On a blue-skied morning in March, gentle house music wafts from inside the Brooklyn lounge bar Superior Ingredients. When I get to the door, I flash my ticket to the bouncer and scurry past a sign that reads “WELCOME TO FRIENDSHIP” until a smiling woman with sequined UGGs chases me down for a hug. “Huh? Oh, sure,” I say, lightly patting her shoulder. I learn she’s been hired to hug everyone at Daybreaker, the self-described sober rave I’m attending.
Inside the venue’s sun room, a pre-rave yoga session is already underway. As a mashup of Rihanna’s “Kiss It Better” and Luther Vandross’ “Never Too Much” plays over the speakers, a perky instructor guides us through 20 squat jumps. After closing with a shavasana, she shouts, “Are y’all ready to dance?!” before a DJ in an aloha shirt throws on a tech-house remix of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” Later, a five-person band featuring a white guy slapping a giant hand drum climbs onto the stage to perform an acoustic version of “Crazy Frog.” “I haven’t felt this good in a while,” Alex, a 36-year-old from Queens, tells me mid-song. “It’s only with friends that you can open up.” He then gives me my second unprompted sober-rave hug of the day.
Once a signifier of unsanctioned parties, the word rave has never been more ubiquitous. While there are still echoes of its subversive origins in the current Brooklyn DIY scene—warehouse nights listed with a TBA location on Resident Advisor, beach raves announced via flyers circulated on Discord—if you get sucked into the right algorithm, “rave” quickly loses meaning. Today’s mainstream offerings include sauna raves, Labubu raves, Shrek raves, and even a Trader Joe’s vs. Aldi rave, with revelers arriving “decked out in produce swag.” Unlike IYKYK events, where nocturnal freaks roam free and a gruff bouncer might threaten banishment for a dancefloor selfie, cameras are strongly encouraged. “We’re adding to the culture of the rave community,” Daybreaker co-founder Radha Agrawal tells me. “Communities naturally evolve, rave culture evolves. Everything evolves.”
To rave is to party, but to party is not always to rave. Raving is a youth movement that has always rejected conformity. For decades, in the face of economic, social, and political decline, factions of queer, Black, and lost children have skulked around paradisal jungle gyms by way of bunkers, wild forests, and abandoned buildings, anywhere that couldn’t easily be accessed by the establishment, paving the way for punkish innovations across electronic music and fashion. On the political spectrum, ravers lean deep left—in a society that criminalizes the use of mind-altering substances and loud music, you don’t become a promoter because you want to get rich. A great rave will more often than not barely get out of the red, only to be shut down in the first few hours. To understand the untamed nature of raves, you can review its fascinating etymology. In the early 14th century, to rave was “to dream; wander here and there, prowl; behave madly, be crazy.” By 1989, it would be pegged as a “mass party with loud, fast electronic music, and often psychedelic drugs,” a definition still widely used today.
Raving can be traced to the late 1980s, when artists like DJ Pierre and Spanky sparked a bright but short flame of acid house in Chicago clubs, manipulating synthesizers to create squelchy beats dancers could jack their bodies to. When a police crackdown forced the scene to fizzle out, raving travelled to illegal squats in the UK, where, in 1988, in the so-called Second Summer of Love, it was framed as a rebellion to the working-class deterioration of the Thatcher era. A few years later, it journeyed back to America: In New York, Frankie Bones’ and Adam X’s Storm Raves took place in dilapidated apartments on Coney Island Avenue; in the Bay Area, a group of English DJs called Wicked threw acid-laced full-moon raves surrounded by bonfires; and in the Midwest, an abundance of open fields and warehouses in cities like Detroit and Columbus allowed raves to surge. It experienced another Stateside boom in the 2010s, thanks to DJs like Skrillex and Deadmau5, who transformed UK dubstep into screeching dopamine hits called brostep, boosting the genre all the way to the mosh pits of America’s newly supersized EDM festivals—and, in the process, turning the idea of raving into an extremely profitable business.
