Over this long, long, long time of being quarantined, I have been trying to think of what makes me the happiest in this life. I first think of the easy things like food, sleeping, friends, family, and my partner. Then I continued to dig deeper, and I thought of music. Music is single-handedly the most influential element my life has had in my life. Since I was young, I would use music to process emotions I didn’t understand, sometimes I still do that now. Now I am here in college, heard as a radio personality for WHSK, The Huskies. For years I got to mix my professional skills with my passion of sharing music with people. After some time, I decided I wanted to vamp up my time on air so I bought a Traktor kontrol s2 Mk3.
Now I am home with my mixing board and missing out on one of my favorite aspects of music – festivals. Ever since college I have dove deep into the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) scene and have been missing it terribly since the pandemic has begun. My favorite DJ goes by the name of Bassnectar and before the pandemic, I basically devoted all my free time and money into getting to see him live. Once an artist gets big enough, they can start to create their own festivals which we call a curated event. Bassnectar holds several of these curated events every year as well as attends large scale festivals in between. Personally, I love attending curated events more because they feel much more intimate and special. Event Arcitecture has some comments on this which I will display in an image. See here for reasons to go to a curated event over a large scale festival (i.e.Electric Forest):
Over the years, I have made it to many of his events. Along with the benefit of seeing incredible live music, you get to travel the country as well. We both absolutely cherish music and it is such a gift that we get to travel for it too. It has been so much fun traveling with my partner for the past three years and it’s all thanks to us joining the EDM community. Here are some places I have been to recently due to seeing a Bassnectar curated event.
After reminiscing about the times I’ve had while listening to music, I am also forced to think towards the future as well. Because festivals inherently bring a large crowd (see graph below), it is a worry that we won’t see them again in the near future. Nearly all festivals I am aware about have already cancelled Summer 2020, but when will they come back?
I went online to do some investigating and found a very interesting article written by Mike Margolies (2020) called “Biden RAVE Act Legislation From 2003 Continues to Impede Risk Reduction Efforts”. Seeing that our now Democratic runner for 2020 election, Joe Biden, has been basically against raving since 2003, probably earlier too, did not feel too good. But I’m not going to be one of those people who get all of their information from headlines, so I continued to read further. The article mentions that, “[w]hile the global pandemic has forced the cancellation and postponement of many events throughout the world, the pent up desire to party may increase the need for risk reduction measures once festivals finally open up their gates.” (“Biden RAVE Act Legislation From 2003 Continues to Impede Risk Reduction Efforts”). It goes on to quote Biden with,”’If I were governor of my state or mayor of my town, I would be passing new ordinances relating to stiff criminal penalties for anyone who holds a rave, the promoter, the guy who owns the building. I would put the sun of a gun in jail’” (“Biden RAVE Act Legislation From 2003 Continues to Impede Risk Reduction Efforts”).
And that’s where I stopped reading this article. I love and miss festivals too much to see this much negativity.
Let’s move onto a more positive outlook, shall we?
This pandemic has given me, and I’m sure everyone else, a great deal of time to think. Rather than hunting for information about when everything will be back, it’s important to remember what we have now. Right now, I have all this free time to practice what I love so much, DJing. Although I can’t see all of my inspirations DJing live, I can work to be the best version of myself until I can again. Music is what brings me the most happiness and I’m lucky to be able to have the experiences I did and the ability to listen and make music everyday.
It’s so important to maintain a positive outlook while the world is going through such a negative time. But we can do it!
Bloomsburg Infographics 