I'M SICK OF THE RANTS ABOUT RAVES

For a city fond of touting its "world-class" status, Toronto's starting to
look as backwoods and parochial as the redneck town that banned rock 'n'
roll and dancing in the old Kevin Bacon flick, Footloose.

More loudmouth sloganeering from soundbite-addicted cops and politicians,
and the faithful, if typically uninformed and miscontextualized
reproduction thereof by local media have once again placed Toronto's rave
and club scenes under unwarranted attack.

What the hell is wrong with this town? Flush with top-shelf production and
DJ talent and a large, enthusiastic audience for electronic dance music,
Toronto has one of the healthiest dance scenes on the planet. You can raise
a convincing case, too, that it's rave's epicentre in North America, with
an army of as many as 50,000 partygoers at its disposal.

Old, inferiority-complex-stricken Toronto is a major player in a global
phenomenon; here's an area, folks, where we can genuinely claim to be a
world-class city. Yet in the eyes of police and dubious cultural
visionaries like Mayor Mel Lastman, this town's penchant for nightlife is
merely evidence that we're plunging headlong into disaster.

Four fatal shootings at after-hours clubs in three months and mounting
alarm on the part of police at the size of the city's drug trade (why did
it take the cops a good decade longer than the rest of us to discover
Ecstasy, anyway?) have, understandably, got people worried Toronto is
turning into Detroit.

But the recent establishment of a police/government strike force targeting,
as Lastman put it, "illegal after-hours clubs and raves" and establishments
where criminal activities are taking place is merely a PR exercise aimed at
satisfying a nervous public's calls to "do something."

The alarmist political and police rhetoric makes no distinction between
booze cans or known criminal hotspots and, say, the bulk of the city's
perfectly legal, typically trouble-free after-hours clubs and raves.
They're all, as far as Mayor Mel is concerned, "dens of drugs and guns,"
and the strike force feels suspiciously like a thinly veiled excuse to
hassle anybody who legally provides people with a venue in which to
congregate outside "respectable" hours.

The city's news outlets, as usual, have only contributed to the witchhunt
mentality by splashing headlines about "killer clubs" (Toronto Sun) and
hyperbolic references to "years of murder and mayhem in after-hours clubs"
(National Post) across the page.

What's more, most of the reporting only hammers home yet again how
infuriatingly little understanding most of the mainstream media here have
of the scene. Despite its size and profile, it's still youthful enough and
sufficiently "underground" to exceed the comprehension of most reporters,
the lion's share of whom know only as much about clubbing or raving as the
misleading clippings they dig up for research.

This is why Toronto's beleaguered rave community - which has bent over
backward to avoid any potential trouble with either the law or the media
since last summer, when three unfortunate, allegedly drug-related deaths
prompted the last flare-up of anti-party hysteria - has been dragged back
into the fray.

News stories keep referring to "rave clubs," for instance, yet there's no
such thing. While raves might sometimes occur in hired club spaces, they
are one-off events; an extended-hours club night is not automatically a
rave. Still, as one local promoter lamented to me last week, "anything that
goes past 2:01 a.m. is a rave to them."

What's more, most of the large parties so often referred to in stories
about Mel's war on illegal after-hours clubs and raves are, in fact, legal.

According to the local papers and CityTV, raves are mass orgies of sin
where kids wade, blank-eyed, through piles of filth, permanently
brain-damaged by "pulsating music" and preyed upon by dark overlords
hellbent on hooking them on drugs.

But if the media would get over its stubborn insistence on demonizing the
events, it might realize that rave promoters - just like the folks bringing
good, old-fashioned, wholesome entertainment like Crosby, Stills, Nash and
Young to town - are businessmen.

There are hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake in major parties, and
it's in the promoters' best interests to obey the law and avoid getting
shut down. After all, their livelihoods are at stake.

They're trying hard not to screw it up. So why does Toronto feel the need
to screw it up for them?