"I'm ready to bring back gatekeeping." The New Yorker staff writer discusses how to protect the underground, experimenting with drugs and her new book, Health and Safety: A Breakdown.(Subscribe to our channel: @ResidentAdvisor)
Can drugs help us find meaning in music and nightlife? This is a question that today's Exchange guest, New Yorker staff writer Emily Witt, asks in earnest in her new book Health and Safety: A Breakdown. Just released in hardcover in the UK and Europe, the memoir traces Witt's life in her early-to-mid 30s. A journalist living and working in Brooklyn, she began experimenting with psychedelics and club drugs after years of living what she describes as a conservative, straight and narrow, middle class life. She became enamoured with the borough's underground raves, frequenting parties like the festival Sustain Release, the party Unter and Bushwick haunt Bossa Nova Civic Club, and falling in love with an aspiring DJ and producer she calls Andrew.
As the book progresses, Witt documents the growing MAGA movement in America, gun rights rallies and mass shootings. As the country falls apart, she watches her romantic relationship fall apart, too. Drugs and Brooklyn nightlife, she writes, became both an escape and a way to rearrange a world that she starts to feel no longer makes sense.
Witt shares critical opinions about the underground scene's capacity to be a utopia and place of belonging in an increasingly hostile world, arguing that there should be more gatekeeping in place to protect a scene that's threatened by capitalism and the mainstream. She also interrogates what she calls "woke identity politics" in Brooklyn, the lack of change that came from the Black Lives Matter movement, empty calls for political protest that dominated the early days of the pandemic and why, despite everything, she's chosen to stay in Brooklyn for good. Listen to the episode in full. -Chloe Lula
-----------------------
Follow us:
Website -
TikTok - @residentadvisor
Instagram - @residentadvisor
Twitter - @residentadvisor
Facebook - @residentadvisor
-----------------------
Музыка
Фильмы
ТВ Шоу
Категории видео
