I just wrote this for class. Does anyone know more about the history of pre-disco dance clubs and violence? I am thinking mod bank holidays, etc etc. and the types of weaponry (switchblades - but guns?) involved. The argument I make about hip hop and violence is not entirely fleshed out, so don't think me some asshole Tipper Gore freak, just point me towards better resources.

-------in praise of shadows---------

I write about nightclub lighting for a living. It’s something I do. I know the different between a par can and a moving mirror fixtures, about rotating gobos and strobes, mirror balls and LED displays because everyone in the nightclub industry is obsessed with illusion. Club sound design is about transmitting signals with minimum noise, with the highest attention to reproducing audal detail. Club lighting, however, is purely about the cover up, about the mood and atmosphere of the semi-shade, about the space between light and dark where the things that make good nightclubs great go on.

This shade is the unseen by virtue of its darkness, although there is nothing unseen in a nightclub because security and the help staff know where to look. The darkness draws deviance, but it is encouraged and if not malicious, ignored. These are the corners, the nooks and crannies designed by people who know nightclubs are about escape and encourage it second only to how they encourage drinking. Traffic flow is about alcohol, seats in dark places are for everything else. People who write about nightclubs as dance spaces miss the point. The nightclub is an auditorium, and the dance floor is a stage. The spotlights move continuously, giving dancers the chance to be the spectacle, which the rest of the club watches hungrily. They watch in the darkness, often, with parlor like lamps naturalizing the setting, the couches, the drinks placed like those on a friend’s coffee table. It is in these spaces that the (dis)utopian dream of the darkness is fulfilled.

If you listen to Hot 97, New York’s number one station for hip hop and R&B, you know that the street has been replaced by the club as the place of business, the social place, the proving ground for in the popular discourse of the black American male. If hip hop’s new street is the club, it’s new streetlight is club lighting, a complex, digitally controlled environment creating a world of spotlight and shade. There is no bright, concentrated bath of light and little pretense of illumination. It is colored, quick, non-focal – like police chasers, strangely, but here symbolically rendered powerless to their function as omnipotent eye-of-the-state by Hakim Bey’s TAZ (ridiculous, imagined, mythical) promise of the limbless body of libidinal, apolitical pleasure. Like in Vegas, we’re told, what happens there, stays there. There is no law, is no death, is no consequence. An illusion. Clubs have always served privacy behind closed doors, but nightclubs upped the ante by turning off the lights and looking the other way.

Rappers, not content with the anonymity offered by such spaces, continually celebrate/confess their private sins of acting the fool (The Game), taking drugs (50 Cent), sneaking in the back door (Ludacris), or paying for sexual favors (the Ying Yang Twins) in lyrics about clubs. Or, they threaten, by dint of character bearing striking relation to the artists themselves, that another may not come out of the club. And thus the street’s violence, not an illusion, but real fists, real guns and real death come indoors for club riots (Chicago) and shootings (by Shyne, C-Murder, or outside of concerts by Money B, Ja Rule, G-Unit, or at hip hop nights in Florida and Rhode Island to name the ones I can think of off the top of my head). The club can be as dangerous as the street, only, as private space, it is supposed to offer protection and community, entertainment and release. If you die there, which happened in the past mostly from drugs (the excess of illusion), it was often your own damn fault.

Electronic dance music has always celebrated the danger in the shadows, not for the least because it mocked white, mainstream hetero culture’s paranoia with the other, but something new has arisen in clubs where the illusion of criminality has moved from drug-use to gunplay. Is there a death drive behind putting one’s self in a small, smoky, dark room with no windows and few fire exits filled with strangers on drugs whose motivations are maybe not so pure? And more recently, a space whose illusion is heavily armed? Perhaps it is best thought of as just another mass gathering whose success is largely hinged on the catastrophe that does not occur in such a space, in the knowledge that somehow, for some reason, the majority of the people who come together do so to sit on the edge between the light and the dark, dancing and maybe joining some stranger outside the spotlight, knowing that the privacy they have is a grand illusion.