Remilia has cultivated a beautiful little garden in NYC, but it wouldn’t be so special if it was in every city from sea to shining sea. If Milady Raves are to stand as a ’leader’ to a rave revival across the states, it would have to be by example; the digital tribesmen under the banner of Milady Maker must learn to tend to their own local gardens. The following article serves to inspire & guide aspiring horticulturalists on how to thrive in rough terrain.

Cultivating a catalog of DJs which fit the vibe, and patrons who enjoy the scene, is by far easiest in NYC. There is a significant Milady community there, and it’s one of the only large cities in the states that’s strongly connected across its neighborhoods. This doesn’t mean that NYC is the only place that this could happen, but it’s the most obvious place in the states where one could make it look effortless.

The milady raves stand in almost hilarious contrast to other crypto events in NYC, booking artists that any suburban college radio station would book maybe a decade ago. When one understands that most millennial-dominated spaces host events as boring as these nationwide, the prospect of raising the bar becomes a whole lot easier to imagine for anyone paying attention. The bar doesn’t raise itself though, and besides, how was this bar set in the first place?

The 2010’s were not very kind to scenes which existed or sprung up across the nation, regardless of whether they took place online, or in meatspace. A good chunk of these deaths were from natural causes; people leaving their towns/cities, finances blowing up, central acts disbanding, etc, yet anyone who dabbled within their local scenes during this era might have stumbled upon a tension during their times. If you’re reading this, I don’t need to explain cancel culture to you, I don’t need to explain how “music journalists” turned everyone’s brain into mush, and I don’t need to explain the fear that could be struck within an artist for earnestly exercising their work. Any properly subversive work of art was either cancelled, lost, or crystallized on an internet archive somewhere. To the naive neurotic, culture, particularly “underground culture” was only genuine in LA/SF/NYC/Chicago/etc¹, a lifetime of living in suburban sprawl usually fuels the desire to escape home, especially for non-drivers. Once this type of person approaches college age, they may have their heart broken when they realize that their school performance/savings plan wasn’t good enough to get them to that city they wanted to be in. Neuroticism properly starts to set in at this point. Usually around this time, they also discover their local music scene.

In many cases, it only takes one person who’s this broken up to destroy that local music scene.

The end result seemed to vary depending on what sort of city/town you were in, either a slow death ensued as people lost interest, or the scene implodes on the spot & is forgotten soon after. If that city was mostly older people, the youth continued to leave. If there was already enough youth to keep it from ever becoming too geriatric in the mid-term, the inoffensive tastes of normies tended to reign supreme. Nobody wants to hang around neurotic power trippers for the same reason that they wouldn’t want a loaded gun pointed at them. For many creatives, it simply became safer to stay at home & be anon online. The pendulum is swinging back though isn’t it? You can feel it can’t you? Now that we know that these black-hearted ghouls only loaded blanks, what’s next?

Though pointing at journalism & the ’climate of culture’ works when you have millenials re-living their glory years through tired line-ups, it really makes no point over rave scenes as it stands today. I personally can’t comment on the state of the nation, but I can talk about my home city. Here’s a common sentiment I’d hear going around some of the cooler places in my area:

I like coming here, but the atmosphere’s still a bit too normie for my tastes.

Imagine how many people are silently thinking of this in your city, waiting by the wayside for something new, not quite noticing that the torch was handed to them years ago. You can’t judge them too hard for it, for one was laid in your hands too. When did you first notice it? When are you going to put it to use?

Really, normies are a bit of a blessing when you think of it, they kept your city’s dance floors warm while you were absent. As is true in all domains of life, if you notice that something wrong, it is your obligation to become the change that you want to see. You have all of the necessary tools to find every random soundcloud/bandcamp artist in your city, to find the flints that spark greatness pumping out tracks by the wayside. There’s almost certainly someone in your city refining their craft, in the lab until a worthy dance-floor arises. Reviving raves in your city is a matter of finding these people, finding a place, bringing them together, and getting the word out.

I firmly believe that one of the largest errors of the 2010’s was the fact that many upstanding people allowed themselves to be pushed out communities that they cared about without a struggle. They simply threw their hands up and said “well, these just aren’t my people”, and there was probably truth to such a thought, but it’s never 100% true. There are always people on the sidelines, and putting an earnest effort out there for them goes much further than you could ever imagine. As the pendulum swings back in the 20’s, surrender will no longer be an option. A true artist hampered by crabs in a bucket has an obligation to subdue these frauds (on the canvas), or blow the whole thing up. If you’re in college, it’s time to take over that radio station.

The potential for bringing back true regional style, and a proper multi-polar culture in the states might be at its peak in 2022, you’ve just gotta show the normies that the future is here, but Remilia’s not gonna do it for you, they’ve got enough on their plate as is. You read the manual, if you want it, you’ve gotta implement it. At best, they’ll do a one-off rave at a cool venue around you².

You can’t expect Remilia to learn how your city works, how it ticks, what your good venues are, that the local arcade could also be a good venue or what your city’s bedtime is out of the goodness of their heart, that’s on you resident, figure it out or quit whining. I don’t even understand what NYC is really about, and I see it on the internet every single day, do you see me running up there & telling them how to run it? One could certainly give a prospective Remilia collective a hand here if they’re thinking of doing a rave in their city, but a scene’s expert will always be local to that scene.

In more explicit terms, one can only “decentralize milady raves” through action. Assemble your local miladies into a unit, start scoping out local talent, and put something together. You don’t even need a venue if someone’s got a house, even if it’s just a barn. Call it whatever you please, just keep it milady-adjacent in energy, even better if its the action of a budding collective (just remember who sent you).

1. This sort of perspective was not exclusive to small town America, a good chunk of residents of pretty much every city looked in this manner toward some larger city in the nation. In reality, the landscape was still pretty rich for any “second-city” dweller who stuck their head out & took a good look, but it was generally kept pretty quiet. Even notoriously “dead” cities have vibrant scenes, usually coordinated by facebook groups or instagram pages & ready for anyone who stumbles upon them. Of-course, the complaint was never that the “underground didn’t exist” where they lived, just that they either had to find it, or put what they wanted together.

2. Milady Rave Marfa?