What actually happened at Studio K—the provisional communities and the improvisations practiced by its patrons, and by the dJs who were asked to double as entertainers as well as a security element in the club—frustrates any tidy narratives about the lamentable absorption of what may have began as subcultural forms into the controlled and controlling environment of the suburban amusement park. Pale Communion. The Tuscan poet called it hell, purgatory, and heaven. Hence the touches that were reassuring to his audience and appeared incomprehensible to those with a different idea about the function of music: the matching Day- Glo suit coats for the band, the identical, buttoned-to-the neck dresses when the ladies sang ensemble. Trouble, it must be noted right away, can be as much interior as exterior, as much a part of normal life as of extraordinary crisis, as much Metallica on permanent simmer as Nirvana boiling over.
nest...