Footage of the raid aired on TV segments about the police's controversial response to the event. For all the civil rights violations endured by Salt Lake youths that night, no similar crackdowns followed. Instead, the incident brought members of the Salt Lake rave community closer together, and their scene has actually continued to flourish without much disruption from authorities or attention from news stations. That was in the fall of 2005, and this uninterrupted growth was felt in rave scenes everywhere...
Until this year. During my kandy raving days in Oakland, California, Skills was a small production crew that gathered, at most, a few thousand kids at their events. After 1999, when Oakland city officials stopped giving out permits to rave promoters, Skills moved their business across the Bay and spent the next decade fostering a relationship with San Francisco police, venue owners, and the good folks at City Hall, essentially saving the Bay Area rave scene through its leadership in putting on parties of all sizes at various locations in SF.
However, with the tainted reputation of raves as far as drug abuse is concerned, it only takes one tragedy to threaten a career backed by years of hard work. That tragedy occurred during Pop 2010, held at the Cow Palace, and made up the first two reported deaths associated with any Skills event. What followed - cancellations of parties that Skills had scheduled for the upcoming months, as well as the banning of raves by the Cow Palace - shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the history of how venue owners and government officials typically react after lives have been lost or harmed at a rave.
Pop was held on the last weekend of May, and by the end of the summer, Skills' unsuccessful attempts at keeping their events alive were no longer rooted merely in the unfortunate fatalities in San Francisco over Memorial Day weekend. Inside an overcrowded street tunnel thousands of miles overseas, at least 20 electronic music fans were crushed to death while trying to maneuver their way around Germany's annual summer Love Parade.
The event organizers swiftly announced the discontinuation of Love Parade, out of respect for the victims' families, ending a 21-year era of the largest dance festival in the world. Back in San Francisco, Skills and other local crews had their own electronic parade and festival, started in 2004 and based on the original gathering in Germany, scheduled for October. With renewed concerns over overdoses and crowd control, San Francisco's version of the Love Parade simply did not end up taking place.
None of this should sound foreign to those of you in Los Angeles. Indeed, the LA rave scene has been associated with more problems in 2010 than in any other recent year, and the negative attention has been centered around a single event: Electric Daisy Carnival.
On top of the standard fear against raves and drugs, several factors helped pull EDC into the spotlight this year:
- The popularity and immensity of EDC. Capacity reached 185,000 over the course of the two-day event. No other music gathering in North America has drawn a crowd of this size.
- LA news media and its inclination towards shocking and entertaining stories, more so than news media in any other part of the United States.
- The plethora of videos immediately posted on Youtube depicting ravers jumping and rushing their way onto the Coliseum field and main dance floor. These images, captured outdoors in broad daylight, became every news producer's dream come true during a rush to convey how dangerous and out of control EDC was.
- The young age of the girl who died. The two victims at Pop were in their early 20s, but EDC's fatality consisted of a 15-year-old, and the significance of this tragic detail outweighed the statistical triviality of one person losing their life at an event of nearly 200,000.
The panic and urgency which circulated in the media, in City and County meetings, and on rave internet forums during the days after EDC has passed. So the question is whether rational and balanced dialogue is taking place now as to what we're all going to do to keep both raves and the young people who attend them alive and healthy.
To that extent, I must say that LA is one strange place run by a rather bizarre political body. At the time of this writing, the County is proposing to shut down all its medical cannabis dispensaries. In a nutshell, the LA region earned the title of medical cannabis capital of America, beating out even cities like Oakland where the first dispensaries were founded in the late 90s.
But LA achieved this through the quantity, not quality, of its dispensaries. With the scores of shops popping up in violation of County ordinances and licensing policies, officials have failed to enforce the very regulations that they created. Instead of owning up and learning from this failure, LA County apparently would rather just ban all dispensaries altogether.
I only hope that our local government isn't as sloppy with rave policies as they are with medical cannabis co-ops. The LA Coliseum panel, made up of civil servants representing the city and county, recently voted to allow raves to take place at the venue again. Their rationale was announced as satisfaction with new measures that have been implemented at the remainder of Coliseum raves this year. But let's examine the economic factors:
- It's hard to discontinue an event that just brought in more than $10 million. We're talking ticket sales here, and this is a very conservative estimate. The paycheck written out to the Coliseum for providing the site of EDC was reportedly six figures. The Cow Palace in San Francisco made a different choice. The ban of raves will cost the venue, which is already in debt, tens of thousands in lost revenue.
- Banning raves from LA County won't put much of a dent in the scene. Underground parties operate illegally anyway. Electronic shows take place at 18+ and 21+ clubs in Hollywood and abroad almost every single night of the week. And above all, San Bernadino County has several venues which hosts raves too, including the National Orange Show Event Center which is even bigger than Exposition Park in LA (the site of the Coliseum). Unlike fans in the Bay Area, which has now become limited to the city of San Francisco as far as permitted raves and massives are concerned, Los Angeles ravers and promoters have alternative options if events aren't allowed within their county.
- Any attempts to get rid of raves, especially massives, will be challenged in the court of law. This can and has already happened. Someone who's capable of hosting an annual multi-million dollar event surely can afford a good attorney to help protect that event.
What everyone needs to realize is that what's at stake here isn't just a party getting shut down. Twenty years ago, your biggest concern was the cops showing up, telling the DJ to turn the music off, and then sending a few hundred kids home. You merely had your single evening ruined. Today, people's entire careers are on the line. Technology has shifted and advanced. Vinyl shops have closed down due to the emergence of digital mixing. People curious about the effects of ecstasy can find out what they need in a matter of seconds on Google or Wikipedia. iPhones allowed those shocking images of fence-jumpers and gate crashers at EDC to be captured ever so clearly, and Youtube allowed them to be publicized to the world right away. Indeed, the culture and industry of raves are now part of a larger, more intricate web of music, drugs, politics, money, and media, and it's up to all of us to keep each other free of entanglement so this web doesn't implode.
