a club is not a concert

two rooms that point opposite ways

a concert points one way. a stage, a performer, a crowd that came to witness one person. you face the front. you do not face each other.

a club was built to do the opposite, on purpose. no stage worth facing, no single body to watch, a room that turns and points at itself. the event is not a person. it is the floor, the crowd, the dancing, the thing that happens between strangers when the music is good and nobody is performing. that is the literal reason the club was invented. and we have spent thirty years quietly turning it back into a concert.

they pulled the band off the stage

before the club there was the band. a stage at the end of the hall, an orchestra on it, a room dancing to whatever the musicians chose. you watched them. the dancing came second to the show.

the first discotheques removed them. in occupied paris the nazis banned jazz, so people met in hidden basement venues and brought their own records, played on a single turntable where a band used to be. the word is not glamorous. discotheque means a record library, disc plus the french for library. one of the first was le discotheque, on rue de la huchette. a room where the live act is a stack of discs.

the founding act of the club was killing the stage act. with no performer to watch, the room had no choice but to face itself.

the floor became the point twelve years later, by accident, because of one woman. in 1953 a paris manager named régine zylberberg, running le whisky à gogo, was sick of the dead silence between songs on the jukebox. she tore the jukebox out, laid a dancefloor, hung colored lights, and put in two turntables so she could cross from one record into the next with no gap. the music never stopped, so the dancing never stopped. she called herself the first club dj, and she was. notice what she invented. not a way to perform. a way to keep people dancing.

archive → régine, queen of the night

the dj who refused to be a star

for a long time the best understood the job. david mancuso opened the loft in a manhattan apartment in 1970 and refused to call himself a dj at all. he called himself a host. he kept his ego out of the room on purpose, because he thought the ego was the thing that killed a party. no stage. a sound system most people had never heard the equal of, and a floor. you did not go to watch mancuso. most nights you could barely find him.

this is the one thing a concert cannot do. a concert gives you a person to admire. a club gives you a room to disappear into. you cannot get the second from the first. communion is not a spectator sport.

and then we built the stage again

the worship crept back in slowly, the dj raised a little higher each decade, until the booth was a stage again. raised, lit, a clear front and a clear back, the room itself rebuilt to point at it. churchill said we shape our buildings and afterwards they shape us, and a dancefloor proves it fastest. give a room a front and the crowd will find it and face it. the festival finished the job, dance music on a mainstage you do not turn your back on. then the phone arrived and handed everyone a reason to point at the front. a room built to face forward, plus a camera in every pocket, equals a floor filming the drop instead of being inside it.

we abolished the performer to free the floor. then we spent the last thirty years building a new one to look at.

trace it in one breath. the performer was the point, then we removed the performer, then the floor became the point, then we made the dj a performer, and now the performer is the point again. every step felt like progress from inside it. together they walk a full circle back to a band on a stage and an audience in rows.

the pop night is more of a club

here is the proof it is not only the shape of the room. walk into a mainstream pop night, the kind the underground sneers at, and you often find more of a real club than the serious techno night down the road. people dance with each other. they barely film. they could not tell you the dj's name and do not care, and that not caring is what frees them to turn to their friends and move.

the techno night puts the same booth at the same end of the room, but every face is aimed at it and half of them are filming an acid line like it is evidence. the difference is not the architecture. both rooms put the dj at the front. the difference is reverence. the techno crowd was taught the selector is an artist, a genius, a thing to witness. the moment a dj is a thing to witness, the room is an audience.

the pop night forgot to worship the dj. that is the whole reason it is still a dancefloor.

this is the uncomfortable part for those of us who love this music. the seriousness, the respect that tips into worship, the queue to stand at the front and watch the hands, is the exact thing dragging the performer back onto the stage. the pop kids who refuse to take the dj seriously are protecting the one thing that makes a club a club.

a room with no one above you

there is a reason this music came from the people it came from. the dancefloor was built by the working class, the people looked down on everywhere else and done being looked down on. the room they built had one quiet, radical feature. nobody was above anybody. no stage, no headliner over your head, no front row you had to earn. you walked in level with everyone, facing them, not facing up at a star.

a concert is a hierarchy you can see. the dancefloor took the pedestal out of the room.

so when the dj climbs back onto the stage, the hierarchy climbs up with him. the lit booth, the queue at the front, the phones held up at the genius. concertification is not only the club becoming a show. it is the club growing back the class system it was built to escape. black planet is built on the flat room. by outcasts, for outcasts only means something if nobody inside is above anyone else.

face each other, not the front

this is not nostalgia and it is not anti dj. nobody is pretending phones do not exist. it is one argument, and the history makes it for us. the club was the escape from the stage, and the second it becomes a stage again it stops doing the only thing it was ever good for.

we have been refusing the concert in small ways already. camera stickers so people dance instead of film. booking for the floor, not the name. the bigger version is simple to say and hard to do. keep the performer off the stage, keep the lights off the booth, build the room so there is nothing to face except the people you came in with. let the floor be the event again, the way it was the night someone first pulled the band down and put on a record.

by outcasts, for outcasts. facing each other, not the front.

referenced

the discotheque is born — the record library origin and occupied paris: encyclopedia.com on disco and the birth of disco (oup). le discotheque on rue de la huchette.

régine, 1953 — washington post obituary and queen of the night. two turntables at le whisky à gogo so the music, and the dancing, never stopped.

the host, not the star — tim lawrence, david mancuso's art of parties (the wire), and the documentary maestro (2003) on mancuso and the loft.

the booth becomes a stage — harold heath, dancing: schrodinger's cliche (attack magazine), on the booth moving centre stage and the dj becoming a headline act.

whose music it was — dance halls and discotheques have always run on the young, the working class and the marginalised, away from the mainstream and the edge of town. dave haslam, via a history of the discotheque.