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Peace, love, unity and respect. Isn’t that the basis of raves and shows? According to those who don’t understand why we rage, it isn’t – it’s some drugged up orgy. I’m assuming that by now you all have read or at least heard about the hype surrounding the LA Times article entitled “A fatal toll on concertgoers as raves boost cities’ income”. I for one, find it completely ridiculous. In the beginning of the article, the writer talks about how the amount of people attending these shows has greatly increased: “their audiences are no longer a few hundred revelers but tens of thousands”. Simply based on the fact that there are more people, there are clearly, consequently, more deaths. Take tens of thousands of people doing something as safe as eating lunch. There is obviously a greater chance of some of them dying than of someone dying in a crowd of one hundred people.

I would be behind the times to simply write a reaction or rebellion post against this article, so I wanted to focus more on the “why” aspect of all of this. Why is the rave scene being attacked? It has been around for decades, so it doesn’t make sense that it is suddenly getting worse coverage than ever before. When considering the fact that it is becoming more mainstream now, however; it does. Raves used to be something that were pushed out of the minds of the general public. There were not as many people attending, social medias weren’t as advanced, or even existing yet, hence, the public wasn’t bombarded with hearing about shows. Kaskade talks about how “no one knows who we are”. The public only sees this becoming mainstream and they select the few who chose to make bad decisions at shows as the model for what all of us do. Due to the fact that those who don’t rave don’t know who we are, or understand us, it is hard for them to see passed these incidents. As outraged as I was by the LA Times article, Kaskade’s statement put it slightly more into perspective for me. If the only thing that the public is hearing about our shows is that teens are over-dosing and dying, it at least makes it slightly more understandable that they are giving our scene a negative connotation. It is their fault for looking at the scene with a closed mind, but it is also our fault for not informing them more on health and safety measurements that are being put into place. This is part one of a two-part segment. The second part is looking at a few articles which talk about the good for our scene that has come from the LA Times article.