For 110 days, Israel has been engaged in a war on Gaza with devastating consequences. So far, around 85% of the population has been displaced, and more than 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, including around 10,000 children. Citing a right to defend itself after the Hamas attacks on October 7 that killed around 1140 people, Israel’s ferocious military response has resulted in an astonishing daily death rate in Gaza, higher than in any other major 21st century conflict, according to Oxfam. Just 14 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remain open, over half a million Gazans are facing catastrophic hunger, and at least 8000 Palestinians are currently missing in Gaza, believed to be buried under the rubble.
And yet the underground dance music community, which has historically been very quick to show its support for Ukraine, Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements, has been much quieter than usual. This muted, reticent response to the crisis in Gaza echoes that seen in other sectors and industries around the world, but it has felt particularly aberrant in the dance music scene, rooted in Black, queer resistance against oppression.
Watching all of this unfold with growing frustration, I wanted to talk to people in the scene about the muzzled reactions to the mounting horrors in Gaza and the West Bank. A few conversations immediately revealed many different angles and perspectives, and I realised some of these merited smaller or standalone pieces. Trying to shoehorn too many ideas into the one story simply wouldn’t do the issue justice.
Doing it this way also allows me to publish faster and more regularly, and as the death toll continues to rise, it makes sense to start here and now.
To kick off, I spoke to a representative from Ravers for Palestine, who launched publicly on October 27 with an open letter in Mixmag calling for the electronic music community to speak out against Israel’s attack in Gaza. Since then, the collective has regularly shared via Instagram relevant news and community calls to action to support Palestinians facing genocide. Organisers prefer not to disclose too many details about the mechanics of the group, describing it as a “constantly evolving international collective of ravers and DJs with a horizontal coordination structure.” To date, this group of activists has been one of the leading voices rallying the dance music community in support of the Palestinian cause.
Annabel: The signatories of your original open letter published in Mixmag are mainly pretty underground artists. How did you go about approaching people to sign the letter?
Ravers for Palestine: The open letter came out of there being a disjunct between institutional response and what ravers and DJs were seeing. The letter disseminated quite organically and within different networks, it took off quite quickly. When we published the initial list of signatories, there were about 300. And since then, as the campaign has picked up, there’s been a lot more signatures added. It is true that with a few exceptions, the bigger names tend to be from the underground music scene. It feels like a movement that’s definitely rooted in experimental music.
Did you notice a spike in venues and artists signing the letter after it was published, and in some of those venues and artists taking action publicly?
Yeah, definitely. I think that did happen. For example, some club founders in London did sign up and there was a flurry of attention and scrutiny on some of the institutions that had been critiqued for being slightly inactive and they did end up putting out statements. But there was also some disenchantment, and I think in general a lot of people have slightly refocussed their efforts away from the clubs. We’re realising that it's quite hard to force solidarity, because even though some clubs have notionally put out statements in response to public pressure, they’re invariably quite caveated, they're not really actively promoted, or they don’t come with concrete commitments in service of solidarity that would actually diminish their bottom line. A lot of the impetus behind the Ravers campaign was to demand accountability from clubs and I think that a lot of people have woken up to the realisation that club owners have a specific role within an ecosystem that’s quite materially determined. They represent a particular fraction of an economic system. And it's hard to get solidarity out of institutions that's sincere if they don't want to provide it and if they’re not rooted in those traditions. But I would always want to emphasise that there are exceptions. I think there are some institutions that are genuinely community-grounded and have been supportive— for example, providing spaces for activists to convene and create banners, and issuing full-throated solidarity statements. I think the big techno institutions have been uniformly disappointing in their response, and that there is a huge disjunct between them and the ravers that go there. I think the action at the recently closed De School really demonstrates the gulf between what ravers want and expect and what institutions are able to provide. That's clearly expressed in the image of ravers putting up a banner to express solidarity with Palestine and it being taken down by the club staff.
I’m looking at the Silence = Complicity message to clubs that you posted nearly a month after that initial open letter. It went a step further in outlining some of the concrete actions that could be taken by clubs and venues that might have more of a meaningful impact. The post also reads, “Show up for Palestine or be consigned to irrelevance.” And while I support the idea of this, I’m not sure if we’re seeing it happen yet. There are many clubs that are yet to make a statement or show support and a lot of these clubs are some of the most notoriously progressive clubs out there, and are celebrated as these safe spaces, and they're still saying nothing. Almost as disappointing for me is that a lot of people also don’t seem to want to call them out because they still want to party and play there.
It's really difficult because I think these clubs trade off a very real sense of the spiritual communion that can be generated on a dance floor. For example, I and many other ravers in the collective feel a very deep connection to some of these spaces, we've had some of the most joyful moments of our life in them. And the clubs have facilitated those moments, but also, those moments are fundamentally constructed among ravers and DJs. I think this moment of anti-colonial uprising has exposed some clubs as being incapable of responding to or openly hostile to our solidarity. That's a really painful thing to reckon with if you love the club. We all want to rave, and we also want that to be politically situated. We want these sites of joy and liberation, but we insist that the liberation and release we feel on the dancefloor is inseparable from our commitment to fighting oppression. This does feel like a moment of reckoning for these institutions but, at the same time, we don't have a parallel infrastructure of rave spaces that are both lit and politically grounded. So what does it mean to reject these spaces without an alternative? I think there's this longer term challenge of how do we foster spaces that are intentional, that are joyful and that are also capable of facilitating the kind of powerful spiritual experiences we've had in these clubs? What these clubs have traded off for a long time is this idea that just because we're a space where queers convene and dance, there's something intrinsically liberating about that. I think that's really been disproven, and you can absolutely have circumstances where you can convene queer ravers in a way that is quite reactionary if there isn't a political basis to your project.
I guess it's also a question of the scene becoming more commercialised and professionalised, and DJs want to get paid and they want to get paid a certain amount. And if these DIY alternatives can’t pay them what they’re used to, you wonder who’s going to come along for the ride, or how sustainable it might be at a larger scale.
I think as some commentators have pointed out, there's nothing intrinsically freeing about making all your money from music if it means you might have to work with compromised institutions, and it makes it slightly harder to withdraw your participation. And so maybe we need to look at it from a mutual aid perspective, like, are there ways we can do more to foster and support precarious artists working in our ecosystem? What you just outlined about how artists might feel obliged to take these compromised gigs, I think it's really important not to necessarily shame artists for doing that. Rather, we should be thinking about collective solutions to these structural problems, and I think the structural position of the DJ can be quite a precarious and compromised one due to how the industry works. It's really important to situate that materially and not kind of place it at the feet of the individual, because they're part of this bigger system. I feel that a lot of the anger against institutions and also the energy that's powering this boycott of German cultural institutions is also driven by a deeper anger at the way our collective innovation and liberation through the rave has been commodified and privatised and enclosed by these platforms and venues that have an extractive relation to us.
I’m not sure how many ravers would share this view but for me, I feel quite deeply disappointed in some of these venues, to the point where I’m not sure I could enjoy myself as much in these places knowing they’ve chosen not to speak up about Gaza. I feel like some ravers don’t really want to contend with this and would rather let it slide or bury their heads in the sand so they don’t have to have difficult reckonings with their favourite clubs. I get it, we all want to go to our favourite venues with their great sound systems and great lineups, but to me the experience feels a bit tainted when those places we felt aligned with are staying silent on this.
I’ve been surprised at how much latent—not just instinctive but also very rooted and informed—theorization of the ethics of the DJ and anti-colonialism there is among ravers. So there are a lot of radical DJs and there are a lot of radical ravers. That doesn't mean that all or the vast majority of ravers have this deep political education. And I think the commodification of dance music has increased depoliticisation, 100%. But I think that it's incumbent on us to use this moment to create that political education. I feel like we are really lacking these organs or sites of intellectual theorization of the rave or spaces that raise consciousness and also connect people to talk in a structural way about these things. So I completely see the exasperation with what seems like apathy on the part of a lot of people, but then I also think that we have an opportunity and a role to wake up ravers and DJs to the power they can have in shaping wider structural realities.While the ecosystem of DJs and ravers is relatively small in terms of how many people participate in it, it does have an outsized impact in this particular moment. For example, expressions of solidarity from international DJs have really rattled discourse within Israel because a key part of the legitimacy of Tel Aviv is its nightlife, its ability to attract ravers. Ravers are seen as this kind of unassimilated, vaguely countercultural fraction, sometimes punished by the state, at other times utilised by the state — a bit like queers are through pinkwashing. So you hear things like, you couldn't have a rave in Palestine, which is the same argument they use around queers, saying it’s not safe to be queer in Gaza. Ravers are at once close to the centre of imperial power and slightly distant from it, and that particular position opens up interesting opportunities for activism.
Since Ravers for Palestine started, have you seen any signs of fatigue where people might have been campaigning for a while and then they’re like, I’m tired of this and so are my followers and I need to get back to promoting my gigs, or do you feel like there are more latecomers joining the party now? Maybe both?
I feel it's more the latter. As the movement has expanded, there are signs that the mood is changing. You can see this a lot through the CTM Festival announcements and some of the names who have boycotted the festival in response to STRIKE GERMANY’s campaign. There are some DJs who were there from the outset, who are long term activists and have a very deep political education. But there are other DJs who are sympathetic but maybe not historically the most politically activated, who are now also backing this boycott. The mood within the community has radically shifted in the past few months to the point where actually not participating in these initiatives as a DJ or raver is coming at a cost and so the broad view of people working within our campaign is quite optimistic. There's momentum, and conversations and actions are happening organically. That action by ravers in Amsterdam at De School was completely autonomous and spontaneous, it had nothing to do with this campaign. And there are lots of parallel campaigns popping up in places like Australia, Japan and Canada. Ravers for Palestine is just one example of these global campaigns. The sense of urgency is increasing, We haven't seen any signs of DJs and ravers backing down. If anything, we’re seeing the opposite. More engagement, more anger, more interrogation of these institutional frameworks, and I think the analysis happening within this broad movement is becoming more structural and sophisticated. It’s less focused on calling out specific people or even venues and more about identifying these kinds of broader structures that underpin what is happening, and I think that's a really powerful and hopeful sign.
Do you feel like this moment exposed a lot of people and venues who might have been quite vocal in their support for Ukraine and BLM and other movements?
I think especially on the Ukraine point, it’s very revealing. A few clubs in particular were very full-throated and effusive in their support of Ukrainians—even posting fundraisers for the Ukrainian military, for example—and they’ve been completely silent on Palestine. I think that that is a really important disjunct because it also reveals the geopolitical considerations and how these clubs assess risk, like is it brave to show support for Ukraine when Ukraine enjoys the support of Western governments? With Palestine, the critical difference is that the governments of the countries these clubs are located in are full-throated supporters of Israel and are materially underpinning the genocide. I think what it shows is that a lot of clubs will support issues which are convenient and don't carry any risk for them. But coming back to what you said earlier, despite all these glaring inconsistencies, people are still going to the club. We also have to remember that this has all happened in a very short timeframe and we don't know what the long-term impacts of this silence from clubs will be. I think a lot of people now are talking about clubs in this slightly distasteful way and a lot of people are disappointed in quite a visceral way with how certain clubs have responded. People are still going to the club for now, but I do think the medium and long-term effect of that delegitimization in the eyes of ravers is going to have an economic impact and it’s going to impact their continued viability.
I wonder if going forward, there will be even more of a divide between business techno and adjacent, more overground scenes, and more authentically underground communities, giving rise to more DIY parties and raves, which could be pretty cool actually.
My impression of engaging with big venues about Palestine is they are quite jumpy, they are not super welcoming, they don't want to engage. They don't want to provide solidarity, but they get quite easily frightened if they sense that people might turn on them, even if it’s just queer ravers or more political or alternative ravers. They might pack out their venues with quite a straight-down-the-line crowd, but there is a cost to having any taint of illegitimacy around them. For example, various platforms who don't have super progressive politics dropped HÖR like a stone as soon as news broke about them deplatforming artists expressing solidarity with Palestine. These are venues and platforms that haven’t been engaged in the movement but are afraid of any taint. Even though the experimental alternative fringe of the rave scene is quite small, it has an outsized impact in terms of being generative of clout and innovation. So if there's any sense that these alternative groups are going to definitively turn away from the big clubs, that is an existential threat to them. These big clubs will always be able to attract customers but there's a line they dance where they’re like, we want to pack in and dilute it as much as we can for our bottom line, but we also need to keep the alternative fringe vaguely in the fold. And I think if the alternative fringe abandons these institutions en masse, it might not immediately devastate their pocket books, because they're still going to get people in the door, but a lot of the people that come to the rave who are a bit more straight-down-the-line, part of the reason they go is because they want to feel like they’re in proximity to the cool people. If the cool people have left, it becomes quite a hollow thing. That's why I think the impacts of clubs’ inaction on this are going to percolate in the future. In a way, I think actually reaching out to clubs to try and remind them of their responsibility is an act of generosity, because we are inviting them to remain relevant.
All images are available as Ravers for Palestine printable stickers https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1X28zO_-znzQBSPD9BNJrj7aRZD8FuDtS
wow, how wonderful it is to interview friends and act like it is real journalism. Go and interview also the people in the scene who criticise these boycotts, and not because they are "pro-genocide", but because these movements are embracing problematic voices who divide this scene into wrong and right, without reflecting for one minute.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Berghain_Community/comments/19dnz05/hör_boycott_the_community/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3