Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture
I have a thing for scenes that I had no part in. Enter Frank Owen’s Clubland: a book detailing the 90s club/rave scenes in New York and South Beach and their subsequent fall(s). Published in May 2003, this book has little to no relevance to my life – perfect.
Camp and Criminals
Subjectively, I loved the book. Everyone I’d seen fictionalized in Party Monster was a real-life character, it detailed the intimate details of the scene, and it has the most camp chapter titles (“The One-Eyed Don”, “Slim and Shady”) I’ve seen outside fiction. It read very fast, the litany of characters had their names (thankfully) repeated often, and I would certainly recommend it to anyone interested in celebrity criminals (not to be confused with criminal celebrities).
“Laboratories of style”?!
Objectively, it’s a different story. Owen is probably best known as a journalist for the Village Voice and as best I can tell, this was his first and only full-length work. So it makes sense that it suffers from continuity problems, thesaurus searching, and a pretty weak closer paragraph:
Nowadays, after too many nights seeing club kids’ inhumanity to fellow club kids, I’m more likely to view discos as institutions constructed on cruelty. Club culture is supposed to be about community, self-expression, and joyous release through music. Nightclubs are meant to function as laboratories of style where new trends and modes of being are spearheaded. They’re not supposed to come with a body count.
This is after 300+ pages of telling us about the scene’s intricate involvements with organized crime, out of control drug dealing, murder, and government corruption. After pretty explicitly proving that club culture and their discos, as defined in the book, WERE constructed on cruelty, it would have been painfully awkward if the scene DIDN’T come with a body count. And “laboratories of style”? Really?
I Still Like It
But back on the objective side, with everything taken into context (the author is a journalist, there are far too many people involved for any to emerge as a protagonist or antagonist, it tries to document the collapse of the club scene in two cities within 313 pages, it’s about a scene I wasn’t involved in), I have to say that I enjoyed reading it. From a presentation-of-fact point of view, this works perfectly.
PS: Peter Gatien, the man whose trial Clubland devoted a lot of pages to, is opening a new club in Toronto.
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