Ravin’ and Puttin’, A DJ’s-eye-view of Nor-Cal’s all-ages dance music scene — anyone for miniature golf? (Thanks to Amy for the link.)

Sperling attributes the shrinking of the all-ages party circuit partly to its high turnover rate. “As people grow out of raves — and you can see this with magazines like URB, too — they don’t respect them anymore,” he says. “What I don’t like is that once they move on, they get jaded and suddenly they’re too cool for school. When they did it they thought it was great, but once they get over it they look down on it.”

He pauses and then adds, “Maybe my outlook would be different if I wasn’t doing this for a living.”

I have to disagree with Sperling: the rave community has always had a high turnover rate. People burn through the community in a year or two, and have been getting jaded and frustrated since the early ’90s. Hell, when I started raving in 1996, people were telling me, “raving is over.” Hell, when I was editing Lotus in 1998, I wrote about turnover. Turnover is NOT why the rave community is dwindling. If you ask me, it’s dwindling for three reasons:

1. Authorities caught on
2. The national social atmosphere has shifted
3. That’s the natural lifecycle of party cultures

That said, it’s an interesting article. It’s ironic that to read about the dusk of raving in the same paper that exactly one year ago wrote about Moontribe.

Oh, and I adore this quote:

So what gives? How can a scene both flourish and flounder at the same time? Maybe raves are like venereal disease: You only think about them when you have the bug. Once a raver clears it up — that is, she turns 21 and can get into clubs — she tries to forget her embarrassing past as soon as possible.