As the global pandemic has grown and people have increasingly turned to social media for entertainment, connection, and escape from boredom, the newly termed “isolation economy” has yielded among the more popular cultural phenomena of our moment—Instagram Live DJ parties. Starting in mid-March, DJ D-Nice found a unique way to physically distance while spinning and mixing music for his followers. What began as a small party for a few hundred grew exponentially, and like any good party, word spread quickly. By the following week, over 100,000 Instagram users watched D-Nice in his newly dubbed “Club Quarantine” and his followers have since grown to over 2 million from only a few hundred thousand before the pandemic.
Observing this, I have been fascinated by how perfectly “Club Quarantine” captures the zeitgeist of our moment. Forced into isolation, or more accurately, forced into further isolation than what we have already experienced the past decade, the collective will to create relational experience and recreate something live, spontaneous, and energy-fueled has revived a kind of nostalgia and celebration of something that many of us of a certain age remember very well—the days of the pre-Internet nightclub. D-Nice, aka Derrick Jones, in fact, emanates from that world. At 49, he is of a generation that came of age in the 1980s as the hip hop scene of the South Bronx collided with the Studio 54 disco vibes of midtown Manhattan. Out of this and other fusions of music subculture, fashion, experimental music, and art, was born the urban scene associated with the 1980s and 90s nightclubs that began to spread globally into most major cities.
In its heyday, Gatien’s club Palladium served as an art event laboratory.
This era holds a special interest for me, not only personally (with memories of my precocious teen years dancing away in Vancouver clubs very much in mind), but also as a point of research into the relational and spatial experience of urban nightlife, and its aesthetic potential as a kind of art form. Not two weeks after D-Nice reminded all of us how cool it was to vibe together, without pretense, across all racial, age, gender, and geographic barriers, the much-anticipated memoir by New York club promoter Peter Gatien popped up on my Kindle. Having pre-ordered The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife months earlier, I had no idea how timely and incredibly prophetic the book would turn out to be. The book opens with Gatien’s fascinating childhood and stories he tells as a French-Canadian and Indigenous kid trying to survive a life of conformity in a small southern Ontario town. From there, his entrepreneurial spirit and dreams of escaping into the world of American material success and the intoxicating world of nightlife entertainment takes over the narrative, and he weaves together his account of how he built and sustained the biggest nightclub scene and movement in New York as the owner/operator of Limelight, Tunnel, Club USA, and Palladium.
From his own descriptions and understanding, what made these clubs different, and ultimately special and unique, was his attention to creating temporary experiences and willfully experimenting with mixing audiences, musical genres, and moments that could not be duplicated one night to the next. As Gatien describes in his book, “My definition of culture was a communal form of creativity, like crowdsourced art (164).” Moreover, Gatien reflects on how important the physical experience, dancing, and being within the spaces of the club, were to sharing and co-creating the event, and wonders throughout the book what has been lost to a new generation raised on the dominance of screens, or, in his estimation, culture lived by proxy: “The heyday of the digital age changed everything. Before cell phones and Facebook and Instagram, before the web went worldwide, in order to find out what was happening everyone had to get up off the couch and physically present themselves in public. To discover what people were wearing, what they were listening to, what was hot and hip and cool, you had to get out and press the flesh (248).”
Having dug into the academic research on clubgoing (yes, it is a thing!— see my reading list below!) for my own courses, I am especially interested in this notion of shared experiential and aesthetic space that is discussed by American Studies researcher Madison Moore in a well-argued paper titled “Looks: Studio 54 and the Production of Fabulous Nightlife.” Therein, he talks about nightlife as a form of social sculpture: “I approach nightlife in two ways: nightlife as an aesthetic relational experience and nightlife as a site of curation and creation” (64). Drawing on the work of French art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, Moore makes a persuasive case for the connections between the urban night scene and the conditions of art production. “Art itself is a state of encounter,” writes Moore, “one that demonstrates the features of a particular social world (65).” Not surprisingly, it is this world, documented and shaped by Andy Warhol, a key figure in Gatien’s memoir, that also attracted a whole new generation of visual artists that would come to define the New York art world from the 1980s onwards. Here, I could go down a rabbit hole of references (and these are the ones I routinely make and unpack in my courses) but suffice it to say, I was delighted to read about the gigantic Basquiat and Haring murals that adorned Palladium’s walls back in the day (see images).
Mural by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the Palladium. Photo © Tim Hursley, courtesy of Garvey Simon Gallery.
Returning to our present moment and the current fascination with Instagram Live DJ’s, I wonder what it can mean for our collective desire to move beyond the manufactured and experienced-by-proxy spectacles of many of today’s urban “scenes.” What makes Club Quarantine more reminiscent, at least for me, of the nightclub experiences of the past, is the way in which it foregrounds spontaneity and the relational experience of the music to move and unite people. You simply have to be there, in the moment, and in your body, to understand what is happening, and it will never happen the same way twice. Perhaps not surprisingly D-Nice’s goal with Club Quarantine is to realize it as a live (in real life) event sometime in the future. As he states in an interview with Rolling Stone this past week: “Once we’re able to be able to be together again, I want to pick three cities to actually do a Club Quarantine party live…play that same vibe and celebrate with the same people we’ve been celebrating with virtually…just to be able to see them face-to-face, play that music and feel that bass, that’s the ultimate goal that I have.”
References and Further Reading:
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les presses du reel, 1998.
