QUEER NIGHTSPOTS and the SOUNDING of UTOPIA Aldwyn

Home , Bend Ova, Going Bad, Lookin Ass, Nice for What, Rake It Up

QUEER NIGHTSPOTS AND THE SOUNDING OF UTOPIA

Aldwyn Hogg Jr

A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Music.

Chapel Hill 2019

Approved by:

Mark Katz

Chérie Ndaliko

Michael Figueroa

ABSTRACT

Aldwyn Hogg Jr: Queer Nightspots and the Sounding of Utopia (Under the direction of Mark Katz)

I argue in this thesis that music and sound act upon queer patrons in nightspots (primarily clubs and bars) in ways that generate moments of what Jill Dolan calls utopian performatives. In this thesis I interweave theory with ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in local queer nightspots in Durham and Raleigh, North Carolina, and interviews with local DJs and individuals who frequent these spaces. This thesis illuminates the merits that the utopian performative has for the broader field of ethnomusicology, and proposes a new, sonic way of thinking of these moments.

In my conclusion, I gesture towards some of the political implications of this sonic utopian thinking about queerness in contemporary society. Several years after the horrific shooting at the

Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016, imagining better futures for queer folk remains as vital as ever.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to extend deep thanks to my advisor, Dr. Mark Katz for his inimitable humor, wit, and erudition. Working with him on this project was a both a pleasure and a highly edifying and instructive exercise in the arts of academic writing and mentorship. I would also like to thank the members of my committee, Dr. Chérie Ndaliko and Dr. Michael Figueroa for their affirming and constructive feedback. Special thanks goes to my interlocutors—the DJs and nightspot patrons that I interviewed as part of my ethnography—for being willing to dive deeply into their own understandings and experiences of music and queer nightspots.

And last but not least— and in fact, probably the biggest thanks of all goes to the innumerable unnamed nightspot patrons, Uber, Lyft, and taxi drivers, club goers, DJs, bartenders, go-go dancers, drag queens, club promoters, and bouncers, that have all populated and enriched the various nightspots in which I have found myself over the years. These are very special spaces; and they would not exist or function without the continued passion and investment from all the aforementioned groups of people.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Theories in the Mind ...... 5

Theories in the Flesh ...... 6

“Do You Have Your I.D.?” ...... 11

“Heading Out:” Queers, Clubs, Spots ...... 12

CHAPTER 2: “WHERE’RE WE GOING TONIGHT?” – FIELD SITES ...... 14

Legends Nightclub Complex ...... 15

The Bar ...... 21

The Pinhook ...... 23

Ruby Deluxe ...... 25

CHAPTER 3: “FEELING IT!” – THE UTOPIAN PERFORMATIVE ...... 26

The DJ and the Crowd ...... 28

Soundscape as Performance ...... 36

CHAPTER 4: “THIS IS MY SONG!” – SONIC COMMUNITAS ...... 38

Sonic Communitas ...... 43

The Sonic Utopian Performative ...... 47

How Do You Dance as a (Queer) Body Without Organs? ...... 48

CHAPTER 5: SOUDING COMMUNITAS; SOUNDING UTOPIA ...... 56

28 March 2018 ...... 56

2 March 2019 ...... 59

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION – “A QUEER HOPE” ...... 63

APPENDIX 1: INTERVIEW TEMPLATE FOR DJS ...... 66

APPENDIX 2: INTERVIEW AND QUESTIONNAIRE TEMPLATE FOR NIGHTSPOT PATRONS ...... 67

APPENDIX 3: NIGHTSPOT PLAYLISTS ...... 68

APPENDIX 4: NIGHTSPOT PATRONS’ PLAYLISTS ...... 69

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 71

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 – The Logo of Legends Nightclub Complex ...... 16

Figure 1.2 – Floor-layout of Legends Nightclub Complex...... 17

Figure 1.3 – Digital display outside of Spotlight Theater ...... 19

Figure 1.4 – Drag-show in Spotlight Theater, Performer’s Face Obscured ...... 20

Figure 1.5 – Logo of the Bar, Durham...... 22

Figure 1.6 – DJ Pedestal in the Bar...... 22

Figure 1.7 – Logo for the Pinhook ...... 24

Figure 1.8 – Logo for Ruby Deluxe ...... 26

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

A drag queen hurriedly pushes her way past my friend and I as she rushes to the stage in

Club Lavish in London, Ontario.1 Having gotten caught up in a ribald conversation at the bar with a gaggle of admiring fans, she is late to her performance—a fact that the blaring voice of the emcee on the loudspeaker makes noisily apparent. As she carves her way through the sweaty writhing mass of people on the dancefloor, my friend and I cease our private dance and attempt to follow her to get closer to the stage. The crowd tonight is markedly larger and more animated than the one that the club usually attracts on a Friday night. But while this is exciting for me, a frequent and familiar club patron, it is intimidating for my friend; this is his first time at both a queer club and at a drag show. As the drag queen finally manages to reach the stage—an elevated platform upon which the DJ’s booth sits in the center like a throne—the music fades to silence. And over the raucous din of speech, movement, and hooting and hollering from the club patrons, the queen intones in a deep voice, “Good night London, Ontario. I am your queen and tonight I demand your everything.”2

1 Club Lavish is a queer nightclub in London, Ontario. It does not promote itself explicitly as such; its self- branding on social media completely omits/de-emphasizes the majority queer patronage the space [attracts/caters to], instead only claiming that it seeks to “Evok[e] diversity and unity,” “provide a comfortable atmosphere for all people,” and “reflect a commitment to providing a diverse environment.” On Lavish’s self-branding, See: “About Us: Lavish Nightclub,” Lavish Nightclub, accessed April 30, 2018, http://www.clublavish.ca/about-us

2 Although this performance occurred over three years ago, my memory of it is reinforced by social media, namely saved Snapchat stories. I also consulted with the friend.

The crowd erupts in cheers. Elbows rub, and feet are stepped on as more bodies rush to swell the dancefloor. The drag-queen, seemingly pleased by our sonic and kinetic response, then begins her performance: an incredible display of dance, jumps, and other acrobatic feats. I stand transfixed by the sight and enveloped by the loud pop-music to which the queen is dancing.

Although I rock, sway, and undulate with the pulsating beat of the music, I remain rooted in my spot. I am charged and excited by the energy I feel radiating from the club patrons around me who have similarly been captured by the queen’s performance. Once her soundtrack changes songs, I manage to briefly escape and look at my friend. His eyes were wide open, his mouth slightly agape. His face was an index of awe.

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Moments of intensely felt intersubjective responses to the act of performance—such as the one described above—captured the fascination of scholar Jill Dolan in her book, Utopia in

Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Her theoretical engagement with such moments unfolds through her analysis of several of her own memorably powerful experiences of contemporary theatre performances, through which she develops what she calls “utopian performatives.” They are brief, fleeting, yet deeply profound moments in performance that

“[call] the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense.”3

3 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 5.

The utopian performative has since accrued significant currency in scholarship drawing on performance studies, in large part because of its theoretical malleability and versatility in describing different kinds of performative events. Although Dolan’s original concept imbued only theatre-performance and theater-space with the possibility of engendering utopian performatives, later scholars have explored the potentiality of other modes and geographies of performance to conjure these moments. Performance studies scholar Alice O’Grady, for example, locates them as a transformative force in underground electronic dance music (EDM) nightclubs—which she reconceptualizes as adult “playgrounds.”4 She argues that play, “a mood, an activity, and eruption of liberty,” is intimately linked with the conjuration of utopian performatives because of play’s power to create amongst club patrons “strong senses of belonging and identification with others.”5 This “clubbing communitas,” as O’Grady calls it, involves a “flash of lucid mutual understanding.” She believes that it is key to transforming the playful space of the club into one which “allows participants to try out and embody alternative ways of being in the world. It allows temporary communities to come together to envisage and practice”—and I would add perform—“versions of a better world.”

The “utopian” part of the utopian performative has had particular significance for queer scholars and scholars of queerness working on expressive culture. If, as José Esteban Muñoz claims, “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer,” then utopian performatives manifest as moments in performance in which a vision of a

4 Alice O’Grady, “Spaces of Play: The Spatial Dimensions of Underground Club Culture and Locating the Subjunctive,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 4, no. 1 (2012): 91. A central theme of her article is the framing of EDM clubs as adult “playgrounds,” “subterranean” spaces where “people are afforded the opportunity to engage in free, voluntary activity in spaces that are symbolically separated from the world of the everyday and marked out as ‘special.’”

5 Ibid., 96.

2 queerness can be, at least momentarily, made present.6 Craig Jennex, for example, in his study of gay men’s listening patterns of female pop singers—specifically Lady Gaga—concludes:

“Obsessed gay male fans have identified that divas’ performances encourage them to reflect on an idealized future and potentially send them to a more pleasurable place. I propose that these moments of imagining a desirable elsewhere are instances of utopian belonging enabled by these fans’ participation in music.”7 Another scholar of queerness who engages with the utopian performative is Ramón Rivera-Servera. In his book, Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance,

Sexuality, Politics, he finds himself on dancefloors in several Latinx queer clubs throughout the

United States in search of evidence of the power of these moments. He nuances his understanding of the utopian performative as such: they “work in between the rational and the emotive,” “they emerge out of moments where the aesthetic event becomes, temporarily, a felt materiality that instantiates the imaginable into the possible,” and that they “bank on the heightened emotional states that make performance possible.”8 Having encountered these moments in his ethnographic fieldwork in “gay and lesbian” clubs in Texas and New York,”

Rivera-Servera concludes “club dancing manifests most profoundly the nature of the utopian performative.” He observes:

Within the club the improvised choreography of the dancers showcases modes of being that are both Latina/o and queer. The world envisioned and embodied in these performances strategically invests in both of these affective registers to produce a utopian third space.

6 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1. 7 Craig Jennex, “Diva Worship and the Sonic Search for Queer Utopia,” Popular Music and Society 36, no. 3 (2013): 356, 357.

8 Ramón Rivera-Servera, Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 35.

Dancing in the club produces queer Latinidad as a utopian performative that is the articulation of something new, an identity in motion that bridges both queerness and Latinidad.9

Building on Rivera-Servera’s assertion that “dancing manifests most profoundly the nature of the utopian performative,” I want to explicitly focus on music’s role in constituting these moments. Given that music must be present in nightspots, and in particular nightclubs— queer or otherwise—to facilitate social dancing, how can we account for the effect of music in the generation and experience of utopian performatives? 10

My primary aim within this thesis thus takes as it starting point this set of questions and the attendant issues they raise. I argue that music and sound within these spaces acts upon the bodies that inhabit them in such a way that invites them to orient themselves towards each other through sound. It is in this act of communal orientation through sound that the utopian performative is manifested. To arrive at this, I outline a way of knowing through sound—what

Stephen Feld calls an acoustemology—utopian moments as they manifest within queer nightclubs and nightspots.11 Although I certainly acknowledge the significance of dance and other forms of movement within these spaces, my purpose in this thesis is to theorize the role of music and sound in the generation and experience of utopian performatives within the spaces of queer nightspots.

9 Rivera-Servera, Performing Queer Latinidad, 149 – 50.

10 Fiona Buckland, Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 78

11 See: Steven Feld, “Acoustemology,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 12 – 21 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

Theories in the Mind

In service of this thesis, I draw on scholarship from several disciplines—namely, queer theory, dance and performance studies, philosophy, cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology and sound studies. José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia was a major inspiration for this project.

His gesture towards the political potential of utopian thinking is one that I build upon within the conclusion. Rivera-Servera has been a touchstone whose careful and thinking theorization and ethnographies of dancefloors in queer Latina/o nightclubs greatly informed my own approach to fieldwork. Dolan’s Utopia in Performance lies at the core of this project; and this thesis can be understood as simultaneously appraisal, praise, and critique of her concept of the utopian performative. I believe much theoretical work is yet to be done with this concept in relation to music or other forms of sounded performance. And it is my hope that this project can provide a model what such an endeavor could look like and yield for music scholars of all shades. Dolan’s work drew heavily on that of Victor Turner, a major figure in anthropological studies of ritual who—as O’Grady plainly states—one “cannot bypass…when dealing with the possibility of performative transformation.”12 In later sections of my thesis, I turn to his text and his concept of communitas, a major brick in Dolan’s own theorical framework in devising the utopian performative. I engage Turner’s text in order to incorporate the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

Concepts devised by Deleuze in his magnum opus, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, add a vital dimension to Dolan’s original explication of the utopian performative.

I draw on several key works in the field of performance studies and cultural anthropology that focus specifically on instances of queer geographies—be they nightspots or other

12 O’Grady, “Spaces of Play,” 89.

5 formations—and processes of what the author of one of such texts, Fiona Buckland, calls “queer world-making.”13 Buckland’s text, Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making, along with Kai Fikentscher’s “You Better Work!” Underground Dance Music in New York City,

Phil Jackson’s Inside Clubbing: Sensual Experiments in the Art of Being Human, and Sarah

Thornton’s Clubbing Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital, have all served as exemplars, although none focus specifically on music as a significant phenomenon within these spaces. Stephen Feld’s concept of acoustemology acted as bedrock for my entire approach to thinking about, listening to, and writing on sound and music within these spaces. My most explicit engagement with theories of sound manifests in my synthesis of Brandon Labelle’s thoughts on envelopment and unfolding, with Sarah Ahmed’s concept of orientation.

Theories in the Flesh

Dolan asserts that utopian performatives are only capable of being brought into the world through live performance, and only perceptible intersubjectively amongst other individuals in a temporary community bounded by the performance in question.14 Thus, inspired by Justin

Rudnick’s ethnographic quest for the trace of queerness in everyday (non-aesthetic) performances and discursive utterances, I ventured into the local queer nightspot scene in

Durham and Raleigh to conduct ethnographic fieldwork—to be specific, participant observation—and seek out these fleeting moments.15 This formed the first prong of my

13 Buckland, Impossible Dance, 2 – 5.

14 Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 2. “Utopia in Performance argues that live performance provides a place where people come together…[to] capture fleeting intimations of a better world.”

15 I am inspired by his engagement with the notion of “everyday” performances of gender and sexuality. The central aim of his dissertation is to decenter “purely discursive understandings of queer identity” by “set[ting] out to answer how queer bodies perform and ‘become’ out rather than/in addition to ‘coming’ out discursively.

6 ethnographic method. Through this ethnography, I sought to situate and realize the theories of the mind developed throughout this project in the flesh, specifically in my own flesh, my own body. It has never before been a site of theorization; and thus required of me an unfamiliar kind of experiential and sensory vulnerability, one that involved the possibility of confrontation with

“unanticipated smells, tastes, sounds and textures, and unexpected ways of comprehending these.”16 Sensory ethnography and participant observation—carried out by inhabiting and moving in these spaces, listening to the music and sounds, engaging in casual banter with other patrons, and some dancing when appropriate—constituted my primary means of “being there” in service of this project. I took fieldnotes on my sonic and spatial environments using my mobile device.17 During previous fieldtrips to both Legends and the Bar, I was mainly only able to collect information about the genres of music played.18

Interviews form the second prong of my ethnographic approach in this thesis. I met with and spoke with two DJs: J.Stevens, who has been DJing for about 13 years and has worked with some frequency for over three years at Legends Nightclub Complex in Raleigh—the largest of the nightspots I consider—and VSPRTN, who has been DJing for about 3 years now and has worked in a variety of queer spaces in Durham, Raleigh, and in more northern locales. My questions to the DJs were focused mainly on their own self-conceptions of their own performative and social functions within the space in which they worked, the specific kinds of

Justin Rudnick, “Performing, Sensing, Being: Queer Identity in Everyday Life” (PhD diss., Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University, 2016), 17.

16 Sara Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography (London: SAGE, 2009), 44.

17 Luis-Manuel Garcia, “Doing Nightlife and EDMC Fieldwork,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5, no.1 (2013), 9.

18 Although in certain instances, specifically at the Bar because of its more generically consistent musical environment (hip hop), I was able to identity songs.

7 musical choices they make, their understanding of the role of the crowd, their conception of the purpose of the spaces and the constitutive role of music therein, and their methods of “reading” and reacting to the dynamism inherent in the sociality within this spaces. In short, I was curious about how DJs thought about how music and sound worked within these spaces; and the three whom I interviewed each articulated fascinating and unique understandings of this process.19

My interviews with nightspot patrons had a similar driving goal in mind, to investigate how they understand music and sound as functioning within these spaces, and their role and contributions in manifesting this function. I interviewed five individuals; and my questions probed specific issues such as: the essential elements of a “good” night out and the role of music therein; their understanding of the relationship between the crowd and the DJ; and their feelings of inclusion and exclusion, or attraction and repulsion (not in affective, but rather physical terms) from the general “vibe” or feel for the space. Matthew is 27-year-old man who has been frequenting queer nightspots in both Washington D.C. and North Carolina for about 4 years.

Arthur, on the other hand, a 26-year-old resident of Washington D.C., has frequented queer nightspots for a much longer span of time. He proudly told me that he’s been going since he was

18. Bernard is a 24-year-old former resident of New York who now lives in North Carolina. He has been going to queer nightspots for about three years. Brodie, a 22-year-old native North

Carolinian, approximates he’s been going to queer nightspots for roughly 4 years. John, another native North Carolinian at 30 years old, has been going sporadically to queer nightspots for the

19 For the interview template I used in my conversations with these DJs, See: Appendix 1

8 past decade. He has expressed a marked suspicion of and distaste for Legends Nightclubs

Complex, and of “gay clubs” more generally.20

My conversations with DJs and with individuals who frequent queer nightspots run throughout this thesis, informing much of my theorization and many of the conclusions at which

I arrive, and explicitly acting as evidence and testimony to the power of music in these spaces.

To sensorially enrich the written descriptions of the various spaces, sounds, musics, and feelings that I and my interlocutors inhabited and experiences, each chapter following this introduction opens with a link to a Spotify playlist.21 Both my interlocutors and myself constructed these playlists in an attempt to give a sense of: the kinds of music that characterize these spaces (this was the intent behind my playlists), to give an example of what they considered to be good music in these spaces, and to give specific examples of good music that provoked particularly powerful affective responses such that could be articulated within the framework of the utopian performative.

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Following this introduction, in the second chapter of this thesis, “‘Where’re We Going

Tonight?’– Field Sites,” I use ethnographic data collected during my fieldtrips to Raleigh and

Durham to describe the sonic and spatial profiles of the major two nightspots that figure as field sites within my project, Legends Nightclub and the Bar, respectively. In the third chapter,

“‘Feeling It!’: The Utopian Performative,” I deconstruct the utopian performative according to

20 For the interview template I used in my conversations with these individuals—all of whom were known to me prior—See: Appendix 2.

21 I am inspired in this by Tim Lawrence’s text on American dance music culture. See: Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

9 the nature of queer nightspots. The performance aspect of the utopian performative implicitly invokes structures that are crucial to the act of performance: a performer, a thing or process to be performed, an audience, and a site upon which the performance is to unfold. As will be seen in this third chapter, although these aspects can be perceived and accounted for in the kinetic activity of dance, they do not translate easily into a sonic framework for understanding and articulating utopian performatives within queer nightspots. Working through the challenges of this translation and illuminating the liberatory potential of a sonically wrought utopian performative forms the major thread this chapter.

The fourth chapter, “‘This Is My Song!’- Sonic Communitas: Enfolding + Unfolding +

Orientation,” builds on the ideas of the third, and asks how we can account for the generation and experience of the utopian performative through sound. I attempt to place in dialectical tension Brandon Labelle’s twin acoustic concepts of envelopment and unfolding, with Sara

Ahmed’s reconceptualization of “orientation.” 22 This resultant synthesized process of envelopment + unfolding + orientation serves as my theoretical basis for knowing and experiencing utopian performatives though sound within queer nightspots, and as the basis for my theorization of sonic communitas. This theoretical framework for understanding the utopian performative through sound is then bolstered by my incorporation of the philosophy of Gilles

Deleuze. His interrelated concepts of the Body without Organs (BwO), stratification, and de-

/reterritorialization have greatly informed and tempered my rosy view of the utopian performative. I use these concepts to illuminate the barriers that arise within nightspots, both

22 Brandon LaBelle, “Restless Acoustics, Emergent Publics,” in The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art, ed. Marcel Cobussen, Vincent Meelberg, and Barry Truax (London: Routledge, 2016), 276-8. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 5 – 12.

10 tangible and intangible, that frustrate a seamlessly formed “utopian” utopian performative.

Indeed, my own visible markers of identity—my blackness most prominently—became a felt barrier between myself and complete immersion into the vibe or atmosphere of several of these nightspots on particular nights.

In the fifth and penultimate chapter of my thesis, “Sounding Communitas; Sounding

Utopia,” I use the language produced by my theoretical frameworks developed in the preceding chapters to articulate my felt experience of a utopian performative at the Bar. And in the concluding chapter, “A Queer Hope,” I engage explicitly with Munoz’s polemic against what he sees as a deep suspicion of idealism and hope in academia, specifically within the humanities. I intend to stress the vital necessity, and illuminate the dire stakes invested in this venture of imagining and experiencing better futures for queer folks, particularly in these years following the horrific shooting at gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida in 2016.

“Do You Have Your I.D.?”

As a queer black man living in a post-Pulse context, the stakes for a utopian venture—the imaginings and temporary actualization of better worlds for queer folks—are intimate and real. I initially decided this research topic for a much more mundane—and, in retrospect—somewhat humorous reason; I desired an excuse to delve into and have fun exploring the local nightclub/nightspot scene in the area without the pressure of academic obligations. Before moving to North Carolina, and while residing in London, Ontario, Canada from 2015 to 2017, I was a frequent fixture at the local gay-club in my city. I went out fairly often, met, and existed with countless individuals, both queer and not, with whom I built and shared a temporary world filled with loud music and bright lights. This is all to say that I am neither new to clubbing—in

11 the explicit sense of going to nightclubs—nor to partying, in the general sense of going out to night spots. My colourful tenure in going-out has resulted in many friendships and a trove of embodied knowledge on how to exist in such spaces and others. I have “learned the ropes,” so to speak, on how to exist and move through these spaces—how to talk to people, how to dance with them, and how to recognize when neither of those are wanted or appropriate. I have learned a modicum of what it means to be “out,” and what it means—at least for the several hours a nightspot is open—to be a member of a temporary queer community. This project grew out of a desire to have fun, and to understand and provide language for the powerful feelings of belonging and hope that these spaces have generated for me.

“Heading Out:” Queers, Clubs, Spots

Before “heading out” and discussing my field sites, I should clarify some of the terminology used throughout this thesis. By gay, my interlocutors and I are generally referring to cis-gender homosexual men. Queer is used in this thesis to refer to any and all non- heteronormative genders and sexualities. Although terminological consistency is of course a goal for me in this thesis, there are inevitably spots of conceptual slippage. My interlocutors themselves also slip between terms when describing the nightspots they frequent—a “gay club” versus a “queer club,” for example. The most slippage on my part, however, inheres in my usage of “nightspot” and “nightclub.” In my conception, these two terms articulate different things. I employ the former, “nightspot,” to describe any establishment and event in which the majority of the social activity occurs during evening hours, and for which the primary function of the space is some sort of large, social activity such as dance, conversation, or drinking. I use “nightclub” specifically to refer to nightspots that are either explicitly branded as such by their proprietors, or

12 whose spatial constitution is intended primarily to facilitate improvised dancing, with this being the primary mode of social engagement (or at least the mode most privileged in that particular space). A queer nightspot is thus any kind of primarily-night establishment that either brands itself explicitly as such—for example, as a gay bar, gay club, or gay-whatever—or intentionally cultivates a predominantly queer clientele or becomes a space for which queer folk develop an affinity. There is also an intended degree of temporal ambiguity in this formulation; for a particular nightspot need not be a queer one every time it is open. For example, the Park at 14th

Street in Washington D.C.—one of more recent nightspots I have visited—is a queer nightspot only on Sunday evenings.

This explanation of nightspots is crucial because of the variety of spaces I consider explicitly in this thesis, and because of the experiential diversity I have had in them. As will be discussed in the second chapter, not all the field-sites I visited are nightclubs—neither in my estimation, nor in their own self-branding. Two of them, in fact, are more properly described as bars, and one—the Pinhook—is even better described as a nighttime performance venue.

Nevertheless, although I focus most of my energy on the nightclubs, my arguments are informed by my (and my interlocutors’) experiences in all these spaces.

CHAPTER 2

“WHERE’RE WE GOING TONIGHT?” – FIELD SITES

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7MffyDz7BfVtwWbfMaQPyg - Matthew’s “Essential Songs” Playlist

Although I draw freely from my experiences at queer nightspots across many of the locations in which I have lived in the past five years—mainly south-western Ontario, Canada, and most recently, Washington D.C.—the ethnographic information in this thesis is specifically grounded in my fieldwork carried out within the Research Triangle Area (Raleigh, Durham, and

Chapel Hill, hereafter collectively referred to as the Triangle Area) in North Carolina. In what follows, I offer brief descriptions of the major nightspots in the Triangle Area that have informed my thinking and acted as sites of experimentation for assessing the potential of a sonic utopian performative. I pay particular attention to the material constitution of these spaces, remarking

(when relevant), for example, on the position of the DJ’s booth or platform relative to the dancefloor and the bar, and the general location (when easily perceptible) of the speakers within these spaces. I also offer general descriptions of the musical genres that tend to construct these spaces. I also take care to remark on what I perceive to be the primary demographics of these spaces. This is necessarily speculative because it can only ever be based on my own observations and those of my interlocutors. There is no access to empirical data when discussing the demographics of these spaces. Such speculation is necessary, however, in order to render a representation of these spaces that is closer to “reality” than not; and because several of my

14 interlocutors consider the typical racial demographics of these spaces to be salient elements of their identity.

Legends Nightclub Complex

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/11hPYt4fpqO3Fy8rLPHfnA - Typical Music at Legends

Figure 1.1 The logo of Legends Nightclub Complex.23

Of the nightspots I visited in the Triangle Area it was at Legends Nightclub Complex in downtown Raleigh that my musical experience was most consistently varied. This was in large part due to the unique and expansive construction of the space. Legends is a “nightclub complex”

23 Retrieved from: http://legends-club.com/

15 because it is constructed of four distinct yet interconnected zones, each with its own unique set of music genres (and DJ’s on some nights) that typically fill the space(s) (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Floor-layout of Legends Nightclub Complex. 24

24 Retrieved from: http://legends-club.com/about-us/club-tour/

Danceclub is the largest of the zones within Legends Nightclub Complex; and patrons immediately enter it upon successfully completing the required border-entry transactions of the club—paying the entrance fee of $10 (and sometimes more depending on the evening) and verifying one’s age. This zone is darkly lit. Most of the light in the left side of this zone (the area on the floorplan above with the zone’s name) comes from a brightly coloured series of lights that adorn the large bar. And on the right side of Danceclub, the largest and normally most populated dance area within Legends, light streams down from neon-coloured strobe lights that swivel and pulsate in accord with the zone’s music. Danceclub is also unique amongst Legends’ zones because it always has a DJ. From an elevated platform on the north wall of this side of

Danceclub, the DJ weaves together a varied blend of high-tempo electronic dance music (EDM) and electronic-remixes of contemporary hip hop songs. For instance, on my first visit to the space, around 11:30 PM I heard an electronic remix of “God’s Plan” (2018) by the rapper Drake.

And on a more recent visit, the DJ for the evening, DJ Joey Shull, put on an electronic remix of rapper Cardi B’s wildly popular song “Bodak Yellow” (2017). The second zone, the Patio, is an open-air area with a central bar, encircled by a few sparse tables and chairs. The music here is typically more pop and electro-pop; and, given the lack of a DJ, likely comes from a curated playlist played from a laptop or some other electronic device. Accessing the third zone that contains the View·Bar and Gameroom brings one back to the interior of the complex. View·Bar is a small, narrow area decorated in what one random conversant described as a “lounge- aesthetic.” Large televisions that typically play music videos unrelated to the more mellow electronic music adorn the high walls; and dim, overhead lights illuminate the space. Gameroom is a similarly small area that, as its name suggests, houses a small assortment of games, such as: pinball machines, arcade games, an air-hockey table, and a ski-ball machine. The final proper

17 zone is the Spotlight theatre, a small room that primarily caters to more official (club-sponsored) kinds of presentational performances such as drag, strip, and other varieties of light- entertainment shows (see Figures 1.3 and 1.4).

Figure 1.3 Digital display outside of Spotlight Theater showcasing the drag-queens performing that night. Photograph by the author, March 16, 2018.

Every night that I visited Legends, there was a drag show happening. The music played during these performances is extremely varied; each drag queen will have her own selection of songs to which she lip-syncs, dances, and engages in other kinds of stage performances.

Figure 1.4 Drag-show in Spotlight Theater, Performer’s Face Obscured. Photography by the author, 2 March 2019.

In my interview with Matthew, he passionately made a distinction between “white gay clubs” and “black gay clubs.”25 These categories for him represented the way that emergent racial demographics within nightclubs and nightspots overtime come to characterize and mark these spaces racially. Provocatively—and this is a thread I further unravel in later sections within this thesis—Matthew posits that music, the specific genres that constitute the musical environment within these spaces, is a primary mechanism by which queer nightspots come to be racially marked:

Cuz like the gay community has this bad problem of using—they [referring to gay white men] all listen to our [African American] music on the low. But when they get in their spaces, they act like they don’t listen to our music. And when we get around them, they still act like they don’t listen to our music. But when they get around us properly then they’ll listen to music. They tell us that they listen to our music all the time; and I’m just like…so why can’t you play the music in the space, you know? Maybe that’s the star

25 Matthew, Interview with author, March 2, 2019.

difference between black and white in the gay community…Cuz I have clearly made it very clear that there are black gay clubs, and then there are white gay clubs.26

Matthew would most certainly—and in fact, has in prior conversations with me—classify

Legends Nightclub Complex as a “white gay club” precisely because of its majority young, white, male clientele and the genres of music that tend to characterize the space (generally pop and electronic dance music). DJ J.Stevens similarly characterizes the club as “definitely a gay, white-male oriented place.”27

26 Matthew, Interview.

27 DJ J.Stevens, Interview with author, February 10, 2019.

The Bar

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4DygI0eplzyOSi1tGlZ9Lf - Typical Music at the Bar

Figure 1.5 Logo of the Bar, Durham.28

Compared to Legends Nightclub Complex, the Bar (see Figure 1.5) in Durham is much smaller, less busy, and seemed to attract a much larger amount of people of colour. It brands itself as “the OG Bull City LGBTQ home base. The latest iteration of a more than two-decade long tradition of clubbing for queers.”29 The Bar’s interior is rather sparse. The dancefloor is a sizeable, slightly elevated wooden platform in the corner of the space. Two poles (meant for dancing) stand near two of the floor’s ends; and the area itself is surrounded by a wooden bar/handrail, almost like a fence. There are a few tables and chairs scattered around the space,

28 Retrieved from: https://www.thebardurham.com/

29 “OG” here means original. https://www.thebardurham.com/

21 but the space is generally rather nondescript. Through the doors next to the DJ’s booth is an outside-patio area (see Figure 1.6).

Figure 1.6 DJ pedestal, adorned with club’s logo, next to the dancefloor. The walls surrounding the dancefloor are covered with large mirrors. Photograph by author, March 17, 2018.

Next to a large wall-mounted television (sports games were being broadcast both times I visited), there is a small bar that doubles as a food-booth. Further past this area, next to a gigantic field of sand in a volleyball net demarcates a playing area, is a wall lined with small cubicles with benches. Musically speaking, during my first trip to the Bar in March of 2018, hip hop music was played much more there than at Legends. Up until around 11:00pm, the soundtrack was predominately older Hip Hop such as The Sugarhill Gang’s “Jump on It!” (1999) and Tag

Team’s “Whoomp! (There It Is).” (1993) As the night wore on newer songs such as DJ Khaled and Rihanna’s “Wild Thoughts” (2017), David Guetta and Akon’s “Sexy Bitch” (2009,) Bruno

Mars’ “Finesse” (2016), and Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” (2014), filled the club-space. A more recent trip to the Bar in November 2018 further maintained this assessment of the space’s typical musical selections.

Whereas Matthew classified Legends Nightclub Complex as a “white gay club,” he classifies The Bar as a “black gay club,” and more specifically as an “older black gay club.” As stated above, the primary racial demographic of The Bar has—at least for each time I have visited the space—been predominately people of colour, specifically black folks. And, again hazarding an observational conclusion, I would say most individuals at The Bar have generally appeared older than folks at Legends, at least in their 30’s.

The Pinhook

Figure 1.7 Logo for the Pinhook.30

The Pinhook (see Figure 1.7) is the second of my field sites in Durham, North Carolina.

Even though it is not a nightclub, the Pinhook’s self-articulated social function and purpose— that of a multi-modal performance and social space that fiercely and proudly promotes its

30 Retrieved from: https://www.thepinhook.com

LGBTQ+ inclusivity—made it a greatly productive space to visit. Branding itself as “Durham’s premier 250 cap venue for bands, music, dance parties, basic chilling, and collaborative/creative events for over TEN YEARS,” the Pinhook is a major queer nightspot in the “triangle area.”31

Some of the events hosted in the space that I have attended include a punk show, several live DJ events, and of course, drag shows. Given the fungibility of social and performative functions of this space—one that varies nightly—to speak of a typical musical experience in this space would be impossible. Each time I have visited specifically to attend a queer-event, however, a DJ was present. They typically had their set-up on the stage which overlooks the large, open floor. The space of the Pinhook itself is moderately sized; music easily permeates the entire space from the stage, to the area with benches next to the entrance. Similarly, given the immense diversity of performance-events and thus musical genres that inhabit this space each night, it would be impossible to speak at a level not disappointingly superficial about the space’s typical demographic. Although, I suppose, drawing from my own trips to the space, there has tended to be a mix of both older and younger individuals; and, although still mostly white most times, there was an appreciable degree of racial diversity.

31 https://www.thepinhook.com/about/

Ruby Deluxe

Figure 1.8 The logo of Ruby Deluxe.32

Ruby Deluxe (see Figure 1.8), in Raleigh, is very similar in social function and purpose to the Pinhook in Durham. Although Ruby Deluxe is a much smaller space, it too is a general performance venue space that positions itself as “a queer space meaning we aim to include everyone—including people who are LGBTQIA, non-binary, gender queer, and femme,” and as

“an option for queer folk to hang out and be celebrated in our format—out events and everything.”33 Once one walks through the entrance and passes a row of three arcade video- games, one enters into a space with disco-balls, a heavily decorated wall behind the bar, and a general “vibe…clad in glitter and sequins.”34 Speaking of Ruby Deluxe’s typical musical environment or its typical demographic presents the same challenges as with the Pinhook.35

32 Retrieved from: http://rubydeluxeraleigh.com/

33 James Nichols, “Ruby Deluxe Gives Queer Southerners a Respite from Constant Concerns of Access and Safety,” Indy Week, February 27, 2019, https://indyweek.com/culture/stage/ruby-deluxe-gives-queer-southerners-a- respite/

34 http://rubydeluxeraleigh.com/contacts/

35 A much longer study would likely glean some insight into these questions.

CHAPTER 3

“FEELING IT!” – THE UTOPIAN PERFORMATIVE

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6npUH15RVhNWv8LiM3yjVb - Bernard’s “Essential Songs” Playlist

As previously mentioned, Dolan argues that utopian performatives arise only in live performance, and that a sense of community with others is a crucial constitutive element.36

Drawing on previous performance studies scholarship by Victor Turner, Dolan equates this latter element to communitas, “moments in a theater event or ritual in which audiences or participants feel themselves become part of the whole in an organic, nearly spiritual way.”37 She further describes this feeling as a moment in which “spectators’ individuality becomes finely attuned to those around them, and a cohesive if fleeting feeling of belonging to the group bathes the audience.”38 Within queer nightspots, the emergence of communitas can likely be explained without much difficulty. Simply by “being there” in the space with other queer patrons engenders, at least on some level, a (queer) sense of what O’Grady specifically calls “clubbing communitas.”39 And Rivera-Servera, expanding the concept of communitas to include

36 Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 2.

37 Ibid., 11.

38 Ibid.

39 O’Grady, “Spaces of Play,” 96. She also equates this to “the vibe.”

“intersubjective understanding,” convincingly argues that “Latino/a queer dance practices” likewise engender this mode of being.40

The performance element of the utopian performative, however, is trickier to translate and apply in performance spaces outside of the theater. I contend that the ontology of performance implicitly requires the presence of four distinct categories: a performer, a thing or process to be performed, an audience to be performed to, and a consecrated site upon which the performative act is to unfold.41 The manifestation of these categories within the theater is an obvious process—the performer is whoever is acting on stage, the thing being performed is the play or dramatic work, the audience is those spectators in the seats, and the site is the stage itself.

So too are these categories perceptible in dance in nightclubs— albeit, not as easily as in theatre performance and theatre space—because of the highly visible and “kinetic resources” involved in the activity.42 Rivera-Servera implicitly outlines the presence of these categories in an ethnographer account he gives of a Chicano dancer in Rochester, New York, named Nestor.

When he takes to the dancefloor, Nestor is, of course, the performer. His performance?—his improvised choreography that “[is] characterized by a slight bending of the right knee and a rhythmic pause in which the right shoulder punctuates the beat travelling through his torso onto his hip…His movement sequence is adorned with a forward rotation of bent arms performed in

Caribbean social dance genres.”43 His audience?—those club patrons (including Rivera-Servera)

40 Rivera-Servera, Performing Queer Latinidad, 150.

41 Dolan also posits that utopian performatives also engender an altered sense of time, a feeling of being “out of time.” See: Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 13 – 14.

42 Jonathan Bollen, “Queer Kinesthesia: Performativity on the Dance Floor,” in Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage, ed. Jane C. Desmond (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 299.

43 Rivera-Servera, Performing Queer Latinidad, 153.

27 who are enticed by his dance that “is both an invitation to watch and perhaps to engage, as well as a setting of boundaries.”44 And the consecrated site of his queer performance, the marked spatial zone upon which the performance unfolds?—the space on the dance floor demarcated by his “cutting motion[s] across the floor.”45

The DJ and the Crowd

These constitutive categories outlined above do not necessarily translate easily into a sonic framework for understanding the concept within queer nightspots. Taking nightclubs as an example, who in this particular space can be said to be the performer, the originator, the architect of the performance? And what exactly is the performance, the thing being performed? Who is the audience? And can a more specific performance site than “the club” be said to exist? Kai

Fikentscher’s assertion that the club DJs act as “soundscape architects” is alluring in its simplicity, ostensible obviousness, and potential of at least accounting for the identity of the performer and their performance within queer nightclubs.46 The sonic power imbued in this role is indeed great; it would be difficult to claim that another agent within the club space exerts greater sonic control and influence. As Matthew succinctly put it in our interview, the role of the

DJ within such spaces is primarily to “[choose] songs consistently that represent the crowd that’s in the space.”47 DJ VSPRTN articulated a similar sense of purpose and agency, seemingly with

44 Rivera-Servera, Performing Queer Latinidad .155.

45 Ibid., 153.

46 Kai Fikentscher, “You Better Work!” Underground Dance Music in New York City (New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 8.

47 Matthew, Interview.

28 an added function as a kind of steward when he explains that his role within the spaces of queer nightspots is “to keep the party moving as much as possible. And [to] make sure that one is, like you know, overbearing. You need boundaries in space, ‘cuz you know.”48

Although I partly disagree with Fikentscher’s assertion that club DJs act as “soundscape architects,” his likening of the club’s sonic environment to a soundscape, however, is provocative and valuable. I believe that in the soundscape concept lies the key to achieving a sonic understanding of the utopian performative within queer nightspots. If one conceives of the club’s sonic environment as a soundscape, then every sounding body within the club space is involved in its construction. The shuffling and pounding of feet on the dancefloor, the cheering and hollering of excited patrons, and the flirtatious bar-side chatter of lusting individuals—all these sounding events come together in constituting the club’s soundscape, and thus renders all the individuals within in the nightspot—the DJ and the patrons—as performers. .

I have witnessed such a dynamic within a queer nightclub’s soundscape by an individual patron some time ago at Club Lavish in London, Ontario, Canada. A young man had become belligerently intoxicated and began to harass a group of young men sitting near the bar. The club’s bouncer, having been notified by a conscientious onlooker, approached him and ordered him to leave the club. The young man refused and began to physically confront the bouncer.

Several other security personnel rushed to the bouncer’s aid; but what was perhaps more distinctive about this event was the fact that the club’s DJ stopped the music, and only resumed it once a bouncer made an affirmative gesture to him. That this one individual was able to cause

48 DJ VSPRTN, Interview with Author, March 1, 2019. The boundaries VSPTN refers to are those that relegate safety and appropriate sociality. When I asked him how he maintains those boundaries within the space, he explained that he does this by paying attention to the dynamic between the energy of the people of the space and the energy of the music itself: “As a DJ, I’ve noticed—I’ve watched this with other DJs in the space—this like…too much high energy going on. People tend to, you know…a lot of personality clashes in the space. So it really goes off by the vibe of the song and whatever.”

29 such a dramatic change in the club’s soundscape demonstrates the degree of potential agency that club patrons (and the DJ) possess within these spaces to enact sonic shifts.

Notwithstanding situations like those described in the brief account above, individual club goers can also explicitly enact their sonic agency within the soundscape of a nightspot, sometimes even to dramatic effect, by other means such as intense dancing or making song requests to the DJ present within the space. As the account below demonstrates, I have personally witnessed potential of dance to trigger a change in a nightspot’s soundscape at a DJ show(case) at the Pinhook.

I was standing near the back of the open floor area directly in front of the stage, subtly scoping out the crowd for familiar or interesting faces. I noticed several individuals perched against a painted wall to the right of me, all chatting with each other while surrounded by other individuals who were moving in place to the music. The dim lighting in the space, punctuated by a mix of red and green lights, made it difficult to see the faces of these dancers; but I assumed that they were enjoying the music on account of their physical embodiment of it. It would be hard not to have some kind of reaction to the music within the space given its sheer volume and the dominance of the bass. Even I started to feel myself slipping into the DJ’s groove. She stood on the stage, alternating between surveying the crowd and making adjustments on her mixer and laptop. The song changed, and a group of folks started edging their way closer the crowd. They were easily the most animated within the space; and upon reaching the platform that demarcated the stage from the dancefloor, they formed a loose circle, all dancing with each other and the music. Although the DJ seemed to be too preoccupied to notice them, I was attracted to both the group’s energy and synchrony. It was alluring and exciting; and I managed to squeeze my way a bit closer to them. Suddenly, a young man with locs wearing a crop top shirt broke from the

30 circle and moved directly in front of the stage. Now, in this position directly in front her, the DJ noticed him. He made an affirmative gesture towards her and beckoned to the rest of his group to join him and resume dancing. Incredibly, the DJ seemed to key into how he was dancing: it was a sort of two-step movement, and every four downbeats of the track’s hypermeter he would freeze momentarily in place. She kept the same track playing that had pulled him to the area in front her longer than she had previous tracks and started to insert breaks that matched the dancing-man’s freezes. This marked change in the Pinhook’s soundscape, engendered by this momentary individual connection between this man and the DJ, was noticed by many of the patrons within the space such as myself and the same individuals I had noticed learning against the painted wall earlier. The man’s friends, however, responded most strongly of all to this change in the soundscape and the activity that had sparked it. They formed a half-circle around him and began to cheer both him and the DJ for their dynamic duo-performance. This continued for about thirty-seconds before the man stopped, jumped and clapped at the DJ in adulation a few times, and moved with him friends off to the side. With their performance over, the DJ resumed her work and switched to a different track.

Simply by requesting a specific song—a practice to which some DJs like J.Stevens

(hereafter referred to simply as Steven) are generally receptive (and many more are not)— nightspot patrons are also able to exerts their individual agencies on such a level that reverberates throughout the space because of the change of song. Such a move has the guaranteed potential to change the entire mood and feeling of the space, at least for the duration of the song. In my interview with Steven, he spoke positively about requests, and very plainly spoke of this powerful tool that club goers sometimes wield within nightspots. When asked his thoughts on receiving requests, Steven explained:

I’ve learned it really depends on where you are. There are times where I don’t get any requests at all. And there are times when people will just throw their phones in your face. And so my rule on this—when it does happen; and honestly, it’s very rare anymore that I actually get requests. And if I do it’s normally something I was gonna play anyway. But the best thing to do with that is just to acknowledge the person, acknowledge their existence.49

Acknowledge their existence, and—by extension I would add—acknowledge their agency.

Steven goes on to stress his belief that good DJ practice when handling requests is to respect the requesting-individual’s presence and their attempt to make an explicit contribution to the soundscape. He says:

Don’t treat them as if they’re just some asshole coming up to request a song. Maybe they don’t know that there’s a certain etiquette to it; or maybe they had a bad week and they just couldn’t wait to hear this song and dance to it in the club. You don’t know their story behind it. So at least try to acknowledge them.50

Steven also intimates a similar belief that the DJ is not the supreme sonic authority within queer nightspots, and that patrons exert an equally significant and essential agency—both collectively as a crowd, and sometimes individually as song requesters or particularly fiery dancers, for example—in contributing to the soundscape of a queer nightspot. On a most fundamental level, he describes how his reading of a crowd—his in the moment, dynamic and reflexive assessment of the crowd’s energy and performed or visible affinity with his musical decisions—directly influences the music he plays during that particular night and subsequent nights in the future. He frames this process as heavily reliant on his own accumulated intuition of nightspots, and an almost systematic approach to taking pulse of the space:

49 DJ J.Stevens, Interview.

50 Ibid.

You know, I feel like intuition plays a part in [reading the crowd]. Intuition is also a big part of your past experiences as well. And so reading a crowd to me and to a lot of DJs is probably the hardest part. You can have the best mixing DJ and world-champion, famous names. But if the crowd isn’t into it, that doesn’t matter. You’re nothing at that point in time. And so, it’s kind in the first hour or two, I’ll spin through different genres—some older stuff, some newer stuff…And you just kinda check into it and see who’s moving to what and what’s actually working, and what isn’t working. And if you go along throughout the night, you kinda fine tune that.51

More specifically, he frequently scans the crowd and looks and listens for:

…people dancing and having fun. People, they’ll give you a fist bump or like a high-five. You can easily tell when someone walks off the dance floor. Like you don’t necessarily have to have verbal feedback; you can have body language. Body language feedback is definitely a big thing. And people either scream at songs they like and enjoy it, or you can see them struggling. Or if they get on their phones while they’re just kinda swaying there, then you know—you might just wanna switch up what you’re doing there!52

Later on in our interview, Steven further professed how he conceived of his role as a DJ to

“create an escape for [the crowd].”53 And although this remark seems to veer into a reframing of his agency as being monodirectional—that is, not influenced by any other agencies such as those of the nightspot patrons—Steven quickly reorients himself when he stresses his persistent and vital connection with, and derivation of influence from the individuals for whom he plays:

But there are times when, even as—even though I don’t dance, I can even get loose. And I know that if I’m loose, then so are they [the crowd]. If I’m not enjoying myself, then they’re probably not either. And I owe it to them to allow them to enjoy themselves.

Steven’s most poignant and, might I even say forceful rejection that DJs singularly control the space again comes in his response to my question about his feelings towards patrons making

51 DJ J.Stevens, Interview.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

33 song requests. He summarily rejects this notion and critiques DJs that are “assholes” precisely because of their egotistical and narcissistic stance:

And I think we’re at a point where people almost expect the DJ to be an asshole to them. And I’ll be the first to admit, I used to be that asshole—in the worst way! It was always like “you don’t know what’s best; I know what’s best!” And I think when you strip that down—when you stop doing stuff like that—you can enjoy yourself more too.

I used to see in groups, message-boards, and forums—more and more DJs bitch about requests. And I always wanna write back, “maybe do your job better!” And you know, there is—there’s a certain ego. A lot of DJs have an ego if you haven’t learned that yet. And, so I think they take it [requests] negatively, so they respond in kind.54

Each of the nightspot-goers that I interviewed all expressed similar convictions that the

DJ within a queer nightspot acted in tandem or as a partner with the crowd to “make the night happen,” as Arthur so eloquently puts it. None of them suggested that the DJ was the

“soundscape architect” and singularly responsible for the space’s soundscape. Bernard, for example, explains that the “role [of the DJ] is to read the crowd; [to] see what music gets a response and keep playing those types of songs.”55 Arthur argues that, although the DJ does

“[play] a big role in setting the tone” and “[is] responsible for people dancing or not dancing,” they nonetheless must engage, almost dialectically with the crowd by “respect[ing] the audience by playing appropriate music to keep the people engaged. And people should respect the DJ

54 DJ J.Stevens, Interview.

55 Bernard, Questionnaire form, March 3, 2019.

34 too.”56 Brodie too stressed that “the DJ is responsible for reading the crowd and knowing what the demographic wants to hear.”57

Matthew similarly suggests that the role of the DJ within the spaces of queer nightspots is not to singularly dictate the progression of the night. His word choice in describing the DJ’s role is compelling. He explains:

[The role of the DJ is to choose] songs that consistently represent the crowd that’s in the space, in the interest of the crowd. I mean, it’s hard with America right now; cuz you know, people have diverse interests in music. But generally…sometimes it’s not even billboard-100 music; cuz sometimes that be the wackest music, especially when you go to popular bars that’re gay. But the role of the DJ is to play the music that respects the crowd. Sometimes they know what crowd they gonna get; sometimes they really don’t.58

His mention of respect echoes all of my other interlocutors. Respect within the space, both on the part of the patrons of the space in their behavior and attitude—Arthur’s proclamation that “there needs to be a balance and constant respect between everyone”—and on the part of the DJ, seems paramount to the success of the night. For most of my interlocutors, they expected that the DJ’s respect be expressed through their musical decisions (genres and assumedly general technical skill) and their willingness to reflexively and dialectically acknowledge the agency of the crowd and involve them in the construction of the soundscape. But more to the point, I would argue that this mention of respect—indeed the very ability to demand and expect respect within the

56 Arthur, Interview with author, March 4th, 2019. Arthur further argues that respect—and the use of the word presages Matthew’s use (to be discussed below)—needs to be a constant in the space: “There is a constant interaction between everyone; and there needs to be a balance and constant respect between everyone. We as the audience should respect the place that we are in and should respect each other by being more conscious of the people around us.”

57 Brodie, Questionnaire Form, March 4th, 2019.

58 Matthew, Interview.

35 spaces—indicates that nightspot patrons have a consciousness of their own sonic agency within the space.

Soundscape as Performance

If we accept the premise that the DJ is not solely responsible for the construction of the soundscape within queer nightspots, it follows that the performance manifested by the contributions of all sounding individuals within queer nightspots is the soundscape itself. Each nightspot’s soundscape is, of course, unique both in degree—of the level of dynamism between the DJ and nightspot patrons—and in kind—dependent on the nature of the space itself and the specific musical decisions made by all the parties involved. Furthermore, the patrons within the nightspot, these sounding bodies that contribute to the production of the space’s soundscape, are also simultaneously its audience. Simply to carry out my ethnographic fieldwork required me to alternate between these two roles of performer and audience. In Legends, for example, I moved frequently throughout the space, observing and listening to the soundscape enveloping me while also rushing into the mass of people on the dance floor in Danceclub—particularly when a song I enjoy began to be played such as Drake’s “Nice for What”—to envelop myself corporally as well. To be in a queer nightspot is thus to participate in the construction of a soundscape, and to be subject to a net sonic product communally manifested by the contribution of everybody/every body within the space. The entire space of the entire nightspot thus becomes the site in which this complex performance—one in which both performer and audience are the same—is unfolded.

Conceiving of every sounding body within the space of the nightspot as contributing to the resultant soundscape, and thus acting as performers, enriches Dolan’s framing of utopian performatives as moments only experienced through “modes of spectatorship and audience

36 practices.”59 My sonic conception allows for them to be moments experienced through modes of participation.

59 Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 15-20.

CHAPTER 4

“THIS IS MY SONG!” – SONIC COMMUNITAS

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3YWr4vyaRxcCoWKT8HBzZv - Arthur’s “Essential Songs” Playlist

How can we understand the process by which sound participates in engendering moments of the utopian performative in queer nightspots? Here, I feel compelled to reassert that I am not arguing for sound as singularly generative of utopian performatives within the spaces of nightspots, but rather that it acts in tandem with other phenomena—such as space and time—and performative elements—such as dance and identity. Brandon Labelle’s twin concepts of enfolding and unfolding provide useful starting points for the development of such a sonic framework. Sound, he argues, acts on, in, and through listening subjects according to “two coordinates, or two experiential modalities.” He characterizes these as “‘enfolded’ and

‘unfolded’—two sonic operations intrinsic to sonic materiality.”60 It is worth quoting him at length (his writing is delightfully florid). He explains “enfolding” as such:

As sounds circulate through an environment, rising from below, or coming from outside, or even directly in front, and from within, we might appreciate the ways in which they envelop the body; one is enfolded by sound, with each wave an event that brushes over our corporeal figure; we are touched, or hit by sound—it is all over me.61

60 LaBelle, “Restless Acoustics,” 276 – 7.

61 Ibid., 277.

Enfolding thus describes the perception of how sonic phenomena wash over us, submerge us in their constitution, and actualize themselves on and in our skin. “Unfolding,” LaBelle explains, however, describes a process that works in a somewhat reverse, yet complementary way from enfolding:

This “external” event of sound—this enfoldment—is complemented or mirrored by an equally physical experience, or sensorial event, that of an internal coming out or forward, what I might call unfolding. If sound calls my attention, if it brushes past or over me, to enfold my senses, and sensibility, in impressionable waves and animations, I equally step toward sound; it may rush into me, yet it equally requires my attention: my body cannot help but respond; I cringe, shudder; I let it pass, or I draw myself into it—I lean into sound as it occupies and teases this place, this moment; I unfold myself, even if to turn the other way.62

Unfolding thus describes a reciprocation of the self into an enfolding sonic phenomenon. The listening subject steps into the sound and bares their body to it. These two “experiential modalities” work on us dialectically. LaBelle explains:

I would venture to say that in moments of audition I am less myself; if sound enfolds me, delivering so many impressionable forces onto and into me, and if I unfold myself, drawing my attention to what takes place, so as to await what may happen next, then what I understand as “myself” is always already displaced. Sound takes me away; it literally subsumes me, figuring my body as never where I may think it is.63

His argument that the act of listening, when conceived as involving enfolding and unfolding, already involves the displacement of the listening subject’s self is quite provocative; and several of my experiences at nightspots seems to partly accede to him. The sheer volume of the music played throughout Legends’ interior swallowed me, particularly in Danceclub. When I

62 LaBelle, “Restless Acoustics,” 277.

63 Ibid. Bold emphasis added by me.

39 would temporarily step out of my ethnographic mode, the music washed over me unfettered and absorbed me in its grain. To hear any other sound within the space, like the chatter of other patrons around me, was a strenuous feat. I could not help but let the loud music hit me, enfold me into it psychically and almost materially. DJ J.Stevens articulates that the facilitation of patrons being able to unfold themselves—or as he frames it, “get lost”—in the music is one of primary goals as a DJ in queer nightspots:

My role [in the space of queer nightspots] is to create an escape for [the crowd]. Something where, just for a couple hours or even for 20 minutes, you can just get lost and forget about your worries or your troubles or equality, or anything like that. You’re in a safe space; you can let yourself go. You can be yourself.64

Marc Leman, Jeska Buhmann, and Edith van Dyck’s cognitive theorization of beat synchronicity is applicable here. The omnipresent beat within the music of Danceclub within

Legends enveloped me so much, that I began to feel myself to be locked into it, to be physically in synchrony with it.65 Phil Jackson in his study of clubbing culture in the late 1990’s in the

United Kingdom similarly speaks of another acoustic parameter of music that is as equally corporally and affectively arresting within nightclubs (and by extension, also nightspots)—the bass. His writing when discussing the power of the bass within these spaces is even more florid and colourful than LaBelle’s. Consider the following passage:

If I believed in a God, then that God would take the form of a bass beat. Raw, guttural and sublime the bass enfolds and possesses, it is the heartbeat of clubbing, both archaic and wise, infusing both time and space with the organicism of a living thing.

64 DJ J.Stevens, Interview.

65 Marc Leman, Jeska Buhman, & Edith van Dyck, “The Empowering Effects of Being Locked into the Beat of the Music,” in Body, Sound, and Space in Music and Beyond: Multimodal Explorations, ed. Clemens Wöllner (London: Routledge, 2017), 15 – 6.

Such a bass has the ability to sculpt air and charge it with an electrostatic frisson, which makes it akin to being touched. The driving power of the subcutaneous force is a source of energy in itself, it hits your gut, genitals and chest with a kinetic surge of desire that can at times become so intense that it is physically overwhelming and you are forced to turn away for fear of puking. A pumping bass beat launches you onto the floor before you’ve even thought about it. Its immediacy is lascivious and virulent and the rhythm it carries infects entire rooms.66

Although Jackson’s deification of the bass in music in nightclubs is intense, his valuation of this specific acoustic parameter’s pervasive and—harkening back to Buckland’s provocative phrase

“empire of the beat”—almost oppressive power within these spaces is spot-on.67 Although these acoustic parameters of the always-loud music in many of the nightspots I visited often did enfold me into it—lock me into its beat and subjugate me to it totalizing bass—I did not always reciprocate and unfold myself into it.

Although useful and coherent by itself, LaBelle’s theory does not fit easily into this framework that I am developing for analyzing (a) the experience of sound and music within queer nightspots, and (b) how they work with other spatial factors to generate moments of utopian performatives. What my framework requires that LaBelle’s theory admittedly did not necessarily seek to provide is a mechanism to account for the listening agency and specific subjectivities of nightspot patrons. It would be a critical error to presume that listening subjects within queer nightspots are mere sounding boards or mediums on and through which these processes of enfolding and unfolding occur. For within the space of nightspots, although sometimes assuming a more passive role within the space, patrons are not totally passive

66 Phil Jackson, Inside Clubbing: Sensual Experiments in the Art of Being Human (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004), 28

67 Buckland, Impossible Dance, 78

41 subjects. They move around according to the sounds and music they hear. I moved through and reshaped the space—and changed my relation to this space and its situated sounds— of Legends for myself as I followed the sounds of music, to the specific musical genres that appealed to me

(when they were audible).

This is where Sara Ahmed’s conception of “orientation” can serve to straighten-out the kinks that arise from my attempt to incorporate LaBelle’s theory into my own framework. For her, orientations “involve different ways of registering the proximity of objects and others.

Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as “who” or “what” we direct our energy and attention toward.”68 The concept “allows us then to rethink the phenomenality of space—that is, how space is dependent on bodily inhabitance.” Orientations “are about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places.”69

Considered in tandem with enfolding and unfolding, Ahmed’s conceptualization of orientation allows us to place front-and-center the agency of listening subjects within queer nightspots. Listening subjects are not merely sounded upon passively, but can move in space to change their physical, and thus phenomenal relationship to the sounds that seek to enfold them.

In other words, club patrons orient themselves according to the ways in which sound enfolds them and invites them to unfold themselves. This theoretical link between LaBelle and Ahmed is even more productive than this. The displacement of the listening subject’s self that LaBelle argues is always already present in the act of listening can also be understood as simultaneously

68 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 3.

69 Ibid., 6, 8.

42 enacting a change in orientation internally and externally about the subject. The music played at the Bar that most successfully enticed me into unfolding myself into it was hip hop.

Reciprocating the embrace of the enveloping musical sounds, I stepped into them (particularly when the music of Fetty Wap or, later during the night, Kendrick Lamar was played). In the space of the club, on a most literal level, this manifested in me consciously turning to orient myself towards the sources of the sounds, the speakers and the DJ. This external change in orientation was paralleled by an internal change as well. By allowing the music to enfold me within it, and by actively projecting and unfolding myself within the music, I felt through the reverberations of Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” the energetic presence of the other patrons around me. In the tactile sensation of the music, I became aware in that moment of the interrelationality between myself and all the other club patrons. We became oriented towards each other through sound. This was sonic communitas.

Sonic Communitas

It arises in those moments when, surrounded by music (immersed in a process of enfolding) a temporary assemblage of individuals becomes acutely aware of their interrelationality—the ephemeral set of relations that brings them together, or in other words, the manner in which they are oriented towards each other—through their simultaneous unfolding of themselves into the music. This double articulation, this enfolding and unfolding, works to enact a displacement of each of the individual’s subjectivities that comprises the assemblage; in the spaces of nightclubs, for example, this would be the crowd. The aggregate of these subjective displacements engenders a liminal state, in which—although never being deindividuated—these

43 individual subjectivities “obtain a flash of lucid mutual understanding on the existential level, when they feel that all problems, not just their problems, could be resolved, whether emotional or cognitive, if only the group which is felt (in the first person) as ‘essentially us’ could sustain its intersubjective illumination.”70

A more substantial turn to Victor Turner’s work on communitas and ritual—the latter concept being the cultural context in which the former was originally theorized—serves to flesh out my concept of sonic communitas. Turner built on ritual-models of earlier anthropologists and put forth his own model of the ritual process. In three parts—what he specifically calls

“stages”—Turner’s model is comprised, in order of progression, of: separation, limen

(“signifying ‘threshold’ in Latin”), and reaggregation or reincorporation.71 Separation, as Turner tells us, is comprised of “symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group from an earlier fixed point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions”—and here,

Turner gives the example of the state—“or from both.”72 The second stage, limen or liminality, is that in which “the characteristics of the ritual subject (‘the passenger’) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or the coming state.”73

Drawing examples from his fieldwork, Turner likens this liminal state to “being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness…to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.”74 Those

70 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 42.

71 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 94.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid., 95

44 entities that inhabit this state Turner describes as “liminal entities.” They are “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”75 Furthermore, and particularly pertinent to one’s experience within nightspots, Turner argues that liminal states force us into “moment[s] in and out of time.”76 To this I would append they also dissolve the boundaries between reality and possibility, between the what-is and the what-could-be. The third and final stage in Turner’s model of the ritual process is reaggregation or reincorporation, in which “the ritual subject, individual, or corporate, is in a relatively stable state once more, and by virtue of this, has rights and obligations vis-à-vis others of a clearly defined and ‘structural’ type.”77

Turner’s greatest conceptual intervention is in fact located within the realm of the liminal stage; this is when communitas arises.78 He summarizes the concept rather tersely: “For me, communitas emerges where social structure is not.”79 He offers another succinct explanation when he explains it “[represents] the ‘quick’ of human interrelatedness, what Buber has called das Zwischenmenschliche.”80 And furthermore:

communitas is a relationship between concrete, historical, idiosyncratic individuals. These individuals are not segmentalized [sic.] into roles and statuses but confront one another rather in the manner of Martin Buber’s ‘I and Thou.81

75 Turner, The Ritual Process, 95.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid., 96 – 7.

79 Ibid., 126.

80 Ibid., 127.

81 Ibid., 132.

And, by further analogy to philosopher Martin Buber, Turner explains:

Community [communitas] is quintessentially a mode of relationship between total and concrete persons, between “I” and “Thou.” This relationship is always a “happening,” something that arises in instant mutuality, when each person fully experiences the being of the other.82

Whereas Turner formulated the concept of communitas in relation to sacred rituals amongst the Ndembu people of modern-day Zambia, Dolan takes it as the base for her theorization of audience experience in the theater. It forms the cornerstone of her novel concept of the utopian performative.83 Communitas forms the intersubjective web that binds the theatre audience together during the act of performance; and it is an essential constitutive condition of the utopian performance. For Dolan, it perfectly encapsulates “the moments in a theater event or a ritual in which audiences of participants feel themselves become part of the whole in an organic, nearly spiritual way; spectators’ individuality becomes finely attuned to those around them, and a cohesive if fleeting feeling of belonging to the group bathes the audience.”84

Communitas takes on a much more vague role in O’Grady’s “clubbing communitas.” For her, it

“occurs at the point [at which] the liminoid construct”—the night-club—“gives rise to the liminal experience…It is a state that provides a means to understanding the impact clubbing can have on individuals and groups who then pursue [the liminal experience] as a key feature of a successful night out.”85

82 Turner, The Ritual Process, 136.

83 See: Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 11 – 2, 14, 32.

84 Ibid., 11.

85 O’Grady “Underground Club Spaces and Interactive Performance,” 127 – 9.

The Sonic Utopian Performative

If, as LaBelle argues, the twin processes of enfolding and unfolding are always already acting upon us as listening subjects by means of displacement, then in the act of listening, we are neither really here nor there, neither spatially nor temporally. We inhabit for the duration of the sounded event a kind of a-temporal interstitial zone, what LaBelle describes as an “acoustic spatiality:” “[It is] exactly where we might locate this sonic body—it is the ground upon which this form of subjectivity takes shape, and where it finds its identity, as a process of differentiation. Sound cannot let things rest—it forces a movement, a break, a procedure of relation; a becoming-body—an acoustical spacing by which I hear myself.”86 This space is nebulous and amorphous, but not insular and closed. This acoustic space in which we hear and know ourselves is co-inhabited by other subjects around us who are similarly enfolded into it and have allowed themselves to unfold into it through sound. It is in the communal orientation within this acoustic spatiality that communitas arises: the moment in the club when our ears, bodies, and selves are all oriented—both externally and internally—towards each other, and towards the thing that we performatively bring into the world, the club’s soundscape. That all sounding bodies within the club—whether gay, straight, queer, white, black, and so on—are able to inhabit this acoustic spatiality, and thus participate in the ensemble performance of the club’s soundscape, is the hope-made-actual imparted by the utopian performative in this scenario. It is a performance of a hopeful future of a better world where all bodies can exist in orientation with and towards each other through sound and music. All these sonic processes undergird the kinetic activity of dance in invoking utopian performatives in queer nightclubs.

86 LaBelle, “Restless Acoustics,” 277.

How Do You Dance as a (Queer) Body Without Organs?

Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy has served well to temper my rather rosy and—somewhat ironically—naively utopian conception of the sonic utopian performative. Although I take great effort to avoid the presumption of a passive listening subject as the phenomenological site for his theorization, I fear my theorization errs dangerously close to an equally critical error: the presumption of an unmarked body as the primary site of theorization. An unmarked body within the space of queer nightspot can be understood to be, as DJ. J.Stevens framed the primarily observed demographic of Legends Nightclub Complex, that of a “gay-white-male.”87 Deleuze’s concept of the Body without Organs (BwO) acts as a crucial reminder of the multiplicity of identities that inhere within the spaces of queer nightspots, and of the fact that that bodies within these spaces are always already marked in ways that affect their ability to move within them.

Turner, Dolan, and O’Grady’s language when engaging with the concept of communitas immediately recalls Deleuze’s concept of the BwO. It bears an almost immediate similarity to communitas in that the two are both predicated on an ideal of smooth space, of seamless, uninhibited connection between—on the one hand, with regard to communitas—temporarily enjoined subjectivities, and—on the other hand, with regard to the BwO—with an entire plane of intensities and flows. However, whereas communitas only envelopes humans into its folds,

BwO’s can and do manifest from any configuration of assemblages of substance, as long as they are swung/swing away from the “surfaces that stratify [them]” towards “the plane [of consistency] that sets [them] free.”88

87 DJ J.Stevens, Interview.

88 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 161.

Stratification for Deleuze is an operation that “forms a vertical, hierarchized aggregate that spans the horizontal lines in a dimension of depth.”89 To stratify is to impose extrinsic meaning, value, or order upon an assemblage—in other words, to arbitrarily impose difference.

As more succinctly stated in Deleuze’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, stratification is the “process of creating hierarchal bodies.”90 Deterritorialization and territorialization are also major philosophical concepts that operate in Deleuze’s theorization of the BwO. He at one point refers to deterritorialization simply as “a coming undone;” and in his entry in The Deleuze Dictionary, Adrian Parr explains it as a “free[ing] up [of] the fixed relations that contain a body all the while exposing it to new organisations.”91 Deleuze’s entry in the

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy succinctly describes territorialization as “the ordering of those bodies in ‘assemblages,’ that is to say, an emergent unity joining together heterogeneous bodies in a ‘consistency.’”92

Deleuze scatters phrases that approach a definition of the BwO throughout A Thousand

Plateaus. Some of his most succinct definitions include:

We come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs [to the concrete elements that constitute the BwO’s assemblage] but to that organization of the organs called the organism.

89 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 433.

90 Daniel Smith and John Protevi,” Gilles Deleuze,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, (Spring 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/

91 Adrian Parr, “Deterritorialisation/Reterritorialisation,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 69.

92 Smith and Protevi, “Gilles Deleuze.”

The organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labour from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences.93

And Daniel Smith masterfully distills all of this with Deleuze’s other ravings on the BwO. Smith explains the concept is “supposed to designate all of those things that an organic body could do, but that it is prevented from doing because of its homeostatic self-regulation processes. The body without organs is the full set of capacities or potentialities of a body prior to its being given the structure of an organism, which only limits and constrains what it can do: it is ‘what remains when you take everything away.’”94

But Deleuze cautions and tempers us: “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit.”95 Already this brings into sharp relief a fundamental difference between the BwO and communitas: the former is always a virtual reality, whereas the latter—as propounded by Turner, Dolan, and O’Grady, Rivera-Servera, and even myself—is discussed as an actual possibility, one smoothly attainable within nightspots, queer or otherwise.96 The BwO…yes, it is always already at the brink of the virtual—or as Deleuze elegantly puts it, every “social formation, or a given stratic apparatus within a formation…has a

BwO ready to gnaw, to proliferate, cover, and invade the entire social field.”97 But in order for the body to manifest—“How do you make yourself a body without organs?”—Deleuze explains

93 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 159.

94 Daniel Smith, “What Is the Body Without Organs? Machine and Organism in Deleuze and Guattari,” Continental Philosophy Review 51 (2018): 106 – 7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9406-0

95 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 150.

96 See: Rivera-Servera, Performing Queer Latinidad, 144 – 50.

97 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 163.

50 that its constitutive elements must become destratified and deterritorialized, in order to render the space they inhabit smooth rather than striated. This “[causes] conjugated flows to pass and escape bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO.”98 In other words, there are always already impediments to the rendering of a body without organs, always strata to be meticulously dismantled that prevent the deterritorialization necessary for the BwO.99

Within the space of queer nightspots, the strata that inhibit the deterritorialization for all the patrons within the space and allows them to smoothly enter into sonic communitas with each other is sometimes made dramatically apparent. Fiona Buckland, for example, discusses several of these strata in her ethnography of gay and lesbian clubs in New York during the 1990’s, such as the very real and—at least still present in my clubbing experience—omnipresent market economies “in which some clubs charge thirty dollars for entry.” She further discusses the perpetuation by club patrons of “economies of desirability based on ideals of beauty, status, race, gender, sexuality, and age.”100

Many of my interlocutors spoke critically about their sense and experiences of both these aspects of economies of desirability, and queer nightspot strata more generally. John, for example, stated that an essential element of a “good night out” for him included “an environment where people don’t judge, and people can be themselves regardless of their attire, gender, and/or their looks.”101 Brodie also intimated a similar sensitivity to economies of desirability, and I would add the result economies of sociability. When responding to my question about his typical

98 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 161.

99 Ibid., 159 & 161.

100 Buckland, Impossible Dance, 4.

101 John, Questionnaire form, March 15, 2019.

51 experience in queer nightspots, he made the point that “Some clubs are more ‘cliquey’ than others, which make them seem less inviting and less like a space to let loose and have fun—as clubs should be.”102 Interestingly, Matthew seems to have spoken in favour of these economies of desirability; or at the very least, he seems to admit that he consciously operates in them when he visits queer nightspots. In response to my inquiry into the essential elements of a good night out, Matthew explained:

Ok. So for me to have a good night out, I wanna be around guys who look like me. So black [guys]…Guys that identify with my sexuality, so gay. I like being around attractive guys that fit my conception of attractibility. And that could be anything; cuz my level of attraction—my men vary very across the board.103

Matthew’s answer took an even more fascinating turn when he began to talk about the musical elements of his “good night out.” Being partly inspired by the depth of his analysis of the musical genres that he tends to gravitate towards or feels repelled within queer nightspots, I thus also would argue that music itself also can operate as a stratum within these spaces. The passage below, taken from my interview with Matthew, seems to indeed suggest that specific genres of music can and do affect his ability to “feel the vibe” and enter into a state of sonic communitas:

Usually cuz I like to start off with a light vibe. Which at the white gay clubs, they usually play like—you know—old school popular hits. Kinda like Whitney Houston. Some of like the typical standards. The majority of it is black artists; but the beats are remixed and it’s not ever the original version. So I usually start off in the white clubs, and then I migrate down to the black—you know. That was in DC. But in NC, I usually migrate to the straight clubs. That’s usually fun with some of the guys I go with. Cuz we just really wanna hear music that we’re close, that we’re closely related to. Which I found out in NC it’s usually the case that that’s in straight clubs…Is this making sense?104

102 Brodie, Questionnaire.

103 Matthew, Interview.

104 Ibid.

Here Matthew reports that the kind of nightspots with which he has the greatest affinity are those that play music genres that he “closely [relates] to.” He expands on this further in response to my question inquiring on how he understood his own role within nightspots:

Well, I’m a dancer; so I like to dance. I’m very flirtatious; it depends on the music. If the music gets whack, that’s when I start to drink. Usually when it’s like Britney Spears and it gets really pop-ish, that’s when I start drinking. But when it gets more twerk-like and ratchet—Hip Hop)—that’s [with] the real kind of music I start to, you know, really hit the dance floor (see Appendix 3 for Matthew’s playlist).105

Given the primacy to which Matthew affords dancing in these spaces as his primary means of engagement in and with the space, we can assume that when he “really hit[s] the dance floor” is the state at which he feels most “in the vibe” or in O’Grady’s clubbing communitas. Conversely, we can likely understand when he “start[s] to drink” as marking the opposite of this “in the vibe” or clubbing communitas state, one in which he finds himself unable or unwilling to enter a positive relation with the music—“when the music gets whack”— the space, and other the patrons therein. And if we can accept both these assumptions, then Matthew’s remarks can be read as articulating a specific prescription of musical genres—hip hop—that, from his subjectivity, have the best potential of deterritorializing the space of a queer nightspot and facilitating the manifestation of sonic communitas. His remarks can also be read as naming musical genres that, again from his own subjectivity, act as territorializing strata within these spaces.

I can recount several instances upon my entrance into a queer nightspot that I felt myself dramatically territorialized by a confluence of the strata Buckland identifies, and I can also attest to musical genres’ ability to similarly act as strata within these spaces. As a young, Non-

105 Matthew, Interview.

American, black, gay man, who is enculturated in predominately African American musical genres (namely hip hop and its more club-oriented sub-genre of trap-music), and marked ethnically by speech-accent (although these two are admittedly not readily perceptible categories of my identity), I have often rubbed against strata within queer nightspots that have inhibited my sense of any kind of communitas. They are most often felt when I go to “white gay clubs.”

Legends, as has been established in comments by DJ J.Stevens and Matthew, is one local spot to which I would attach such a label. Consider the following brief account of my time at Legends on April 21, 2018:

Upon entering, and after paying the $15 cover charge, I was greeted by a crowded zone of activity with its densest points surrounding the bar. I approached—feeling well-dressed and confident—and dug my way through the buzzing mass of bodies to purchase a drink. An electronic-pop music song is playing; my phone tells me its “Talking Body” by Tove Lo and remixed by Kream.106 I don’t like it; I’ve rarely been impressed or moved—figuratively and literally—by electronic-pop music. The man (?) to the right—he seems handsome—is also waiting to order a drink. He seems alone and seems to be enjoying the music. I attempt to move a bit closer to strike up conversation; but someone suddenly pushes through the space between us.

It seems to be his someone, judging from the animated quality of their speech and the amount of body contact they are sharing. I back off and shrink away from the bar to go the main dance floor.

Again, more electronic music. The crowd, on an elevated platform, dance to an electronically-remixed version of Justin Bieber’s “Despacito.” I think to myself: who actually

106 This account is constructed from field notes taken on trip to Legends Nightclub Complex in Raleigh, NC on 21 April 2018.

54 wants a remix like this of this song? Was the original not club-y enough? I notice that all of the individuals within my field of sight are young, and they seem to be enjoying the music. I am dismayed; and I see several other people of colour slumped on the walls or on benches that surround the dancefloor. For a while, I felt excluded, denied my purpose in dressing up and coming out. I felt jealous and frustrated and made a swift retreat to the drag show happening in the Spotlight Theater.

I cannot say for certain if the DJ working the night of the above account had played hip hop that I would have unfolded myself into the music. For indeed, there have been nights where hip hop was the only musical genre played within a queer nightspot, and yet I still did not unfold myself into that music and soundscape. What I can say for certain about the above account is that it portrays my experience with some of the very strata that inhibit the kind of deterritorialization that is necessary for the manifestation of moments of sonic communitas, and thus for the experience of sonic utopian performatives. My self-conscious attention to being “well-dressed” and the disappointment that my spiffy attire was likely wasted on the night belies my cognizance and complicity in perpetuating aspects of Buckland’s economies of desire. And my bewilderment by, and repulsion from the electronic remix of “Despacito” demonstrates the stratifying effect this particular musical choice had on me. The queer nightspot in which every patron does not to some extent experience a stratification of themselves due to the space’s soundscape is likely an unattainable ideal. Notwithstanding the other strata that territorialize these spaces such as entrance fees, dress codes, and economies of desire, it is likely that every nightspot in which there is music will similarly have such a stratifying e/affect on its patrons.

CHAPTER 5

SOUNDING COMMUNITAS; SOUNDING UTOPIA

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5at12y7Oqxg7CmRs1lcpy9 - My “Essential Songs” Playlist

In what follows, I offer two accounts of my trips to the Bar and Legends Nightclub

Complex, respectively. In the former, I recount a moment that I believe can be described as approaching the feeling of a sonic utopian performative. In the latter, I offer an account of my most recent trip to Legends. I did not experience anything here that could convincingly be described as approaching a sonic utopian performative; but—similar to the account given on the preceding page also at Legends—I did experience and navigate strata that operated within this space. Nevertheless, I include both these accounts to give examples of how the theoretical vocabulary and processes that I have developed in this thesis can be practically applied in articulating actual experiences within queer nightspots. Or in other words, everything up to this point has been a working out of theories in the mind. This penultimate chapter presents these theories in the flesh.

28 March 2018

It was on my first trip to the Bar in Durham that I heard and experienced a moment that felt like a sonic utopian performative. The space is small, and there are not many places to sit.

So, for the majority of the night, I quietly sat at the bar and worked through a few beers. This was not idle time however, as I (admittedly not too subtly) tapped field notes into my mobile phone and actively attempted to attune myself to the rhythm and the vibe of the space. It was challenging at first, as many of the songs the DJ selected were older Hip Hop songs with which I did not have much familiarity such as: the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize” (1997), Mase’s “Feel

So Good” (1997), and Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two” (1988). Although this was hip hop—my preferred musical genre to hear when in nightspots, and nightclubs especially—this older selection felt difficult to step into, to unfold myself into it because of my unfamiliarity with it. I remained seated towards the bar and made side-eyes to a handsome man that I noticed had been not too subtly glancing at me for some time. Around 11:30PM, however, about an hour- and-a-half after I had arrived, the DJ began to spin more contemporary songs. And at this point, several more people—black men and women who appeared to be in their late 20’s and early to mid-30’s—filtered into the space. When the DJ played Future’s “Mask Off” (2017)—a song I had recently added to my “Let’s Get Lit!” Spotify playlist that I often listen to before going out—one of two men who had recently taken a space at the bar next to me excitedly exclaimed to his partner, “Now bruh’s playing some bangers!” And indeed, the general activity of the club did seem to positively respond to this point in the DJ’s sudden shift in music selection. More and more people began to flood the dancefloor—a result of the increase in patrons within the space— and the vibe and energy of the space grew excited. I too could not help but be moved, both affectively and physically, once the DJ began to play Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE” and

“DNA” (2017).

Leaving the bar, I reoriented myself to face the now crowded dancefloor. The patrons had formed a large mass; and the swirling neon lights periodically illuminated their sweating faces as

57 they moved, bopped, and swayed rhythmically on the floor. They seemed raucously excited, thrilled to be dancing with each other to such music—more contemporary hip hop and popular songs such as: DJ Khaled and Rihanna’s “Wild Thoughts” (2017), the Migos’ “Bad and Boujee”

(2017), Big Sean’s “I Don’t Fuck With You” (2014), Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” (2015), and

Drake’s “God’s Plan” (2018). Although I did not feel myself moved enough to join them in their kinetic celebration of music—I admittedly am not much of a dancer—I did lean against the wooden railing that surrounds the dance floor and swayed with the music. I was transfixed by the sheer fun it seemed the crowd on the dancefloor was having. People were smiling, laughing, and dancing, all while the bass of the music nourished the space with its energy. I returned to the bar when the DJ played Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” (2014), a surprising and questionable song-choice given the DJ’s hitherto successful cultivation of the soundscape and populating of the dancefloor.107 Several dancers, after pausing and regaining their bearings, also left the floor and retreated to the bar. The DJ, likely noticing this negative response to his song selection, faded

“Fancy” while replacing it with a remix of Blac Youngsta’s “Booty” (2018). This drew several of the patrons back within the vicinity of the dancefloor; they stood around the wooden railing like I had earlier.

But it was not until he DJ played V.I.C’s “Wobble Baby” (2008) that the dancefloor swelled to its hitherto greatest extent. Incredibly, without any verbal instruction, the entire mass of bodies on the dance floor arranged themselves into a somewhat ordered formation. This was, at the very least a sign that some of communitas was forming, albeit one predicated on a communal dancing. They stepped forwards and backwards and side to side according to the

107 “Fancy” was surprising for several reasons: first being the white Australian artist’s controversial history of being accused of appropriating African American culture; second, the DJ rather abruptly cut to this song; and third, all of the artists hitherto being played within the Bar were African American.

58 music of the song. The DJ, perhaps experiencing the same feeling as me, then put on DJ Casper’s

“Cha Cha Slide” (2000).108 As the dancers followed this explicit set of sung instructions, the feeling of the sonic utopian performative persisted. Here, the song itself was acting as a kind of prescription of how the club’s soundscape and should be shaped. All the dancers had to do was follow along. But even more than this, even though I did not participate in the dance, for me as a listener, I became aware of my own relationality, my own internal and external orientation towards the dancers and the other patrons through these songs. That these two “instructional dance songs” (although “Wobble Baby” cannot completely accurately be described as such) seemed to possess the greatest potential that night of triggering a sonic utopian performative was a fascinating moment for me after I returned from the field.

2 March 2019

After finally reaching the ID check inside of the atrium of Legends Nightclub Complex, having waited outside in the cold for what seemed like half an hour (in reality it was likely about ten minutes), I started to feel the surge of excitement within myself that often occurs when I initially start a night out. It was Saturday night; and I had come with a friend who had never been to a “gay club” before. While we waited for our turn to pay the cover charge, I explained to my friend, a fellow young, black, queer man, what he could expect.109 I told him that the music would be quite loud—a disclaimer evinced by the fact that we were already being to be enfolded by the pounding bass seeping out from the floor beneath us and the walls around us—and

108 The singer of the song lists off the instructions for doing a line dance.

109 He did not agree to be interviewed; but did consent to me mentioning him in this account.

59 jokingly offered to loan him one of the earplugs I had brought.110 I told him, rather pedantically, that it would be quite dark and crowded, predictions that were confirmed when we were rubbing shoulders with people just in the entrance line, and by us being able to see the floor beneath us only with difficulty. I also told him, admittedly rather cynically and hyperbolically, that he would be able to count the number of people of colour on his two hands; and I told him that he would likely feel the presence of multiple cliques of people around him.

We stepped into Danceclub at around 11:00PM. Always one to be cognizant of the hypervisibility that can characterize queer nightspots (particularly nightclubs) because of the economies of desirability that operate within these spaces—in other words, the potential to always be looked at and judged—I strode exaggeratedly into the space in front of the bar in the left area of Danceclub, hoping to make somewhat of an entrance. I glanced around to see if this gesture had had any effect; but I quickly became uninvested and gravitated towards the bar to get a drink and to stand with my friend. All of the predictions I had given to friend seemed to have been accurate. As far I could see, we—standing in the increasingly enveloping music of an electronic remix of Whitney Houston songs—were indeed the only people of colour in the area.

We stood for a while longer listening to the mix and idly chatting before my friend expressed a desire to reorient and resituate himself within the space. We then made our way (with some difficulty given the increasingly large amount of people within this zone of Legends) to the right side of Danceclub, where we were greeted by an impressive sight of a mass of people on the elevated dance platform. It took the Shazam application on my mobile phone several tries to identity the song playing; but it eventually reported that an electronic remix of the song “Set the

110 I would highly recommend any reader to invest in earplugs for ethnographic projects within loud spaces such as nightclubs.

Sun” by Klaas was providing the musical framework for the dancer’s kinetic activity upon the platform.

My friend again expressed a desire to move to a different zone; and I, by this point having already lost most of that initial feeling of excitement I felt upon entering Legends, suggested that perhaps we investigate the Spotlight Theater. I suspected there might be a drag show happening that night, and I was relieved to discover that my suspicion was correct. At

12:07 AM, we entered the very packed space and squeezed through the crowd to find standing room. The drag queen on stage at that moment was lip-syncing to Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have

My Money” (2016); and was eliciting fervent cheers and other cries of adulation—“Yass!,”

“Work!,” “Yes girl!”—from the crowd. I glanced around the room and made note of the observable demographics of the crowd: there was a decent mix of both men and women, and I counted several people of colour. My friend and I must have arrived near the end of this queen’s performance, as after one more song by Rihanna, “Don’t Stop the Music” (2007), she traded places with another.

Deterred by the new queen’s first song, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975), my friend asked if we could return to Danceclub at around 12:30AM. To our surprise and bewilderment, upon entering the space, the sounds of an electronic remix of Cardi B’s “Bartier

Cardi” (2018) greeted us. My friend jokingly made a half-hearted attempt to dance with the music—for this electronic-remix version seemed to be twice the tempo of the original song—but quickly ceased and shrugged. “Maybe let’s stay here for a while to see what happens next, I guess?” he shouted in my ears. And so we did. A few more people of colour, mainly a group of black men whom I had noticed in the Patio, had perhaps similarly been attracted to the (highly mediated) sound of hip hop, and were also standing around. At around 12:39AM, the DJ played

Sigala and Paloma Faith’s “Lullaby” (2018); and for the next 15 minutes or so, strung together more electronic-pop music and remixes—all music my friend and I found ourselves either unwilling or unable to unfold ourselves into.

CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION: “A QUEER HOPE”

It has been my goal in this thesis to propose and outline a shift in thinking about the concept of the utopian performative, those fleeting moments in performance that impart upon us a vision or a glimpse of a hope made temporarily tangible. Following in the footsteps of scholars such as Rivera-Servera, I attempted to seek out and listen for traces of these powerful moments in local queer nightspots. Notwithstanding my primary argument in this thesis—that music and sound has the potential to act upon nightspot patrons a certain kind of way that can generate utopian performatives—a more subtle and implicit goal has been to provide analytical language and frameworks for accounting for music’s generative affects within these spaces, particularly those predicated on a sense or feeling of communalism or intersubjectivity. The affects of fun, pleasure, and joy are all phenomena that these kinds of spaces have the potential to engender.

They are certainly feelings and states of being that I have experienced in my many years of clubbing and “going out,” and confronted during my ethnographic work for this thesis. I would argue that any ethnography of nightspots, queer or otherwise, must on some level contend and reconcile with these phenomena.

But I envision this thesis as having an even more subtle and implicit goal, one that situates it within the realm of contemporary politics, both in general and specifically in academia. Reflecting on the scholarship which with I consulted and engaged for this project, it has seemed to me that to me that utopian thinking—and more generally, hope and idealism—are

63 unfairly maligned critical positions to hold within academia. Muñoz in fact positions his entire monograph as an explicit challenge to this pessimistic, anti-utopian position in queer theory, and theory more generally:

The moment in which I write this book the critical imagination is in peril. The dominant academic climate into which this book is attempting to intervene is dominated by a dismissal of political idealism. Shouting down utopia is an easy move. It is perhaps even easier than smearing psychoanalytic or deconstructive reading practices with the charge of nihilism. The antiutopian critic of today has a well-worn war chest of poststructuralism pieties at her or his disposal to shut down lines of thought that delineate the concept of critical utopianism. Social theory that invokes the concept of utopia has always been vulnerable to charges of naiveté, impracticality, or lack of rigor.111

Many of the deeply moving submissions to the 2016 Sounding Board Special Issue of

Ethnomusicology Review, although laden with grief and anguish, still exude rays of strength and hope in their reflections on the horrific massacre of queers of colour that very year at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Consider Gregory Barz’s introspective foreword to the issue, in which he proclaims:

I dance in Uganda. I dance at Pulse. I move through spaces of passion. And my body has unintentionally queered spaces violated by tragedy and violence. The rhythm performed by ethnomusicologists—scholars of bodies engaged in sonic movement—in this volume allows us to consider dancing once again. I for one am not quite ready. But I know that I will eventually get there. And I feel comforted to know that my colleagues will be there with me—with their fantastic tools of ethnography—to welcome me, to guide me, and encourage me back on to the dance floor.112

111 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 10.

112 Gregory Barz, “(Re-)Membering Pulse: A Foreword,” Ethnomusicology Review: Sounding Board, Special Issue (2016), https://www.ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/content/re-membering-pulse-foreword

Feel the rage in Evan Pensis’ indictment of the United States on numerous fronts, and of rainbow capitalism:113

We must listen to this queer rage. We must let this powerful surge of fugitive faggotry guide us to seek out new forms of living and loving in our worlds, where being out will not jeopardize being alive — because forty-nine deaths are no more or less important than the murder of one when you fiercely love them all.114

Although I did not write this thesis as a response to the horror of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, I nonetheless envision this scholarship as being driven by a similar political thrust to

Muñoz, Barz, and Pensis—the preservation of queer hope in the face of strife and tragedy, a hope that a different world is possible where tragedies such as Pulse are no more. For indeed, even though I am writing this paper three years after the decidedly dystopian massacre at the

Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016, imagining and sounding better futures for queer folk still seems as vital as ever.

113 Rainbow capitalism (also known as pink capitalism) refers to the commercialization and cooptation of Pride festivals by major corporate entities. As Emilie Maine more thoroughly explains, “rainbow capitalism is when businesses incorporate queerness and the LGBTQ+ rights movement into their marketing, products, etc. in order to capitalize off the purchasing power that queer people have.” See: Emilie Maine, “What is Rainbow Capitalism? Am I A Part of It?,” MaineEthics, https://maineethics.com/mainemusings/whatisrainbowcapitalism

114 Evan Pensis, “Fugitive Faggotry: Queer Rage and the Limitations of Equality,” Ethnomusicology Review: Sounding Board, Special Issue (2016), https://www.ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/content/re- membering-pulse-foreword

APPENDIX 1: INTERVIEW TEMPLATE FOR DJS

1. How did you get into DJing at gay clubs/establishments that brand themselves as specifically catering to a queer demographic? a. How long have you been doing this? 2. What is your general approach to DJing in gay clubs/queer establishments? a. What kinds of genres do you play? Does the kind of space/the vibe determine the kinds of genres you play? b. What other musical decisions do you make? i. “how much of the song do you play?” c. How do you “read” the crowd or the vibe? i. What does it mean to “work a crowd?” 3. How do you understand: a. …your role as a DJ within the space itself? b. …the role of the crowd? c. …the relationship between yourself and the crowd? d. …music’s function in this dynamic? 4. How do you feel about getting requests? 5. How do you get feedback on your performance? 6. How long have you DJ’d at [the particular nightspot being discussed]? 7. What has been your general approach and typical experience there? a. Can you describe the best night you’ve had as a DJ? b. Can you describe your worst night as a DJ?

APPENDIX 2: INTERVIEW AND QUESTIONNAIRE TEMPLATE FOR NIGHTSPOT PATRONS

1. How long have you been going to night-spaces that brand themselves as queer, or that tend to attract a predominately queer crowd? 2. What is your typical experience in these spaces? 3. What are the essential elements of a “good-night out” at the club for you/Can you describe your “ideal night out?” a. Music? b. Demographics? c. Setting/atmosphere/Vibe? 4. How do you understand your role within the space? a. How do you understand the role of music? b. How do you understand the role of the DJ? c. How do you understand the role of the other people in the space with you? d. How do you understand all of these things acting together? 5. How do you know when you’re feeling “the vibe” of a place? a. How do you know if others are feeling the vibe? Is it important if they do? 6. What queer nightspots (clubs, bars, parties, etc.) have you been to in Raleigh or Durham? a. What has been your general experience in these spaces?

APPENDIX 3: NIGHTSPOT PLAYLISTS

1. Legends Nightclub Complex o “Where Are Ü Now,” Jack Ü, Skrillex, Diplo ft. Justin Bieber, 2015. o “Lullaby,” Sigala and Paloma Faith, 2018. o “Yernin,” Sevyn Street, 2018. o “Summertime Sadness – Cedric Gervais Remix,” Lanna Del Ray and Cedric Gervais, 2013. o “Work,” Rihanna and Drake, 2016. o “Toxic,” Britney Spears, 2003. o “thank u, next,” Ariana Grande, 2019. 2. The Bar o “a lot,” 21 Savage, 2018. o “Pull Over,” Trina, 2000. o “F**k Boy,” Trina, 2015. o “Hypnotize,” The Notorious B.I.G., 1997. o “Beautiful,” Snoop Dogg, Pharrell Williams, and Uncle Charlie, 2005. o “Truffle Butter,” Nicki Minaj, Drake, and Lil Wayne, 2015. o “Feel So Good,” Mase, 1997. o “Going Bad,” Meek Mill ft. Drake, 2018.

APPENDIX 4: NIGHTSPOT PATRONS’ PLAYLISTS

1. Matthew o “Supermodel (You Better Work),” RuPaul, 1993. o “Nobody’s Supposed to Be Here – Dance Remix,” Deborah Cox and Hex Hector. o “My Love is Your Love – Dance Vault Mix” Whitney Houston, Dyme, 2006. o “No Matter What They Say,” Lil’ Kim, 2000. o “How Many Licks?,” Lil’ Kim ft. Sisqo, 2000. o “Crush On You – Remix,” Lil’ Kim ft. Lil’ Cease, 1997. o “Trap Star,” City Girls, 2018. o “Take Yo Man,” City Girls, 2018. o “Good Form,” Nicki Minaj ft. Lil Wayne, 2018. o “Lookin’ Ass,” Young Money and Nicki Minaj, 2014. o “GTFO,” Mariah Carey, 2018. 2. Bernard o “Truffle Butter,” Nicki Minaj, Drake, and Lil Wayne, 2015. o “Twerk,” City Girls ft. Cardi B, 2018. o “No Problem,” Chance the Rapper ft. Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz, 2016. o “Booty Me Down,” Kstylis, 2013. o “Back That Azz Up,” Juvenile, Lil Wayne, and Mannie Fresh, 1998. o “Bring it Back,” Travis Porter, 2012. o “Bend Ova,” Lil Jon and Tyga, 2014. o “Aww Ladies,” Travis Porter and Tyga, 2012. 3. Arthur o “APESHIT,” The Carters, 2018. o “Twerk,” City Girls ft. Cardi B, 2018. o “Look But Don’t Touch,” Empire Cast and Serayah, 2016. o “Money,” Cardi B, 2018. o “Chun-Li,” Nicki Minaj, 2018. o “Take Yo Man,” City Girls, 2018. o “Act Up,” City Girls, 2018. o “Nice For What,” Drake, 2018. 4. Aldwyn o “Backin’ It Up,” Pardison Fontaine ft. Cardi B, 2018. o “Nice For What,” Drake, 2018. o “Bad and Boujee,” Migos ft. Lil Uzi Vert, 2017. o “REEL IT IN,” Aminé ft. Gucci Mane, 2018. o “Rake it Up,” Yo Gotti and Nicki Minaj, 2017. o “Lemon – Remix,” N.E.R.D. and Rihanna, ft. Drake, 2018. o “She Bad,” Cardi B and YG, 2018. o “ATM,” J. Cole, 2018.

69 o “X,” 21 Savage ft. Future, 2016. o “679,” Fetty Wap ft. Remy Boyz, 2015. o “Roses,” The Chainsmokers, 2015. o “Love Like We Used To – Remix,” Party Pupils, 2017. o “I Like It,” Cardi B, Bad Bunny, and J Balvin, 2018.

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