Yakety Sax at Four AM
There’s a video of ravers at some festival dancing to Yakety Sax, and watching it is like looking at a mirror from when I was 22. The way they’re moving, the genuine joy on their faces even though the song is objectively ridiculous, the commitment to the bit even when there is no bit—that was me. That was everyone I knew.
You spend your early twenties believing that the absolute peak of human experience happens at five in the morning in a mud field with a hundred thousand other people, all of you on the same drugs, all of you dancing to the same four-on-the-floor beat for hours. The beat changes maybe three times across an entire night. You don’t care. You’re sweating through three layers of clothes, your jaw is clenched so hard you can’t open your mouth, and someone keeps spilling warm beer on your back, but this feels important. This feels like what being alive is supposed to feel like.
I spent whole summers doing this. Coming home reeking of other people’s sweat and condom wrappers and god knows what else. Losing days to the crash afterward. Spending money I didn’t have. Standing in the same spot for six hours waiting for a specific DJ to play a specific set, getting my hopes up and having them crushed by the opening act or by some other random set that came first. The music wasn’t even good, most of the time. It was functional. Designed to keep your body moving on a rhythm that didn’t require you to think.
But there’s something in that video of people dancing to Yakety Sax that captures the actual truth of it. The song is a joke, a cartoon, completely detached from the seriousness of the rave aesthetic, and they dance to it anyway. They’re happy. The music doesn’t matter. What matters is being there, being high, being part of a crowd that’s all feeling the same thing at the same time.
Looking back, I can see the absurdity clearly. The wasted time, the money, the health stuff I’d rather not think about, the repetitiveness of it all. I’d probably do a thousand things differently if I could go back. But if someone asked me whether I regret it, I don’t know what I’d say. There’s a version of me that lived something that felt absolutely real at the time, even if it was completely pointless. Maybe especially because it was completely pointless.