- In the US, straight men dancing together to an electronic beat while hopping around chanting and holding each other is, well, pretty gay. In Europe, from Fabric to Culture Club, from Le Tryptique to Watergate, it is, apparently, pretty normal. The reasons why dance music is so widely accepted as a mainstream form of entertainment in Europe while still being seen as – let’s face it – an underground and marginal thing in North America are elusive (let’s blame the well-publicized disco backlash of July 12th, 1979 for now, okay?). In that regard, an event like Berlin’s Love Parade, which was back this year after a two-year hiatus, would never attract this many people. Hence my surprise, as it was my first attendance at an event this big, to see 1,200,000 (or so the organizers say) Europeans shaking their meat to a techno beat.
The whole parade, though, appears to me to be built on a paradox: it is supposed to be about “love” and “unity”, about sharing some sort of “techno love” and “tearing walls down,” but also wants to be – at least accordingly to Dr. Motte, original founder of the event who stepped back from this year’s organization over “creative direction” – about “difference” and “diversity,” each floats and stages supposedly being unique and stylistically individual. The Love Parade 2006, then, was a real success at being together in the most divided of fashions. With twenty-something floats roaming around Strasse des 17 Juni, you can but only feel somehow estranged, even kind of lost. At one point, being unable to move through the sea of sweaty flesh and empty beer bottles (shit, Europeans sure love to drink!), I found myself caught between the Tiesto float and the Space Ibiza float: all these trance synths and fake tans beaming at me from left and right felt like the seventh sign of the Apocalypse, really, and I definitely felt more alienated than united to anyone.
Same thing could be said about the line up of DJs taking the main stage at Siegessäule. With only 20 minutes to shine, DJs such as Miss Yeti, Tom Novy and Westbam each went for the huge trance, hard house and techno head-bangers, which only served to remind me that Berlin might be considered the so-called “minimal Mecca,” but when it comes to populist dance music, Villaloboses and Lucianos are somehow still seen by the mainstream as outsiders, if not plain weirdoes: no wonder almost everyone stopped dancing around when Ewan Pearson played the ever-so-subtle ‘Gazebo’ by Fairmont, one of this year’s most perfectly-crafted house tunes. It probably wasn’t unifying enough.
By the time Hymne took the main stage at 11h to play ‘United States of Love’, echoing the cheesiest-vocal-trance-EVER of opener Rea Garvey (nice facial hair, though), I was already leaving the Tiergarten site, trying to find my way through Berlin’s clubs own arbitrary and segregationist door policies. But that is another “love” story.