MYTHOS 2020

A NIGHTCLUBBING EXPERIENCE

It’s 2011, I’m fourteen and I go to a club for the first time. Don’t worry, I went legally. The occasion—a small showcase for emerging British pop star Pixie Lott. I was rambunctious as any stan would be, before what “stan culture” as we know existed, and stood in line brainstorming chants that professed my undying love for Pixie. The line outside the club was an undeniably convivial one, fans, all in the infancy of our teenagehood, exchanged phone numbers, added each other on Facebook, and forged friendships based solely on the intensity of our fanhood. Our friendships emerged from the preponderance of lyrics we could memorize, how many unreleased demos we had downloaded onto our iPods via Megashare, the great extents we did to express our fanhood. 

By the time the doors opened to the club (which has since undergone various reincarnations), we had forged lifelong friendships, at least we thought so. The club was not big, looking back. But back then, it felt magnificent. I started to recognize the bar stools, the gleaming poles, the dormant lighting fixtures, paraphernalia I thought was only reserved in the mythology of my high school seniors. These were the things of fairytales. Me and my newfound friends made our way to the foot of the stage, a measly stanchion separating us from Pixie. The show began and the blonde and bubbly popstar made her appearance. We belted our hearts out, at times, drowning out her voice completely. In one of the songs, she reached out to me, our fingers making first contact. This was the start of my nightclubbing experience. 

Welcome to MYTHOS 2020.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/47XJEzOJ1FkkPP8rIfmyZm?si=PLN2JeWLTkW1CBUf7RPDtA

AIM: Stage a virtual nightclubbing experience that creates space for the marginalized. This is a space that will use the mechanisms of utopia that are embedded in the club space, but subvert them to make Black, Brown, queer, gender-non-conforming, disabled, poor, colonized arbiters of joy, engineers of euphoria, guardians of a paradigm that they had once created.

The virtual nightclub is inspired by Grace Jones’ seminal album of the same name. I want MYTHOS2020 to be an experiment in joy, a term black-feminist and performance artist Gabrielle Civil coins. A way for us to see how we can make space for joy in a time that seems relatively absent of it. My experiences of growing up in Singapore’s nightlife culture came to my mind as visceral and unmediated moments of joy. It’s the dance music I grew up listening to that foreshadowed my 5am nights in the club. It’s dance music that has brought so much joy to groups on the periphery—a hopeful helplessness. In this time of dissonance, maybe joy is the only thing we can mark as certain. Still, I wonder….

Why should we look for joy when we could be making space for humanity? Joy has felt like a privilege, of late. And for many, joy is a luxury that isn’t remotely affordable. I hope that this project, however momentary, can help make your joy feel justified. 

Dance music cannot be separated from the dance-floors it pulsates in. The sexist architecture of club design has used rape culture and hyper-toxic masculinities as blueprints, further subjecting women and other marginalized groups to harm in “the name of capitalism”.

My friends and I grew up in Singapore’s nightlife, gaining an education in sneaking out of our houses, free-drink finessing, tactfully dancing in skin-hugging bodycon dresses, swindling taxi money home from men that were three times our age. We grew up on the dancefloor, for better or for worse, and saw all parts of the epileptic lights. Upon looking back on those years, one of my girl friends laughs, but then quickly pauses, “It was actually really fucked up”. And that, it was. 

From having to exchange a free entry to the club with the non-consensual caresses of an anonymous club promoter to being denied entry because you hadn’t dressed “sexy” enough, I watched as my friends were reduced to material tropes of femininity: their clothes, their sex appeal, their coyness, their straightness. 

Within the masculinist gaze of the disco, there was little room for them to be seen outside of a paradigm of capitalist consumption: they were rendered products of the club. As we’ve grown over, reclaiming the dancefloor is something we’ve done, rather unknowingly. 

As a young queer boy in a socially conservative country like Singapore, the clubs I attended with my friends presented a different kind of violence: an overstimulated reminder of an omnipotent heterosexuality. 

I recall several photos taken by club photographers with a familiar scene. The subject: three clusters of sweaty bodies devouring each other, their drinks fly above their heads, and the club lighting makes them look better than they actually do. Off centre, at the edge of focus is The Lone Gay Boy, eyes closed, hip-popped, arms resting on a phantom waist, imagining he was in the embrace of a partner they might never have. Though the club was a liberating form of rebellion in many ways, it was also one of the most isolating spaces. What was The Lone Gay Boy to do when his friends were experiencing their first kisses, first dry-humps, first free drinks? Where did the Lone Gay Boy fit into the social architecture of the nightclub? 

For a long time, the club made me long to have the oppressive gaze that my girl friends had endured. Didn’t I deserve to be desired too? I came to realize that I had internalized the misogyny of commercial clubs, dangerously side-stepping murders on the dancefloor. 

In Singapore, homosexuality is still criminalized by law, a law that has been a centripetal point in Singapore’s social policy. Local LGBTQIA activists have made vocal efforts in the past few years, urging the government to repeal the law, Section 377A. So far, these appeals have been met with like a steadfast parent; calm and unwaveringly in opposition.

Queer culture in Singapore has thus operated in a liminal space—a veneered modernity and a subversive resistance. Underneath the furnished canopies of Singapore’s gay clubs, Tantric, Taboo, Rainbow Bar, are repressed ecosystems of connection: gay friendships only made possible via Grindr, first kisses at 30, economies of autonomy, experimentations in drag, explorations into a deep unknown. The gay club is emerges from Singapore’s post-colonial condition, an axis of an ever-growing city-state caught between the indigenous, immigrant and imperial cultures that is is composed of. The gay club in Singapore could be a revolutionary propellant of social progression. For now, it acts as a vessel for a homonationalist agenda, while stifling the queer bodies that inhabit it.

both nightclubbing and self-isolated bedroom-dancing are privileged activities—the access and politics of the club are embedded with racist, sexist, and rigidly classist codes that segregate the “productive” and “unproductive” members of society. My foray into Singapore’s nightlife wouldn’t have been facilitated were it not for my privilege and only highlighted who was allowed in and who was kept out. 

Dancefloors and accompanying dance music were not conceived with the bourgeois iterations and nationalist aspirations of my upbringing, however. Dance music as we know it was birthed across communities and geographies, evolving from Motown records in basements, lofts and bars in various American cities. Dance and disco was unapologetically resistive, with the genres directly blooming from the black power movements of the Civil Rights era and the Stonewall uprisings of 1969. Black and Latinx people fashioned disco and proto-pop styles in an effort to battle the ongoing injustice against their communities. Disco was a political endeavour as much as it was a musical one-it opened up spaces for black and queer joy which was, and continues to be, radical and revolutionary. It is this joy, that is foraged in alternative spaces, that I want to keep with me in MYTHOS2020.

I want to create a soundtrack for the night that includes the songs that I grew up on, but also, the sounds of the time we had apart. What if we entered a club and only listened to the spaces between the silence? The submerged frequencies that are normally hidden by the daily machinations of capitalism that consume us? I intend of creating a score of different sounds—recorded in nature, recorded on the streets—that have punctuated punctuated this year.

I intend on hosting this project on Zoom within the next month—it will be free and open to all.

My future nostalgia is disturbed and rattled: it’s a growing distrust in the institutions that claim to protect me, but expose the vulnerable in the process, it’s my fear that this is just the beginning of an unfurling history, it’s a perpetual state of “idk”. But my future nostalgia is also my friends, mainly femmes of colour, disenfranchised and tired, who are uplifting their communities, it’s the uncapitalist forms of care that I see born from my elderly grandparents, it’s realizing the times have never not been changing. And it’s finding time, however brief, to keep on dancing.