March 24, 2011. Sammy’s.
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Sometimes, for no identifiable or discernible cause, a night just doesn’t come together. To employ a perhaps cloyingly Forrest Gump-esque analogy, it’s like making bread. You might follow the same recipe each time, but sometimes the loaf comes out beautifully risen, other times it just falls flat. And, alas, Bassnectar’s Dunedin gig was sadly less than the sum of its parts, in no way attributable to Bassnectar (aka Lorin Ashton) himself.
It was quite the coup for Dunedin to have attracted dubstep/electronica artist Bassnectar, in a gig rescheduled from its original Christchurch venue. Hailing from California and having played at legendary North American festivals like Shambhala and Sasquatch, Bassnectar is renowned for both his live shows and for his social consciousness. He samples figures like Noam Chomsky (linguist and political scientist of considerable gravitas and intellectual heft) on his Mesmerising the Ultra album and is involved in Conscious Alliance, a non-profit organisation that organises food drives for impoverished communities and Native American reserves in the US. Right on!
The cavernous Sammy’s was half empty when we arrived past midnight but, despite this dearth of bodies, as people moved through the crowd they were brusquely bodychecking us and barging past. What was with all the aggression? That the toilets were alive with the sounds of snorting and awash with cast-off bits of rolled-up cardboard helped to explain this state of affairs.
Unlike certain other columnists in this publication, I see nothing particularly edgy or noteworthy about either ingesting large amounts of cocaine or amphetamine or banging on about it afterwards, so suffice to say that my friends and I instead moved to the edge of the fray and, alongside some people lost in their own private psychadelic world, we enacted our own interpretative dance involving lots of twirling around, Kate Bush arm-waving and balletic leaps through the air.
Then Bassnectar abruptly stopped playing. “I’ve been touring for fifteen years - ” he started. I expected him to continue with the usual DJ platitudes: “but this is the best crowd I’ve ever seen!”, or “but tonight is just off the scale!”. But no. Instead he continued, sounding genuinely upset: “but that’s the first time someone’s thrown a bottle at me. That’s ridiculous - I just want people to have fun. That’s just ridiculous”. Throwing bottles at the DJ? Come on. It’s hard enough to entice quality artists to visit Dunedin as it is without actively pelting them with projectiles. It was hard for the night to bounce back after that. Even the light show and dry-ice couldn’t lift the mood. “It’s just a load of aggro coke-heads”, Melanie remarked on our way out. That it was. Nice one, Dunedin. Dance music and drug culture have been inseparable from their very inception; the Ecstasy generation was the last youth movement of any lasting significance, and look at the very name of “acid house”, but in Sammy’s that night were not shiny, happy party people but the less attractive sides of the scene.
Bassnectar
