Major Lazer Brings "Pon De Floor" To Hollywood
Comments (1)
Photo courtesy of Creative Commons
The idea of jumping up and down in a sticky mass of people and rave “candy” bracelets dotting my arms has never appealed to me. But, when I attended the Major Lazer show Friday night on a whim, I gamely put on face glitter and a metallic mini-skirt to experience the eccentric Diplo/Switch collaboration.
Set at the Avalon - a burgundy bordello-style venue in Hollywood with low lighting and a relatively young crowd - ravers crammed onto the dance floor for three acts of DJs. Without knowing anything about electro-house music, even I could identify the captivating appeal of Major Lazer.
The show featured seamless song transitions in an endless stream of sound, and the definitively scratchy “Major Lazer” hype track kept the energy level high. Of the most recognizable songs was "Pon De Floor," which video features a Jamaican-style dance called "daggering" where a couple simulates sex moves to the beat.
DJ Them Jeans and another act also performed in what felt like a blur of repetitive beats - mostly the remixed "Pursuit of Happiness" track and songs with a similar style to that of "Pon de Floor."
Music blasted from 9:30 p.m. to 4 a.m., and while it’s appealing in theory to dance until the sun comes up, Avalon’s late-night shenanigans are questionable at best.
After Major Lazer’s set, the atmosphere quickly moved from fun with a dash of sketch, to three parts sketch and one part marimba. The average age increased by about 20 years and fights broke out on the dance floor between amped-up shirtless guys.
While sitting in a large balcony, I saw a bouncer shine his flashlight on a group of people in various states of undress, scrambling to find their tops and presumably take the party elsewhere.
When I located my group of friends and staggered out of the club, the beat was still ringing in my ears. Discussing paying the cab driver felt like an abstract concept after six hours with nothing but the concreteness of the pulsing beat forcing my body to feel something, reluctant raver or not.
Reach Elizabeth here.
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Comments
So sick of people who have no clue about the scene going to one party and thinking they can even come close to accurately portraying what happened. This was not a "rave" first of all (it's a club night). The term is perverted even by what is technically still considered a rave, massive events like Electric Daisy Carnival, but that's another story. Second, to call Major Lazer "electro-house" is to pigeon-hole them into a category that barely scratches the surface of the gamut of dance music genres they span as an act. It would probably be worth mentioning that this was their biggest crowd since Wolfgang Gartner (a true electro-house act) and that Diplo is unquestionably one of the most influential figures in American pop music over the past decade, having ushered in M.I.A. and helping catapault his label Mad Decent to the level of uber-tastemaker status. Switch produced most of M.I.A.'s second album and is a dance music juggernaut in his own right.
You clearly went in biased against the scene and uninformed on the music. How could you possibly call this "reporting"? And lastly, to tag this post with "daggering", which is a dancing style in Jamaica where a male dancer pokes or "daggers" a female dancer with his erect penis, is just shameless hit-mongering (despite the ragga influences in Major Lazer's sound, which were, ironically, left out by the author).
Once again, shallow reporting contributes to the negative image of a scene that is too easy of a target for media outlets that should send people who know the music and have experience in the scene or stay away altogether. Would you send someone to cover an election who had no idea who the candidates were, their stances, or their backgrounds? I think not, no clue why the same principle doesn't apply here. Listing it as a column would at least soften the blatantly opinionated stance.