SF Bay Guardian, February 1996
LET'S DANCE - There's Something For Everyone In San Francisco's Club Scene
A good club is many things to many people. For some, it's a place to loosen up and transcend the routines of daily life, a safety zone where they can be more fully themselves; for others it's a cultural oasis in a sea of convention.
San Francisco's hectic club life offers a range of scenes and deejays specializing in everything from rock to disco to Gothic. Each provides a distinctive soundtrack and milieu for folks looking to indulge in the pleasures of self-expression, be it in style of dance, dress or discourse. With so much to choose from, an energetic (or insomniac) nightclubber can adopt a new persona every night of the week.
[...]
Dark and Dreamy
At Death Guild, the Monday night club at the Trocadero, I hear one such theory from deejay the Melting Girl, who spins Gothic, industrial and dark-wave dance music. "This isn't about self-gratification," she says after fading in Dead Can Dance's "Black Sun". "I'm not here to impose my opinions on people. My job is to play what they want to hear, which is why we have request sheets." Requests make up close to 80 percent of the songs that the Melting Girl, and her co-deejay, Lucretia, play.
Because women deejays are severely underrepresented in both local and national club scenes, the leading roles that Lucretia and the Melting Girl enjoy at the club make important inroads. "It's not just what you know, but who you know," Lucretia says. "And since it tends to be a lot of guys who start clubs, work in club management, or work as promoters, they hire their [male] friends. I came from college radio, where there were quite a few women deejays, but not many of them cross over to clubs."
Perched in her booth high above the figures making slow, sinuous movements below, Lucretia spins DDT's industrial rewrite of Madonna's "Vogue". "I love cover songs," she says excitedly. "Whenever I find a really cool cover song I play it. I've got all sorts of weird things." She proves her point by throwing on Deathline International's grim and haunting interpretation of Soft Cell's new wave standard, "Tainted Love".
The Melting Girl's set concentrates on the lighter Goth and industrial textures with a helping of bands from the new-wave canon, such as Sisters of Mercy, the Damned, Peter Murphy, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. "A lot of people here are in their 20s, and they grew up with new-wave bands, she says, tucking a strand of bright purple hair behind her ear. "I was a new-wave junkie. That's what I listened to."
"What we like to do here is play cool dance music," she continues, as elegantly attired bodies twist in the dance floor's undulating lights. "It's got a dark atmosphere and a dark scene, but it's still a party. It's not everyone sitting around depressed, which is something that is associated with the Goth scene."
Yet Death Guild makes poetically somber scene with its abundance of black clothes, elaborately spiked hair, piercings, and caked-on white makeup. I ask Chris, a black-clad clubgoer who recently moved to San Francisco from Boulder, Colo., what he thinks of the club. "The only Goth club we had in Colorado was a really tiny basement - a really steamy, really sweaty, really disgusting place to hang out," he tells me. "So I like this a lot. The lights, the space - it's a very beautiful place. Everybody dances a lot better here, too."
With its post-new-wave theatricality and outward vestiges of inner gloom, Death Guild is a hyperbolic example of the links between style and music, dance and identity. But sometimes even the deejay needs a break. "I don't have time to do the full dressing up," the Melting Girl confesses with a sigh. "About as dressed up as I get these days is makeup on my face."
Top 10 Spins -- Lucretia, Death Guild
Deathline International "Tainted Love"
Templebeat "Interzone"
Cubanate "Oxyacetylene"
Here We Burn "My Death, My Life"
Coolio "Gangsta's Paradise"
Switchblade Symphony "Wallflower"
Hate Dept. "New Power"
Battery "Shame"
Unit 187 "Lardass"
Index "Angelfire"
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