People need a space to let the fuck go.
And people wanna have fun. I’m talking like the nights that you talk about for the rest of your life. The transformative experiences through music and connection to people that you cannot describe unless you were there.
They crave it, they yearn for it, they pay $200 for a Coachella ticket for it. If it’s not at a festival, it’s in some underground warehouse somewhere, you know. People will find it. They will find their place in which they can own their own life.
I’m honored to create that space where it’s possible for people to experience pure joy.
That party place is actually one of the safe spaces where people from all different religions, backgrounds, races, socioeconomic backgrounds can come together and it doesn’t really matter.
If you know the words to a song, we’re gonna jump up and down together and rap it together.
When we talk about marginalized communities, especially talking about people of color, talking about LGBTQIA, that music scene has always kind of been that safe space of community gathering.
Think about NYC early voguing, New Orleans bounce music, Miami bass music, New York dancehall, West Coast early funk hip-hop.
It’s this ownership in your people. It’s allowing for joy to exist amidst the bullshit. These scenes, these subcultures, they’re created out of a need for people to be represented, for people to own something in a time in which you’re dealing with feeling like everything owns you.
Music is the one thing that kind of cuts through all of the bullshit and can get people to just be people in that moment.
In different cultures it’s totally OK to dagger, to flip, to whine. In other cultures it’s not OK to touch at all.
When we bring in the conversation of consent we have to talk about culture.
And we have to dissect each culture and see OK, what’s normal, what’s acceptable, what’s leading to a dangerous situation primarily for women.
We have to kind of get into the psychology, and then we have to teach young men and women how to read each other’s behavior on both sides, and how to respect each other’s behavior on both sides.
In my Buddhist thinking, I wanna say you don’t have control over the crowd, over shit. But you do have the power to connect. And that’s what it is. It’s not control, it’s connection.
You only feel heightened energy when you can share heightened energy. It’s really all about that exchange.
You can’t be up on a pedestal, and everyone is standing still, looking at their watch and their phone like, “So you wanna go get some food?”
It’s really all about that exchange.
But when you are in that moment, oh my god, yeah, you feel like you can float on water, you feel like human connection is the answer to every problem in the world. It’s all the euphoric vibes because you’re making magic happen together.