Curb your bravado: Why pill pressure ruins the rave

You’ve just woken up and it’s 10am on a Sunday. Some birds are chirping earnestly outside your bedroom window and your head feels heavy from the night before. You didn’t get much sleep but at least you got some. “How you feeling?” you message a mate. “Still out”, they reply.

Monday morning and the Whatsapp group chat is exploding with details of the weekend. The inevitable “Where were you?” is fired in your direction. You tell them that you left at 3 and the conversation goes quiet. Everyone is betrayed by their ticks marking the reply as ‘seen’ and someone eventually pipes up to call you “boring”.

It’s become standard to receive such an apathetic response when making this statement to your pals. Maybe a raised eyebrow next time you see them and probably a not-so-enthusiastic invite to next weekend’s festivities. But is it fair to have your opinion on the latest Luca Lozano mix dismissed because you haven’t rinsed your life away on filter-less ciggies at the afters? Last time I checked, your party status doesn’t equate to your knowledge or your love for the music.

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.

You only need a passing interest in dance music to hear about David Mancuso throwing weekend-long parties in his loft or the ecstasy-fuelled days of the second summer of love. People have been escaping the 9-5 by dabbling in chemicals for a long time and will continue to do so until humanity comes to its apocalyptic conclusion. Committing to the rave on any given night is a beautiful thing and an integral aspect of the culture. Seeing your favourite DJ play, losing track of time, being turned out of the club at 6am and still not being ready to go home makes for memories that will last forever. But those nights don't happen every weekend, so excuse me for calling it and heading home a little earlier. Because did you know it is still possible to have a great time, be inspired by the music or the crowd or the club and still enjoy the morning the next day?

If you do want to stay out, that's fine. I’m not trying to get people to call it a night early. I’m not trying to shut down the constantly embattled nightlife that cities don’t realise need to be cherished until it’s too late. Clubs should and do offer a place for those who want to escape and be themselves. But when there are already stigmas around mental illness and DJs are opening up about negative effects of partying on their health, let’s not cultivate a culture in which people force themselves to have a good time to impress someone else or feel included. Bwana wants to give you the body of a Greek god and the health push is upon us but the music doesn’t necessarily suffer for it.

Reflecting on the original acid house boom, Mark Moore from S’Express told The Guardian: “I don't think kids nowadays quite get how revolutionary and countercultural it felt. It changed, and stopped being about a holy sacrosanct where you knew you were going to go out and expand your consciousness and also have a fucking brilliant time. It became about just getting off your head, which was sad really.”

Let's not lose sight of why we go out in the first place.

Louis Anderson-Rich is Mixmag’s Digital Intern. He eagerly awaits the barrage of lame, dumb, millennial, cleanshirt, hipster abuse he's about to receive on Twitter

Patch Keyes is a freelance illustrator and regular contributor to Mixmag. View his portfolio here