Club Status
In Cahoots
Thursday, Aug. 2
For the love of God, people in the dance-music scene need to standardize their terms because if I have to listen to one more conversation about whether trance is faster than house or house is faster than trance, I'm going to eat my glowstick and then hit myself upside the head with my fantastic glittery platform wedge shoes.
Okay, fine, I don't own a glowstick or fantastic glittery platform wedge shoes, or a trendy urban cowboy hat, or a saucy G-string that I wear high and tight so that it peeks out of the top of my shiny, hip-hugging designer jeans. While we're at it, I no longer have a curfew, and I no longer travel around with a pack of giddy, nubile, sexed-up 18-year-olds, and so, due to all these areas in which I'm sorely lacking, I felt quite out of place at In Cahoots in Fullerton, which, it might interest you to know, is an 18-and-up club. Boy, the 18 and ups have a lot of energy! And they don't mind waiting in line! For a long time! And they don't even seem to mind when stressed-out security guards bark orders at them and treat them like a pack of unruly cows being held in place by an elaborate three-dimensional cobweb of thin rope. (Note to self: Or was it—perhaps—thick twine? Or really thick string? Or really, really thin cable?) Maybe it's because they were so recently in high school, where everyone's always barking orders at you. But I've been out of high school for eight whole years, and so I don't take kindly to the armed-security-guards-holding-the-unruly-cows-at-bay treatment. Thankfully, someone knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who lifted up the twine for us and let us in. I swear to God there were fewer people inside than outside. Not that the inside was empty—it was teeming with packs of the aforementioned scantily clad clubgoers—but it was nothing like the Meaty Cheesy Boys personal appearance going on outside. (All right, fine, the outside wasn't like a Meaty Cheesy Boys personal appearance; it was more like a Mariah Carey concert—if by that I mean there were uncountable buttloads of people—but don't you think the Meaty Cheesy Boys are funny? Like really funny?). It was all very funky high school dance inside, including that noxious overabundance of bee smoke so thick and bracing it took a couple of minutes for normal visual and respiratory functions to resume. I made my way through the cloud to the DJ booth, where Zachary Loczi, a.k.a. DJ Loczi, was seamlessly cutting up an OutKast song with bits of Snoop Dogg. It was cool and all, and I was pretty fascinated by watching him and trying to figure out how he did it, but I was also confused because a couple of days earlier, he'd told me that many of the good DJs in OC find themselves torn between playing what they want to play—slower, jazzier house music—and playing what the audience wants to hear—faster, cheesier trance.
“He has to do a rap set because he's the resident DJ,” said Eric, who's my Yoda in the world of club music and club politics. “He'll do a house set soon and then start building into trance.”
“Awesome!” I said because it was really loud and that seemed to be the appropriate response. The weird thing is that I found my leg involuntarily keeping time to the music. And not in some toe-tapping way, because the music was far too fast for that. Instead, it was like a fidgety leg-shimmy kind of thing. I think my leg wanted me to dance! It was begging for it! But I wasn't about to dance. I was going to keep my one mature leg and my other party leg planted right in front of the DJ booth until I figured out how all this DJ madness was created. And for a while, I was pretty into it, watching as DJ Loczi turned the knobs and contoured the sound and did a million things that if you were on the dance floor allowing your jiggy legs to lead you around like some kind of dancing fool, you wouldn't even notice at all, not one bit. You'd just think it sounded really good. But that's the point. You're supposed to lose yourself on the dance floor. If you notice the DJ at all, it's usually because he's fucking up, not matching beats or interrupting the flow or just basically doing something jarring that makes you stop dancing. At least that's what my left leg told me. My right leg told me that if I ever wanted to fit in with all these people who were born in the 1980s, I'd better get a glowstick and some glittery platform shoes. (Alison M. Rosen)
