A crowd of young zombies gather in a dark room, their bodies pulsating to some beat only they can hear. Their minds are blank as their vacant stares and their eyes open and close at irregular intervals. They're ingesting an unknown substance to keep them alive - without it, the dark room would become poisonous, and they would be forced to evacuate or be driven immediately insane. Suddenly, bright lights flash on, and a terrible noise fills the air, causing the small group of humans left to shriek and block their ears. But it's too late, the zombies have spotted them and move in for the kill, arms outstretched towards the poor human girls. A zombie grabs the nearest girl by the shoulders. Her dress twirls out as she spins towards him, trying but failing to fight the irresistable pull of the zombie. He hands her a volume of the unknown substance and motions for her to drink it. Then, in the final moments, she lets herself go and allows him to touch his lips to hers, in a kiss of death. She is a zombie now, and her friends look on in horror, knowing they are unable to save her.
If you think this sounds like something out of the latest straight-to-DVD zombie comedy-horror, you'd be wrong. It's simply a scene from my trip to local party hotspot, Tiger Tiger last night. No, there was no zombie theme party, use your imagination for goodness' sake.
The zombies in this instance are the young adults, the magic substance is their drink of choice. Because in all honesty, the only way yo survive such hangouts is with the help of some serious vodka. Unless you're me... in that case, no amount of shots can make this mini-apocalypse survivable.
But this is a fangirl blog, and I intend to examine the music played at these clubs, above all other things. Club music falls into about four distinct categories, so let's examine them.
So, we start off with a rave beat, no words, no discernible tune, just doof-doof-doof coming from the DJ booth. The young zombies seem not to even notice the music, but they sure do move to it. The head-bop, the arm-move, the leg-bend and the twerk are amongst such moves. The zombies seem hypnotised. I'm ready to launch myself off a bridge.
We then progress to a range of mind-numbing, stomach-turning chart toppers including that song Pitbull bee's re-recording and trying to pass off as a new hit every few months for the past five years, a little bit of Pink, and even some One Direction. It's really not that bad, if you know the words, you can scream them to your friends and continue your head-bopping. Even better is when it's a good song, like Florence's 'The Dog Days Are Over', which has a great beat, meaning it doesn't have to be remixed (more on that coming up). At least singing will keep you entertained and stop you from glancing around the room, lest you make eye-contact with a lonely zombie scoping the edges of the dancefloor for fresh meat. *Shudder*
Next we're on to remixes of songs that should never be re-mixed. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to break Imagine Dragon's 'Radioactive' into pieces split by Avicci-style bass-drops? Also, slapping a dance-y backing track onto 'I Will Wait' does not make it okay to twerk to Mumford & Sons! Have you ever listened to this band's lyrics? You have? And you still want to shake your ass to them? Now, I love Mumford & Sons, so obviously I get excited when I hear their songs start to play, but I dancing to 'I Will Wait' just felt wrong. Dirty. Ugh.
And so we reach the final category: the oldies. At this particular club, the pure rubbish takes a break about once an hour, for one or two great singalong 'oldies'. Now, I use the term 'oldies' loosely, simply because no, we're not dancing to The Platters, but then again 99% of these people wouldn't know what they were. 2000 is way old for these kids. So in the first hour, we're treated to 'All The Small Things' and 'Teenage Dirtbag' - the latter of which is so bad that it should have been outlawed by 2001, yet it's still 100x better than the rest of the night's music - and in the second hour it's Journey's (yes, Journey, not Glee) 'Don't Stop Believing'. Remarkably, the zombies come alive at these singalongs. Belting out every word, the dancefloor comes alive with bouncing, singing, smiling human beings.
It really gets me thinking - maybe people do have better music taste than they care to admit. Maybe they don't even really dig the latest David Guetta jam, and would much rather be listening to Journey, but of course they could never admit that. They'd lose all their street cred. Either way, I'm more than happy to step into my car at 2am and blast some Springsteen all the way home. My street cred's long gone.
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