Curb your bravado: Why pill pressure ruins the rave

Earlier this month, my colleague Funster wrote a piece suggesting that every now and again it might be a good idea to say no to going out. With the wealth of great events there are week in, week out, it can be easy to get caught up in trying to go to all of them. FOMO is a powerful feeling after all. Funster wasn't suggesting to never go out, he was just suggesting that, actually wrecking your body every weekend in the name of partying does catch up with you. The comments that rained down upon him for suggesting such a sensible and completely discretionary option were typical rave bravado. "What a crap article!!? Wtf, surely you don't need to be scraping the bottom of the barrel..fucking bore", "Can't hack the sesh", "Fucking garbage" and, my particular favourite (quoting part of the aforementioned article): "'During the day I exercised, played squash and cooked dinner with my housemates' Hahahahahahahahahaha!". It's as if having a social life outside of gurning by the front left speaker is punishable by being ostracised by the entire internet.

It's stuff like this that sometimes makes being a fan of dance music feel like you’re trapped in an eternal pissing contest. We’ve all experienced this rave bravado, despite thinking it was left in your peer-pressured teens with Lynx Africa and getting drunk on alco-pops. I challenge you to find me someone who hasn’t been peppered with questions about how many bags they did, how many pills they dropped, how much they drank and what time they went home. Everyone has the person asking all the questions lurking somewhere in their friend group. Self-bestowed in the interests of 'the scene', they aren't asking out of curiosity. Rather, it's an attempt to shame, and weed out the self-proclaimed 'posers'. You see, to them going all night makes you a real fan. But actually these people are driven by a fear of sleeping (because sleep is the cousin of death), which means waking up, which leads to the mother of all comedowns. This testosterone-fuelled jousting is just another example of the bro-mogenisation of dance music culture.