WHAT ACTUALLY IS RAVE?

(Editor’s Note)

Words don’t disappear all at once.
They thin.
They get stretched until they stop carrying weight.

This conversation keeps returning because it’s not really about parties. It’s about our collective memory. About whether language still has the right to mean something once it becomes useful to sell.
This isn’t a European scolding Americans from afar. This is coming from inside the house.

Some words don’t describe a vibe. They describe a history. Rave is one of them.
Unmixed is based in New York City. It is also immigrant- and woman-owned. And while this editorial is rooted here, it carries memory from elsewhere too—spaces that didn’t ask permission to exist. Parties temporary by design. Organized quietly. Sustained by trust rather than infrastructure. Some of that happened before New York. Some between cities. Some in places where legality wasn’t a gray area but an outright impossibility.
Those experiences shape how you hear the word rave, even when you no longer say it out loud.

The Extraction Pattern

In the U.S., “EDM” became an acronym that stopped behaving like its definition. Electronic dance music didn’t vanish. It was reframed into a commercial category—optimized for festivals, sponsorships, and mass legibility. The term stopped pointing to a culture and started pointing to a product.

Rave has gone through the same process.

The reason this argument keeps exploding online is the same reason people keep arguing about “EDM.” Not because anyone is stupid. Because language gets captured. The word stays. The meaning gets replaced. Then everyone fights over the empty shell.

The argument looks like semantics. But it’s actually about cultural ownership: who gets to define the category, and who benefits when the category becomes vague.

What Gets Lost in the Flattening

“Rave” has a specific modern lineage: late ’80s, early ’90s DIY gatherings outside the club industry, shaped by political and social gravity, often defined by how they sat against the establishment—not how they looked on camera.

When you call every warehouse party, every branded “experience,” every club night with fog machines a rave, you flatten that history into an aesthetic.

And flattening is not neutral. Flattening is extraction.

Once “rave” becomes shorthand for “any dance event,” it becomes a marketing asset. It gets pasted onto ticket links to imply underground credibility and manufacture FOMO for something built like a product. When language loses precision, corporations gain it. They can sell you the posture of resistance without any of the risk, ethics, or community responsibility that made the word matter in the first place.

That’s why “stop calling everything raves” isn’t gatekeeping. It’s refusing a rewrite.

The COVID Hinge

There’s a reason “rave” started getting used as a catch-all again during and after COVID. Lockdowns didn’t just pause nightlife. They broke the old map.

Between 2020 and 2022, dance culture split into two visible survival modes: private, improvised gatherings that stayed closer to rave lineage, and brand-ready reinventions of dance as “safe,” “wholesome,” “daytime,” “wellness,” and most importantly, legible to sponsors.

That vacuum is where pop-up and off-hour “raves” multiplied, framed as a solution to cost, risk, and late-night infrastructure.

That’s how you get the new language: soft clubbing, daytime raves, coffee raves.

That’s not evolution. That’s domestication.

“Coffee rave” is the cleanest example of the repurpose. It’s not the underground borrowing language. It’s the mainstream repackaging dance culture into a daytime, low-risk, content-friendly experience. When your “rave” reads like lifestyle content, the word has already shifted.

What Actually Makes Something a Rave

Not a look. Not a playlist. Not a camera angle.

Rave is not a music style. It is not “hard techno.” It is not “fast BPM.” It is not “strobe lights.” Historically, you could hear acid house, techno, breakbeat, hardcore, jungle, trance, ambient—whatever the night needed. The word described the gathering, not the playlist.

Here’s the structural breakdown nobody wants because it ruins the aesthetic:

1. The space is non-commercial
   If the event exists to sell—tickets, drinks, brand exposure, content—it’s operating within commerce. That doesn’t make it bad. It makes it something else.

2. It’s not genre-defined
   Rave is not techno. Not hard dance. Not BPM-based. The music serves the gathering, not the other way around.

3. It carries implicit political weight
   Not slogans. Practice. Who is protected. Who is safe. Who is excluded. Historically, raves existed in tension with authority—zoning laws, policing, moral panic. Without that friction, you’re describing a dance party.

4. It’s not built for documentation
   Raves prioritize presence over capture. That doesn’t mean zero phones have ever existed—but when a space is engineered for filming and viral circulation, it’s no longer countercultural. It’s content.

5. It’s not organized around profit
   This is where people call it “romantic.” It’s not. It’s structural. Raves aren’t meant to be economically sustainable businesses. They persist through networks, contribution, sharing, and impermanence. BYOB is common. Tickets are often absent. And yes, there’s often the awareness that the night could end abruptly. That risk is the point.

The Survival Question

“But how do they survive if they’re not economically sustainable?”

They don’t survive like companies. They reappear. They migrate. They dissolve and reform.

The underground is expected to explain itself in the language of profitability, as if the only thing that counts as real is what can scale. But rave culture was never designed to scale. It was designed to gather. To create temporary autonomy. To protect weirdness, risk, and refusal inside a world that tries to monetize everything.

A real rave economy is closer to mutual aid than nightlife business. People share resources. People bring things. People contribute quietly. It’s not VIP. It’s not bottle service. It’s not a brand deck.

Once profitability becomes the primary requirement, everything reorganizes: the music, the crowd, the ethics, the rules. At that point, calling it a rave isn’t inaccurate. It’s misleading.

Words We Already Have

Some commenters say: give us a new word or stop relabeling things.

But we already have words. Plenty of them.
Party. Club night. Festival. Warehouse event. Concert. Dance gathering.

Why bend one of the most politically loaded words in electronic music history to fit commercial models of 2025?

There’s nothing wrong with dance parties. Nothing wrong with club nights, warehouse events, festivals, or shows. New York thrives on them.

They’re just not raves.
Precision isn’t hierarchy. Precision is respect.

What People Mean When They Say “Rave”

This conversation didn’t start in an article. It started in comments. What followed wasn’t outrage so much as a fracture in language—people circling the same word from different lived positions.

These comments don’t contradict each other as much as they appear to. They reveal different assumptions about where meaning lives. Some locate it internally—in intention, attitude, resistance as a personal act. Others locate it structurally—in space, risk, legality, and collective responsibility.

Both positions can exist in good faith. The conflict begins when one is used to erase the other.

The Point

We’re tired of seeing every coffee shop party, club night, and commercial festival branded as a “rave.”

The word carries real political and cultural history. Calling everything a rave doesn’t make it cooler. It makes the culture disposable.

Calling history “division” is a common side effect of not knowing it. Rave culture didn’t come from nowhere. It was built by people pushed out of the mainstream—queer communities, Black and Brown youth, anti-establishment movements. That’s not a narrative. That’s documented history.

Kids can still have fun and inherit context. Ignorance isn’t freedom.

People can call their nights whatever they want. And we can also name when language drifts so far from its roots that it becomes fiction.

That’s not gatekeeping. That’s context.

Not everything needs to be a rave. And raves don’t need to be renamed to make room for everything else.

When a word gets profitable, it gets vague.
Dilution is the cleanest form of erasure.

A rave isn’t a vibe. It’s a lineage.

That’s not evolution. That’s domestication.

Raves are for the people and the music, not the IG content.
Raves should be a safe space for people to escape and not have to worry about being on the internet the next day.

A lot of people going to “raves” have zero clue where, why it started.
Music has ALWAYS BEEN political.

A rave requires diversity, illegality and unity which delivers liberty.

We called it free partying… pay parties were different.
The oneness really broke people—the whole status thing swapped over from the normal world.

You can still rave against the machine that wants you to conform.

The mainstream eventually picks it up and copies it.
People within the underground will always know what fits.

The word carries real political and cultural history.
Calling everything a rave doesn’t make it cooler. It makes the culture disposable.

Precision isn’t hierarchy. Precision is respect.

“It’s not that deep” is usually said from a place where depth has never been denied.

When “rave” becomes interchangeable with any party, what disappears isn’t fun. It’s context.

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“It’s not that deep” is usually said from a place where depth has never been denied.

For people whose cultures, spaces, and languages were built on the margins, meaning is not an abstraction. It’s how memory survives. Words don’t just describe what happened—they decide what gets remembered, protected, or erased.

When “rave” becomes interchangeable with any party, what disappears isn’t fun. It’s context. The history of who created these spaces, under what conditions, and at what cost.

You don’t have to feel that loss for it to be real.
You just have to acknowledge that not everyone was invited to be shallow about it.

Depth is not a personal preference. It’s a consequence of history.

— Nina Katashvili, Editor-in-Chief, Unmixed