In The Land of Walking Wallets, Be The Warrior
The other night, I was chilling with a handful of friends, all musicians, promoters, PR types, tangled up in the music business.
We were talking about the big commercial events happening around Sarajevo, and we got onto a series of electronic music events known for almost identical lineups and ridiculous ticket prices.
One of my friends, deeper in the electronic scene business-wise, dropped it casually: "People come for the event, not for the music".
That stunned me. Because to me, music should BE the event. If the names on the bill can't justify the increasing prices, if the sets are boring or predictable, why the hell do people keep going?
As it turns out, I'm an old fart, and it's not about the sound anymore. It's about being seen and being a passive part of the circus. The music is just the backdrop for Instagram stories and brand activations.
Warriors, Come Out And Mosh!
Back when the world was younger, there were music tribes. Punk and hardcore had their basements, hip-hop had its corners and clubs, and electronic music utilized warehouses for all-night dancing. I am generalizing, but you get the picture.
Each scene had different rules, different customs, different codes of conduct. It was like that old movie The Warriors. Each gang claiming its turf, each one fiercely protective of what it stood for.
I was lucky enough to be a nomad. My strongest associations were with punk and metal. Still, I also got a foot in the door in electronic music and rap through my involvement with the radio, which naturally exposed me to numerous DJs and producers who, like me, hustled to keep the great music spinning. Over the years, all of our stories in a way became the tragic one, that of a slow, deliberate dismantling of tribes by corporate malice. Sponsorships creeping in, the music softening, the edges filed down until everything became palatable, safe, consumable.
A friend of mine who DJs has been particularly disgusted by how parties moved from basements and abandoned locations to rooftops and even city streets. Now everything's sanctioned and sponsored, and something primal got lost when it all moved to the surface.
He also mentioned that the drugs have changed from MDMA and ecstasy to cocaine. And you can feel it. The vibe shifts. It's not about exploration anymore, not about dancing until sunrise in some ritualistic communion with strangers. It's ego. It became status whoring and malicious energy, rather than collective release.
Here Comes The Bleach
Electronic music, like punk before it, was born from outsider communities. Queer folks, people of color, and working-class kids all built spaces where they could exist freely. When capitalism creeps in, with its inability to create anything but only to generate profit, it doesn't absorb scenes. The destruction is not good for the money-making machine.
Instead, the scenes get sanitized. Rebellion gets repackaged as aesthetic until it goes completely beige.
The wellness wave is part of this. Matcha raves, day clubbing, sober dance parties. "Soft clubbing". They're marketed as inclusive, as "healthier alternatives“. And maybe for some people, they are.
But they also represent a flattening of experience, a risk-averse rebranding of something that was once dangerous, unpredictable, and profoundly communal. When you strip away the grit, the sweat, the 4 am comedown conversations in a grimy bathroom, what's left?
A fucking Instagram story.
I'm not against soft clubbing or matcha raves per se. But some things should be hard. That's the nature of things. When access becomes universal, when everything is for everyone, the message gets diluted. Raves and hardcore punk gigs were, at a certain point, a thing of exploration. You needed to know someone to get in. You needed to become part of the tribe.
Nowadays, this is called gatekeeping, and people bristle at it. But it was never about keeping someone out. It was about making sure the right people got in. Because not everything is for everyone, and that's okay.
Walking Wallets
Here's the thing about branded shows and big-ticket events. They treat attendees as walking wallets rather than community members. And wallets function as long as there's money in them. Once the cash dries up, so does the engagement. But community regenerates love. It cherishes active participation. It was never about consumerism. It was about building something together, something that couldn't be bought or replicated.
That's why the commercialization feels so hollow. When the scene becomes a product, when events are funded by corporate sponsors and designed for mass appeal, the soul gets sucked out. That's why „people go for the event, not for the music“.
Maybe I'm just losing my sense of the world as I'm nearing 40. Maybe my tastes have calcified and I can't see past what once was. But there is a reason why I, even as a rock and roller, feel a stronger connection to someone who's part of the electronic scene and can't recognize their universe anymore. And it's not only generational.
It's because we're mourners of an authenticity and creative freedom that was shot dead by commodification. The genre doesn't matter. Punk, hardcore, techno, house, whatever the fuck. Underground music has always been linked by shared values, not by sound, and I understand it more as I'm aging.
When my DJ friend talks about parties moving from basements to sanitized rooftops, he mourns witnessing the same erosion that repackaged punk for the malls before kicking it out to the curb.
Someone cynical might think we're yearning for drug-fueled excess or nostalgia for being young. But take the drugs and youth out of the equation, and you're left with music. And these new consumers of brands can have all the drugs and all the youth they want, yet everything remains shallow.
Don't Obey and Consume
For you, as my reader, my thoughts could be all over the place, but in my head, they all align pretty nicely. And I know I'm asking for too much, a culture instead of content, but we're at the brink of a potential disaster, and asking for "too much" seems like asking for a basic thing at this particular moment.
As always, the solution is below the ground, like the monsters in Clive Barker's Nightbreed. For me, that position is a result of a wise choice, not a failure.
The moment (and sometimes „moments“ are actually decades) something gets above ground, becomes visible and popular, it gets hunted down and exterminated by those who don't understand it. I think Vivienne Westwood said something in a spirit of „if it's popular, it's not a culture anymore.“
This whole thing is paradoxical. In an era where you can learn anything, most people decide not to with each move they (don't) make.
Ditch the algorithmic bullshit. Spotify, Apple Music, all of it. Algorithms don't know you. They're math disguised as an editor. They're designed to keep you consuming, not exploring. They feed you variations of what you already know because engagement metrics matter more than discovery.
Do the digital crate digging. Go to Bandcamp. Buy stuff. Read reviews. Talk to people at record stores in your city (there's a decent one in Sarajevo called Sarajevo Disk) who actually give a shit about music. Support artists directly instead of feeding pennies to streaming behemoths.
Get back to attentive listening. Music should not be background noise. It should be a way to say and speak without words. Put down your phone and close your laptop. Sit with an album from start to finish and let it mean something.
Put on the They Live glasses and realize they only want you to obey and consume, which is not something anyone should do to feel human. The commodification of culture depends on passive participation, on turning art into a product and community into a market. Don't let them win.
Dedicated to my friend Mirza, who organizes gigs, as H20 would put it, for passion and not for fashion. Keep fighting the good fight. Happy birthday!
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