Deee-Lite

People suck. They’re greedy, they’re selfish, and they’re stupid. They rarely consider the consequences of their actions, they have no respect for either their elders or their youngers, and they are hell-bent to getting ahead of everybody else. People, like Agent Smith says, are a virus, destroying the host with zero regard for any other life form, especially other humans. They are perverse and sadistic. They are mean, provincial, and xenophobic. They are pompous, obese, and eat cactus. They will disappoint and disrespect you at every opportunity. And yet, like Anne Frank, I can’t shake a belief in the basic goodness of people (and see what happened to her). Despite my better judgement and most of my experience, I still believe that people – all people – can live together peacefully, with gentle respect for others. I believe it is possible for I have seen it happen. I have glimpsed the promised land. I have been to Roller Roxy.

Now, by most accounts, I am not a spiritual guy. I don’t go to church, I don’t read my horoscopes, I don’t chant, pray, implore, or commune with much at all. Shallow, empty, bitter, whatever, that’s my lot in life. But every now and then, I have a divine moment, something that vibrates deep inside and connects me to the invisible web of humanity. During those moments, time stops. My brain, that compulsive cataloguer and interpreter, switches off and I just am. I inhabit the moment completely, oblivious to the past and the future. The momentary fills to the eternal and my cup overfloweths, and I disintegrate into literal selflessness. At its best, dancing was like that – I’d walk out on stage and become obliterated. Editing has, on occasion, also blown my head off and stopped the clock. But for a few months as the decades shifted from the 80s to the 90s, the most reliable way I had of replenishing my soul and restoring my faith in humanity was to lace up some skates and hit the floor with the other skating fools.

The Roxy was (is, I suppose) a club on Manhattan’s west side, down towards the old meat packing district. I had gone there once for a disastrous night when I was first in the city in 1983, and hadn’t gone back until I heard about Roller Roxy. On Thursday nights, the Roxy would rent out skates and pump up the tunes and you could skate around listening to all the latest club sounds. Being a skating enthusiast – often spending weekend afternoons skating around Prospect Park with my homies – I thought Roller Roxy sounded like a good time. I had no idea.

I went there with G, my girlfriend, and Jamie, a mutual friend of ours who had gone to Interlochen and lived in the apartment right upstairs from ours in Brooklyn. Jamie and Geoff and I used to skate around Prospect Park on the weekends, playing frisbee while we skated, an impressive feat, if I do say so myself. Somewhere, there is a videotape I shot while we skated and played frisbee (who says men can’t multi-task?). Anyway, Jamie was an enthusiastic skater and G was game, so we hopped the train and rode it across the fabled Brooklyn Bridge. We got to the Roxy, laced up, and hit the floor.

It was the most amazing scene I had ever witnessed (well, perhaps that first Halloween at Hampshire in which hundreds of people were tripping while wearing outrageous costumes was more amazing). There were a fair number of people there, but there was plenty of room to skate. As I worked my way around the floor, I found myself joining an elaborate, improvised dance. People swirled and swerved in and out of each other’s way. The braid of people was constantly shifting and evolving. And all sorts of people were there – old day-glo roller boogiers from the 70s skating next to hard-core B-Boys dressed in black. Couples in their 20s rubbed up next to couples in their 60s. Gay, straight, male, female, hippies, suits, old, young, black, white, all the poisonous dualities dissolved and we became a joyous sea of humanity. And best of all, there was absolutely no attitude whatsoever. Everybody was just there to experience the sheer joy of moving to music with other people. It was a remarkable experience, and my heart burst with glee to be in such a gathering. People would touch each other as they skated by, but they were gentle touches, acknowledgements that we were all sharing the same space and needed to be aware of each other, not touches of desire or oppression. I felt such an indescribable joy that my eyes welled up with tears and my brain shut off, and I skated in circles, headless and happy, for hours. The DJs played gloriously blissful music, shifting between old school disco and the most up-to-date dance sounds which, at that moment, included the psychedelic happy face funky neo-disco of Deee-Lite.

Mmmm….let’s go!

Deee-Lite was made up of two DJs (DJ Dmitry and DJ Towa Towa – later Towa Tei) and a downtown diva (and girlfriend of Dmitry), Lady Miss Kier, and summed up the mood of that particular summer (1990) in that particular place (Brooklyn by way of the East Village) better than any other track I know. This first album truly is deeeliteful from start to finish and is leagues better than anything they did afterwards. This was part of a general trend to lighten up music that used to be fun and had recently turned into something dark and sinister. This was, after all, about the same time that De La Soul was slipping their daisies into the muzzles of hardcore rappers, which had recently swept the scene and whose members took great pride in boasting how nasty they were and how many bitches they slapped and so on.

Dance music was undergoing some of the same transition, as the first wave of the Ecstasy-fueled, good-vibe, everybody-loves-everybody dance scene gave way to the dark side. Some of that was purely a feature of the drugs favored at raves. Like any drug, Ecstasy has its down side. E uses up your endorphins and, in a sense, spends future happiness on the here and now. It’s like compressing a week’s worth of happiness into a few delirious hours, but it tends to make the next few days kind of brutal while your brain replenishes the endorphin supply. The more you use, the harder it is to replenish, the more you take, the worse you feel, and so on. Then people started cutting E with speed to help you at least maintain the energy required to dance all night, even if you ultimately weren’t having as much fun. Then speed started taking over and the scene started getting more aggressive and the music started reflecting that and the whole cycle fed on itself in a downward spiral.

Deee-Lite tried to revive the early, happy days of the rave scene, and did a pretty good job (they claimed their name had three E’s because there were three members, but I think the music was supposed to make you as happy as if you had three E’s in you as well). The music was incredibly optimistic, extremely danceable, and highly infectious. They were goofy and fun and never took themselves too seriously. At least on this first album. Their look was straight out of the far-out, groovy, lava-lamp school of happy 60s psychedelia and their vibe was straight Summer of Love as well. They preached international unity through music and dancing and led the way by combining genders and cultures (American, Russian, and Japanese) in their group – the first album is, after all, called World Clique. They even grabbed legendary funkmeister Bootsy Collins and respected rapper Q-Tip for guest appearances to round out their idealistic, we-are-the-world clique.

The music itself was funky, groovy, sample-happy (what they called Sampladelic) dance music structured as songs instead of just repetitive dance tracks. Although Miss Kier wasn’t the greatest singer, the freshness and hip-hop happiness of the grooves more than makes up for any individual weaknesses. Weaknesses which became more apparent as DJ Towa Towa left the group to follow the beat of his own drummer (a beat which served him well for one solo album before abandoning him completely) and Dmitry and Kier tried to carry on without him. Each album was less inspired than the one before, with the biggest drop happening between the first two releases (in other words, stay away!), but World Clique is a great slice of dance pie, with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

And I wish I could’ve left well enough alone. I should’ve learned my lesson from the disastrous De La Soul “concert” I had just seen, but I made the mistake of going to see Deee-Lite during their first concert tour. The NYC crowd was noisy and appreciative and the place was packed, and the “band” had a lot of energy, and Bootsy even showed up to play his patented Space Bass, but they couldn’t hide the fact that they were really just playing their record. Which I could do at home. For free. My disappointment was compounded by the fact that I had paid three times to see them once. G had a friend who was coming in from England that day to visit so she told me to get tickets for the two of them and they’d meet me there. I knew they weren’t going to show, but she insisted, so I went ahead and bought three tickets. And (what do you know?) they never came (not that I would be in a big hurry to go out clubbing after just getting off a transatlantic flight, but that had been my point to begin with). Deee-Lite was pretty mediocre for $25, but they sucked for $75 – although Jamie graciously agreed to split the cost of one of the extra tickets with me. The one really memorable moment for me was when they started taking random Polaroids of the audience from the stage and flinging the pictures into the crowd. Jamie, in the kind of display of physical prowess for which he was well known (and well chided for), leapt into the air and grabbed a picture as it flew by, flattening several people in the process. When we got home, we took great pride in pointing out to our doubting friends which distant blobs we were.

Fun, but still not worth $75.