Sometimes I take our music and our community for granted. By community I mean the people that attend electronic nights and people that all share the common love for electronic music, whatever sub-genre.
Every once in a while I am reminded of how lucky I am to have seen the light. This weekend brought two amazing experiences that put things into perspective. I would like to share these with you:
1) I was leaving my Thursday night residency on the main club strip in Vancouver and recieved a call from a girlfriend. She was at a popular ‘top 40′ bar and wanted me to stop by and say hello. I was walking up towards the lineup and spotted her so I started to waive. As she was waiving back some girl comes flyinging out of the club doors, trips over the velvet ropes and bails on the sidewalk in front of a crowd of people. One of the bouncers had pushed her out and she was so drunk that she fell head first over the rope and onto the sidewalk.
The girl got back up and went at the bouncer. She was trying to fight him by kicking him and swinging her arms wildly at him. She got tangled up in the ropes again and fell face first onto the sidewalk.
She lay there crying in front of a hundred people and then got back up and tried to fight the bouncer again. The bouncer dropped her this time and she cracked her head open on the sidewalk and started bleeding. The police were called and she was also trying to fight the police who dropped her again.
Meanwhile some guys in the line got into an argument and started fighting and ended up hitting a girl by accident. I ended up grabbing my friend (who was crying by this point because of having to watch a girl crack her head open on the sidewalk) and quickly went home.
The point of this story is that I have never seen anything like this happen at a house night. I play at some of the biggest and best clubs in Vancouver and I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fight. This speaks a lot about the people that are attending and also a lot about the vibe that the music sets.
2) I got a call from another friend that I haven’t seen in a long time. She called me to tell me some terrible news; doctors think she might have a serious form of cancer. Hearing this destroyed my mood and when she told me I was just heading out the door to go on a boat cruise where all of my friends were expecting me. She told me to go because she wanted to be alone and I went to the cruise.
At first I wasn’t my usual self. I was upset and bummed out. I was standing at the back of the boat and the sun cracked through the clouds. The sun was shining so perfectly on the DJ, on the beautiful people dancing and smiling and Vancouver, the most beautiful city in the world, was highlighting the scene in the background. At that moment I remembered / realized that house music is a celebration of life. The music was so warm and it was so great to see all 500 people on the boat smiling. Parties like this are about people getting together to enjoy each other and to be greatfull for being alive and house music is the same for me as well.
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Great people, a celebration of life: House Music.
