A Rookie Impression of Miami Music Week
“I’ll take two whiskey gingers.”
“The minimum on cards is eighty,” says the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. She happened to be tending the bars that night at Mansion in Miami.
“So how much would that be?” I ask in disbelief at both the height of the price and the length of her legs.
“Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three for two whiskey gingers?”
“Oh, you want two? That’ll be forty-six,” she states calmly in an Eastern European accent. Her angelic costume and heavenly eyes don’t seem to fit with the hellish prices. I can’t be mad at her though. She’s my future wife and I’m already mentally planning the honeymoon.
“How much for a beer?”
“Fifteen.”
“Water?”
“Twelve.”
“To breath?”
“Oxygen is fifty cents an hour plus a sixteen percent gratuity.”
While part of that is an exaggeration (Water was only 10), the rest was the first slap in the face Miami gave me. I wasn’t in Gainesville anymore.
I had the fortunate opportunity to spend the past week at Miami Music Week writing and taking pictures for Elektro magazine. This seated me comfortably on a great majority of the press lists around Miami.
For those of you who don’t know, MMW is the week between the two Ultras. It’s been around since the mid-80s slowly churning into one of the biggest weeks in dance music for producers, djs and labels from around the globe. Over 500 events go on and it’s insane, to say the least. It doesn’t get the same press as Ultra, but I think the attendees like it that way. It’s the heart of dance music, not EDM. As DJ superstar Alesso stated this week at an interview I was lucky enough to film, “EDM sounds like a disease. Help me I’ve caught EDM.”
I was able to get VIP access to take photos at some of the biggest and smallest clubs there. LIV and Mansion being the two I can’t stop thinking about. These clubs won’t let you in if you’re off the list. We were on the press list and showed up 5 minutes late.
“Sorry, you aren’t getting in.”
Either way, we hooked it up at Mansion and the outside bar of LIV is nicer than any club I’ve ever been to. I was able to make some observations.
In Miami, you feel an inevitable sense of unimportance. The man sitting next to you could be a billionaire or work at a seven eleven. Everyone wants to look the part, whether they’re acting or the real deal.
The women in the upper clubs swim in a beauty so fragrant it does not merely turn heads, but rips them off in single swoops of Herculean strength. Yet you realize, these women are being paid to be here. They’re there so you’ll buy more drinks and have the alcohol-induced courage to make it to “Hello, I’m Luke, can I buy you a drink? Well I would, but then I wouldn’t be able to eat for a week. Oh, who am I kidding, never mind.”
You can’t have an ego here because no matter who you are, the city is bigger. There’s someone richer, prettier and more important.
My favorite club was Treehouse. I felt as if I was in the Miami underground. You won’t hear Avicci there, the music was on an entirely different level (See what I did there?). They play techno. For those of you who think techno is the same as EDM and that Tiesto and Bassnectar are techno, it’s not. It is a genre of dance music with no borderlines. It’s dark, it’s deep, it scares children, and yet it is so beautiful. It is music you’ll never hear in Gainesville.
I’m wearing white high tops, black pants and a striped black shirt. If I wore this outfit in Gainesville, they’d call the police, but at Treehouse, a hipster version of The Cat in the Hat seems to be suitable attire. The locals accept me into their dark underworld and I couldn’t be more excited.
Let me take a moment to address the bass. Standing next to the speakers is akin to the feeling of a full body massage and getting pounded by a semi-truck. You don’t hear the bass, you are the bass. There are no identities here. The DJ is one of us.
This is how EDM began. Dark rooms where people weren’t there to see the DJ. They were there to dance and forget themselves. Quite the contrast to the pop star DJs who layer hacked out sounds underneath a prepubescent pre-teen pop-star hopeful who sings about dreaming and putting his or her hands in the air. The modern commercial EDM scene has about as much soul as Justin Beiber’s diary, and yet it’s so wildly catchy. I love it so much.
You’ll get a different experience at MMW than you would at Ultra. It isn’t a mass produced, sorority/fraternity drug affair. It seems to be the place where people who are more passionate about dance music come to club. They don’t care about bells, whistles, or Tweeting about how [insert Swedish Dj here] is “totally killing it!” They care about basslines, grooves and the soul that much of the modern scene has forgotten could ever exist. They were there when it started and I do believe they’ll be there when it ends.
