From the Bottoms Up: Grassroots Organizing Among Berlin’s Activist Rave Collectives

Description

Within weeks of Berlin’s first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, the Emergency Nightlife Fund had been founded, funded, and was already distributing funds directly into the hands of the city’s most vulnerable nightlife workers. By the end of 2020, the fund had redistributed €85,000 to 350 nightlife workers. This fund was the work of Berlin Collective Action, a newly-formed consortium of 40+ local activist organizations, of which the majority were collectives of queers, trans/gendervariant folks, sex workers, racialized groups, refugees and migrants—and nearly all of them directly involved in Berlin’s rave and club scenes. Why were these particular musical communities leading this community care campaign for an entire economic sector, and how did they do it so quickly?
Seemingly in response to the rapid mainstreaming and concomitant white-/cishetero-washing of popular electronic music during the “EDM boom,” the 2010s saw the emergence of numerous rave collectives seeking to “reclaim dance music” and to re-center their local electronic music scenes around Black and Brown, queer and trans communities. Explicitly political in stance while also committed to local community-building, these collectives are notable for their adoption of principles, practices, and discourses from "grassroots" organizing and activism.

This paper will provide a survey of these collectives, focusing on Berlin as an international hub for EDM as well as queer nightlife, while also situating this city’s activist rave collectives within emergent translocal networks of like-minded collectives. Although music scholars have studied the role of music in/for protest, grassroots organizing, and activism (e.g., Redmond 2013; Kutschke & Norton 2013; Manabe 2015; Peddie 2017; Orejuela & Shonekan 2018), few have studied the role of grassroots organizing in/for music collectives, scenes, and communities. This talk will consider the impact of broader political shifts in the last decade, such as the intensification of right-wing violence, the vernacularization of activist discourses and practices, and hashtag-focused movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #DJsForPalestine—as well as the devastating impact of COVID-19 and the efforts of these collectives to care for the communities they serve.

Period	12 Nov 2022
Event title	Society for Ethnomusicology: Annual Meeting
Event type	Conference
Conference number	2022
Location	New Orleans, United States, LouisianaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International