When it's time to party, we will party hard

And all they wanted to do was dance.

This year’s Love Parade, held at an old railway station in Duisburg, Germany, turned all sorts of tragic when 19 people were crushed to death after hundreds of thousands of revelers packed into a tunnel that appeared to have been the only entrance to the festival grounds. According to the Associated Press, it remains unclear what exactly triggered the mass hysteria, though witnesses described “a desperate scene, as people piled up on each other or scrambled over others who had fallen.”

The free dance party started out as a peace demonstration in West Berlin in 1989. Since then, it has grown into a huge outdoor celebration of club culture, drawing about 1.5 million people at its peak in 1999. Complaints about noise and overcrowding, however, forced Love Parade organizers to move it to its current venue, an industrial city of 500,000. Out of respect for those who lost their lives — mostly foreigners between the ages of 18 and 38 — 2010’s rager is said to be the last.   

The End of an Era

As I read about the sad event, my mind — reflexively, I guess — jogged back to a cache of secondhand images: candy-colored rave kids dressed as Macaulay Culkin dressed as Michael Alig in Party Monster; the giant badger in the brilliant — and criminally slept on — It’s All Gone Pete Tong; nightlife in all its mutant disco glory in Berlin Calling; the highs and lows of a gnarly 48-hour weekend in Human Traffic. It was the end of an era; from here on out, there won’t be any more saucer-eyed strangers following floats and engaging in sampler-bruised summer flings under the watchful eyes of God, a.k.a. the deejay. A greatest-hits reel from my favorite club-themed films was, in my opinion, an appropriate tribute.

While I’ve never been to an actual Love Parade, I’ve always been aware of its existence. To the high school me, it seemed the perfect rite of passage, like a teenage running of the bulls set to a Bob Sinclar remix. My college life was built upon a foundation of drinking, dancing and darkness, so crashing the Love Parade — or similar picnics in Ayia Napa, Mallorca or Ibiza — turned into a short-term goal.  

Dancefloor Detritus

Scrolling through photo after photo of last weekend’s collective panic attack, however, I’m now pretty sure it wasn’t the best place to be. Save for dancefloor detritus — trampled-upon shutter shades, for instance — the festival site-turned-crime scene resembled that of Ultra’s circa the Wowowee stampede. Cue Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

That said, I wonder if it was bound to happen. German media reports that as many as 1.4 million people showed up at the Love Parade; meanwhile, the venue could only handle 300,000. Add a cocktail of mood-enhancing, mind-altering substances — the venue was littered with syringes, for crying out loud — and you’ve got death by techno. As the AP writes: “Many people continued dancing, unaware of the deaths. Rescue workers carried away the injured as music thundered in the background.”

It may be a bit insensitive to make light of the Love Parade situation, but the whole thing, body count and all, somehow gives new meaning to the words “clubbed to death.”

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