Virginia Arce
Splendid Intensity, Splendid Subversion: Transgression on the Dance Floor
In capitalist times, the traditional anti-mythological ferments of music conspire against freedom, as whose allies they were once prescribed. 1 —Theodor W. Adorno
Throughout his seminal writings on music sociology in capitalist societies, Theodor W. Adorno outlined the complicity of popular music in engendering a regressive listening practice instrumental to the formation of a culture characterized by complacency—a culture of unwavering material and ideological consumption. At the heart of his corpus on popular music as an extension of the culture industry is a sense of profound lamentation and anger in regard to the increasing loss of spontaneous and transgressive social and aesthetic experiences. Instead of fulfilling its role as a medium whose essence was synonymous with social and individual progress, music has been corrupted by the ideologies of authoritarianism and material consumption, leaving in their wake only the illusion of individuality and a false sense of happiness. Instead of making it possible for spaces to exist in which atomized individuals could experience potentially subversive and unmediated relationships to each other, music was instrumentalized to “inhabit the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility.”2 This was the kind of music that instilled in its listeners an ideology of sameness that usurped what had once been a liberating potential and left in its place pure insidious subjection to the rule of law. However, the potential for music to function as a catalyst for authentic and spontaneous relationships has always lingered at the seams of the social order and so has its potential to subvert dominant ideologies—a potential for which Adorno appears to have, in spite of all the trappings of late capitalism and beyond, held out hope. In the peripheral spaces of culturally sanctioned modes of being, where individuals whose social and economic positions foreclose to them the spoils of the free market, the culture industry’s attempts to encroach upon sovereign spaces of self-expression comes up against a wall of resistance. This essay focuses on a remarkable moment in time in which such resistances manifested in working class neighborhoods of Southern California, made possible by groups of youths whose marginalized status in the fabric of neoliberal culture industries engendered a disavowal of the constraints of an inhuman and unequal social structure. In waves of seemingly chaotic and grand moments centered around pleasure and unmediated modes of being with others, the thousands of so-called “ditch parties” that took place in the early and mid-1990s provide an example of the extant possibility for music to catalyze the disarmament of the disciplining function of the social order.
Ditch parties derived their name from the act of “ditching” school. At first glance, the term deceivingly appears to say it all: adolescents blowing off an education in favor of the impulsive gratification of friends and participating in other potentially delinquent behavior. It might seem strange to look to ditch-parties as an example of what Adorno might have had in mind when he envisioned the kind of socially transgressive spaces and inter-actions that could be made possible by music. However, the ditch parties that are the subject of this specific essay were almost entirely organized and patronized by Latino youths in Los Angeles, parts of Orange County, and the region known as the Inland Empire—a fact which is crucial to understanding their subversive character. Many of these youths grew up in immigrant families and in profoundly socially and racially segregated neighborhoods, and even those who were not first- or second-generation immigrants still bore the burdens of decades of xenophobic and class-based structural discrimination. The years during in which ditch parties were at their most active coincide with a political and social climate in the U.S. in general and Southern California specifically during which Latino communities (Mexican and Mexican American in particular) were the subject of both insidious and overt forms of criminalization by Democratic and Republican policies. It was during the mid-90s that the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (otherwise known as the Clinton Welfare Reform Act) began to destroy the remains of the social safety net, criminalizing the poor and laying the groundwork for the unprecedented expansion of the industrial-prison complex. The mid-1990s also saw the passage of Proposition 187 in California, a bill whose xenophobic roots would not only have denied any form of social services including education and medical care to undocumented persons, but also made teachers responsible for reporting any student whom they suspected of being undocumented to local authorities in order to remove them from the public school system. This was a socio-political climate in which the youths who participated in these parties were being criminalized not only for being poor or lower working-class, but for being visibly marked as “other.” Bearing this social and political climate in mind, one can make a case for how participation in these gatherings centered on communality and pleasure represented a total disavowal of their daily lived experiences of being vilified as members of largely immigrant and working-class communities. In participating in the parties, instead of dutifully adhering to and falling in line with their roles as students and future workers, these young men and women were implicitly rejecting their perceived inevitable working-class identification, routinization, and of the restrictions of a so-called “productive life” (which, historically, for the immigrant working class, has meant a life of literal service to and for others). In choosing to live in the moment, in unmediated and unsanctioned contexts, these youths whose very existence was deemed categorically deviant if not outright criminal by neoliberal ideologies were brazenly living out an alternative to the crushing and stifling reality of social immobility and, in many cases, gang warfare. By choosing to be with their peers and in spaces where familial bonds were established and strengthened, these youths were able to rout social isolation and form alliances that could exploit the gaps left open by a lack of stability in the social order. Theirs was a brilliant exploitation of the failure of the social contract which they were able to see and sense was a ruse. They implicitly understood that the promises of fair rewards for honest work were false—especially for the disenfranchised and disempowered, and they were able to use music as a vehicle by which they could collectively experience a suspension of social and psychic stultification.
The lifespan of the energy of the parties was short, perhaps necessarily so. In order to grasp why their subversive nature could have only existed in short but intense (as opposed to overdetermined duration) bursts, it is useful to think of the relationship between spontaneity and social upheaval. The dichotomy between intensity and intention in social exchanges has largely been explored by cultural critic Diedrich Diedrichson, whose writings on the subject are heavily indebted to Georges Bataille’s theories of excess and non-recuperable energy in general economies. Both Diedrichson’s and Bataille’s writings on intensity, intention, excess are especially helpful in understanding how to theoretically contextualize the energy on display in these moments. In Diedrichson’s essay “People of Intensity, People of Power: The Nietzsche Economy,” he writes, “Intensity described a devotion to unreserved investment into the potential of grand moments—moments that were also a medium of collectivity—that might be salvaged and maintained even if the better world the movement foresaw could never be realized in this life.”3 One can think not only of ditch parties but of any gathering prompted by an excess of energy as being on the side of intensity—a counter to uncompromisingly overdetermined and alienating social structures. In their earliest iterations, ditch parties represented a release of excess energy culminating in service of no conventional or formally recognizable utilitarian end. As soon as one party began, its energy spread and quickly generated multiple parties—all of which took place simultaneously and within short distances of each other, and soon one small gathering turned into dozens of exponentially larger gatherings; thus the germs of excess functioned as a kind of fulcrum for energy that could no longer be contained or suppressed. Diederichson writes about this kind of intensity as being “a concept that ran decidedly counter to the dreary everyday organizational chores of those who had chosen to become invested in politics.”4 Indeed, a capitalist society would deem this sort of energy wasteful because of its inability to fit into a system of commodity exchange and resource/value extraction and accordingly, the system can only respond to the excess energy in one way: criminalize it and make it fodder for a burgeoning carceral system.
The precedents for ditch parties in the region date back to at least the 1970s, perhaps even as far back as the mid-twentieth century. After WWII when many of the region’s suburbs began to expand to accommodate a growing population, architecture and urban planning were seemingly developed in service of segregating populations. Spatial segregation in particular reinforced race and class-based segregation through redlining practices that denied loans to potential home owners due to the racial and economic makeup of their neighborhood (the epicenters of many ditch parties fell squarely within areas historically redlined). Freeways ensured that people never had to experience prolonged contact with neighborhoods, class, or ethnic communities other than their own, and the ubiquity of lawns and backyards created a false sense of democracy across the region. It was in the backyards of working-class communities that neighborhood DJs could play music and people had a place to congregate and maintain a sense of communality. In this sense, music had always been part of the collective and often spontaneous gathering of people in these areas. But what did the music played at the neighborhood parties actually sound like? It certainly did not recede into the background, functioning as a kind of music-lite—the kind of music that propagated regressive listening pursuant to maintaining a docile and passive populace. Instead, the music countered the effects of lite music—the kind of music which, according to Adorno, served only to “complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all.”5 The kind of music that countered it heightened a sense of viability for emergent equitable spaces that could foster the development of both the community and the individual. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the soundtrack to the neighborhood parties largely comprised disco and funk and, later, freestyle, new wave, disco, electronic dance music. The youths who would go on to throw their own parties grew up absorbing popular American music despite the fact that they lived in areas geographically and socially segregated and, much as with the generations before them, their relationship and identification with the musical products of the culture industry was a kind of alienated participation. The parties in their neighborhoods played the same kinds of music that was being played in discos and clubs across the city, just one or two freeways away in more affluent areas, but whose admission policies discriminated along ethnic and class lines. As such, neighborhood parties historically filled a necessary role, by which marginalized communities could take up the products of the culture industry, products which were not made for them as the ideal consumer, and repurpose them for themselves. The soundtrack to many ditch parties vacillated between the rhythmic, high-tempo beats and baselines characteristic of techno, acid house, juxtaposed with rap and hip-hop as well as the recognizable synths of new wave and freestyle (a throwback to their predecessors). The dominant electronic music genres that made up the bulk of the playlist complemented the kind of democratic atmosphere that characterized the parties. Although DJ equipment was not cheap, it was not prohibitively expensive and, as such, made it possible for those within the community to be a part of the production of the music itself—a particularly remarkable repurposing of the products of the culture industry, akin to a kind of disidentification. Local DJ’s simultaneously grew to prominence, as did party crews, alternatives to gangs whose stewardship of the parties was critical to their propagation. The lineage which these young promoters and patrons of the ditch parties were continuing was part of a resistant cultural practice.
Entrepreneurship quickly sprang up throughout the parties as adolescent promoters charged attendees anywhere between two to five dollars (a particularly well-promoted party may have charged as much as ten) for entry. Just as entrepreneurship developed, so did collaborative initiatives among groups of youths, whose volunteer labor also provided security, libations, and the equipment necessary to make the parties possible. These modes of production simultaneously subverted and modeled themselves after existing modes of entertainment promotion, advertisement, and monetary exchange. Self-promotion was critical for heightening the status of parties among peer groups, either through the distribution of hand-drawn and inexpensively produced flyers or by disseminating information regarding the parties, locations by word of mouth. In all aspects of the execution of a party, cooperation played a critical role and created countless self-taught event organizers.
Once ditch parties began to gain notoriety outside of the original peer groups that initiated them, public school officials and the media quickly targeted them and their participants, not only for encouraging and partaking in truancy, but for representing a decay in the moral fabric of their community. If the definition of truancy is predicated upon the institutional nature of compulsory education, and abstaining from such a system is itself a crime, the decision willfully to be truant itself represents a kind of social and politically transgressive position. For the youths who participated in these parties, rejection of compulsory schooling in an educational system designed to maintain a steady supply of low wage fungible workers must be considered as an act of political resistance. One need only look to the profound disconnect between the implicit expectations of them as students in an underfunded educational system and the capitalist social order that cannot exist without the steady supply of an expendable work force, for which these adolescents were essentially being primed. Their rejection of compulsory education and curriculums that were, by design, unable to address their social, economic, and psychological concerns was only natural. The rhetoric of rejecting compulsory education was used as a promotional tool for the parties—flyers openly espoused anti-school and anti-work sentiments. Party flyers regularly contained slogans such as “F*CK SCHOOL!” and scoffed at the notion of being a good pupil in a system that offered no economic or socially empowering prospects in exchange for the compliance it demanded.
As the popularity and frequency of the parties continued to grow within their community, local media began producing series of salacious and exploitative television reports in which they gained access to the parties and filmed their attendees and the actions they participated in with the aim of evoking a moral panic that fed into the xenophobic political and social climate. Los Angeles news station KTTV Fox 11 News devoted several ten-minute-long (that is, at least a fifth of their total airtime for those particular broadcasts) undercover reportage segments during its prime-time news hour to “exposing” the parties. Each segment began with an anchorperson cautioning viewers to prepare for the “shocking” footage they would soon be seeing. These segments, edited in short and fast cuts, presented viewers with footage of youths reveling in truancy, consuming alcohol and marijuana and making no apologies for any of it. The segments included salacious footage of teenage girls dancing in crop tops and miniskirts, soundbites of teenagers boasting their party crew affiliations (with no context in regard to how these crews were an alternative to gangs), and teenage promoters playfully boasting to the cameras, “I can make more money than a teacher!” The segments also occasionally included footage of seemingly bewildered parents whose implied failure to discipline their children was the very cause of the lack of moral judgement exhibited by the teenagers with such brazen excess. It was as if the producers had set out to confirm everything suburban viewers stereotyped as unique to the poor and immigrants. But as thoroughly, selectively, and salaciously as Fox News covered ditch parties, the station failed to address, much less devote, significant airtime in equal measure to the accumulated disadvantages which Latino students faced in the public school system.6 In 1995, the United States Census Bureau reported the rates of high-school graduation for Hispanics at below sixty percent; college graduation rates for Hispanics at this time were even more dismal at less than ten percent.7 It failed to address that the heads of households in many working-class Latino families juggled multiple low-wage jobs in order to make ends meet and therefore could not monitor their children to the degree that affluent families could. It failed to address the difficulty of working-poor families to afford after-school programs, educational tutors and that hunger and financial insecurity make it particularly difficult for a student to attend to lesson plans. It failed to address the systemic underfunding of the public-school system and biases against working-class students of color, much less examine the curriculum that the teens were rejecting. It bears mentioning that during the peak years of the ditch party scene, across the city in the affluent but no less socially stratified campus of UCLA, students and faculty were undergoing a hunger strike in order to convince the university to establish a Chicana/o Studies Department.8 If students in elite academic spheres such as UCLA had to literally starve themselves for the university to establish a curriculum that would attend to the present and historic concerns of Mexican Americans, what could students in a public education system expect? Their relationship to school was naturally adversarial.
Simultaneously, thousands of miles away in England, the United Kingdom’s Parliament passed the infamous Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. Prompted by the growing popularity and concern regarding raves, the bill sought to criminalize the gathering of travelers and individuals on land in open air. Section 63 of the bill titled Powers to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave,9 made it a crime for twenty or more persons to gather in the open to play amplified music. The most notorious passage of the bill, subsection B, made it illegal to play music “characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”10 The bill went so far as to make it illegal for anyone to have knowledge of any gathering which fit the newly establish definition of a rave. Both the local news in Los Angeles and Public Order Act represented a struggle by social institutions to make sense of the spontaneous gatherings of people whose abundance of energy threatened the logic of sanctioned leisure and order. In the UK, the government responded by passing a law that left so much room for interpretation and ambiguity in regard to its applicability, that a child’s birthday party taking place outdoors could be construed as a “rave” and therefore illegal. In the US, the media responded by constructing a false moral panic which portrayed immigrant working-class enclaves as volatile germs of crime, promiscuity and disregard for the importance of education and a complete disavowal of the responsibility for proper child rearing. And while the media and the courts attempted to make up a fitting narrative that made criminals out of groups of people who wanted to dance with others, the teenagers attending ditch parties in Southern California and ravers in the UK English raves found themselves celebrating to the same music. Techno and acid house was well established in England by the late 1980s, but in the United States it had yet to reach commercial acceptance, and at the time could be considered avant-garde. Records such as 4 Hero’s Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare (1991), L.A. Style’s James Brown is Dead (1993), The Prodigy’s Charlie (1994), and others were being danced to simultaneously on both continents. At a time in which the internet had not yet made the distribution and reception of niche genres of music easy, the fact that these two disparate groups would be listening to the same kind of music was a curious, somewhat serendipitous, coincidence.
It has been over twenty years since the height of the parties explored here, enough time for those immersed in their core to reflect on the impact they had in their lives and on the relationships developed within them. In early 2016, prompted by the formation and rise in popularity of an archival project by artist Guadalupe Rosales, the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA hosted a symposium on the subject. The archive she has amassed uses the reach of social media to source party-related ephemera and video documentation and, like the parties themselves, thrives because of the contributions of hundreds of otherwise atomized individuals who have found in the project an opportunity to find traces and memories of short-lived yet profoundly socially transgressive moments in their lives. Rosales’ and her collaborators’ firsthand experiences as participants in the parties and the archive as a whole double not only as an intergenerational revisitation of shared histories, but also serve to correct the maligned image of the parties’ participants and their importance within their community. Part of the impetus for Rosales to create the archive was the desire to know what had become of her friends who were as immersed in the scene as she had been. As the process has grown, many partygoers have been able to connect with old friends, and found images of unknown family members and friends as well as themselves. But the archive also serves as a kind of memento for those who fell into the carceral system, or who became casualties to gang violence.
It may seem ironic that a symposium on the subject would be hosted at an institution symbolic of the kind of academic spheres whose policies have made it notoriously difficult for working-class and immigrant students to enter into them, the same kind of academic system whose rejection partially prompted the parties to take place. This irony points to a complexity in Adorno’s argument in regard to his perception that the culture industry is inherently irreconcilable with the agents of authentic dissent: that being outside of the dominant system of order and legitimized by the system are incompatible positions, because the latter requires that the former give up the essence of its subversive character and in so doing, strips it of its power to challenge authoritarian structures. A project such as Rosales’ archives would appear to be situated firmly between the interior and exterior of structures of legitimization, were it not for the fact that the events are being retroactively and discursively examined. As such, the strength of the archive is to correct the image of a maligned community—an interruption in the dominant narrative that working-class Latinos neighborhoods during the 1990s were steeped in gang warfare and deviant behavior—and to remind viewers of what fomenting dissent can look like.
Perhaps the most compelling and powerful characteristic of the parties was their short lifespan, the fact that they had to be fleeting because the intensity they harnessed was so great. What was being expressed was not only adolescent unrest but also the collective disavowal of the crushing machinations of a social structure that had segregated them and discriminated against their very existence. There is a passage in Dialectic of Enlightenment where Adorno notes, “The individual, on whom society was supported, itself bore society’s taking; in the individual’s apparent freedom he was the product of society’s economic and social apparatus. But all such as progress of individuation has been at the expense of individuality in whose name it took place, leaving behind nothing except individuals’ determination to pursue their own purpose alone.”11 It is difficult to deny that the insight of his prophetic writings about the bolstering of society at the expense of the individual and the masking of true individuation with artifice and isolation were implicitly known to the youths who were participating in ditch parties. By this I do not mean that they were necessarily well-versed in Adornean criticism, but that this was a perspective they knew without having to articulate or overdetermine a formal political, economic, or theoretic position. And so, in retrospect, the deceptively simplistic privileging of pleasure, the building of relationships with others in unstructured contexts, a commitment to immersing oneself in music (regardless of the source of its production) remain a kind blueprint by which one can glimpse strategies to push back against the subsuming tide of the sameness and the ideologies that strip us of choice and individuation.
1. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in The Culture Industry (New York: Routledge Classics, 2001), 32.
2. Ibid., 30.
3. Diedrich Diederichson, “People of Intensity, People of Power: The Nietzsche Economy,” e-flux, Oct. 2010, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/people-of-intensity-people-of-power-the-nietzsche-economy/.
4. Ibid.
5. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” 30.
6. A study by the National Research Council (US) Panel on Hispanics in the United States in conjunction with data compiled by the US Department of Education listed some key obstacles to high-school graduation rates and matriculation for Hispanic youths during the 1990s, including: lack of English proficiency by students’ parents, lack of completion of a high-school degree by one or both parents, and deficiency of students’ knowledge of the English language as perceived by teachers, among others.
7. United States Census Bureau, Educational Attainment, by Race and Hispanic Origin: 1960 to 1998, accessed March 13, 2016, https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/99statab/sec04.pdf.
8. In 1993, eight students and one faculty member at UCLA took up a fourteen-day hunger strike after Chancellor Charles E. Young refused to move forward with a proposal to establish a Chicana/o Studies Department. The students and their faculty advisor were successful in convincing the university to establish what would become the César E. Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies.
9. UK Parliament, Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994, London: HMSO, accessed March 15, 2016, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/V/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves.
10. Ibid.
11. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002), 125.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor W. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” In The Culture Industry. New York: Routledge Classics, 2001.
–. Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life. London: Verso, 1995.
Diederichson, Diedrich. “People of Intensity, People of Power: The Nietzsche Economy.” e-flux, Oct. 2010. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/people-of-intensity-people-of-power-the-nietzsche-economy/.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002.
“Hunger Strike Commemorated.” The Daily Bruin. Accessed, March 12, 2016. http://dailybruin.com/2003/05/12/hunger-strike-commemorated/.
Mitchell, Faith and Marta Tienda. National Research Council (US) Panel on Hispanics in the United States. Washington: National Academies Press, 2005.
“UCLA Undergraduate Admissions.” UCLA. Accessed March 16, 2016. https:// www.admission.ucla.edu/campusprofile.htm.
UK Parliament. Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994. London: HMSO. Accessed March 15, 2016. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/ part/V/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves.
United States Census Bureau. Educational Attainment, by Race and Hispanic Origin: 1960 to 1998. Accessed March 13, 2016. https://www.census.gov/ prod/99pubs/99statab/sec04.pdf.