Club Lives
by Brian Hioe
I’m a political reporter who writes on Taiwanese politics mostly, but my other hobby is underground electronic music. Though I have incorporated DJing into my “branding” as a journalist, I DJ only occasionally. I had a stint as the managing editor of a short-lived Hong Kong electronic music publication. I even appeared in Netflix’s rather unfortunately orientalist take on Asian nightlife, Midnight Asia. Reading Emily Witt’s memoir, Health and Safety: A Breakdown, I felt a disquieting sense of parallel to my own life.
The book describes Witt’s experiences in the underground clubbing scene during the early years of Donald Trump’s rise in politics. The scene provides something like a means of escape in this narrative, even as the world seems to be coming to pieces around us.
For a long time, the club scene was the world I inhabited outside of my life in politics. I viewed it in rather a utopian light, as a space on the margins, beyond capitalist consumption—a political space, but one that offered glimpses of what could be, and maybe even the prefigurative glimpse of a future society. This isn’t a new observation, obviously. Lots of people have described the club or rave as a temporary autonomous zone at a remove from society, in which people who would ordinarily never meet come together in an atmosphere of mutual unity and respect that doesn’t exist on the outside.
But there’s all manner of unhealthy people and unhealthy behavior in clubs. Some go clubbing to try to lose themselves in music, dance, alcohol, and drugs—to drown out their problems in daily life. In a disintegrating world, the club looks ever more attractive as a means of idealized flight from a harsh capitalist reality.
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