Comment by embedding-shape
7 hours ago
I've been a raver for decades, not until I jumped into reddit I started reading and seeing people writing about "PLUR" (Peace Love Unity Respect) a bunch. Our little community never really interacted with the US side of things, and never used any acronyms or "sayings" like that, it was just built-in into the community, and people running around saying stuff like that would be kind of inauthentic and borderline sketchy. Just be that, no need to say it or remind others.
Kind of fun and interesting how the two electronic music scenes are very similar, but things like that remind me how different it is in say Europe than the US, even though the vibes are obviously similar and more or less the same, just way more implicit, not so "Look like this and do that".
In the US, it's been a concept for almost the entire time the scene has existed. In the early 90s, PLUR was popularized by Frankie Bones, who had essentially founded the east coast US scene a few years prior.
By the late 90s it was more of an implicit ethos -- you'd read about it and see it on flyers, but running around and saying it too often would indeed be considered inauthentic and rather cringe. Although, a bigger one around that time was use of the word "rave"; it was always "party" instead, to the extent that using the r-word in person was a huge faux pas which basically indicated you were either a poser or undercover law enforcement. And a "party" was always distinct from a weekly or monthly event at a club, and definitely not the same thing as a festival.
That's all quite a bit different in today's scene though, which has been thoroughly commercialized and mainstreamed for the past 15 years, ever since SFX started pouring major dollars into "EDM" events.
Thanks for that bits of history :)
> That's all quite a bit different in today's scene though, which has been thoroughly commercialized and mainstreamed for the past 15 years
Shame to hear, Europe surely feels a ton different than 10-20 years ago, but still there is something authentic behind most events I'm still going to, tend to be the smaller ones, might be why.
But these most exists still today in the US/North America as well? I know for sure you can find those sort of events in Mexico for sure, but maybe today they've done the same with the electronic music events as they did with local broadcasting TV and it's all been centralized by now, would be sad to hear.