ULTRA-NAUT: Strange eccentric ramblings in the winter music conference et notes on the demise of decency and the rise of the ravers.
As we got ominously closer to Bicentennial Park, in Downtown Miami, the furious frantic roar of electronic music reached decibel volumes unbearable to the common man. The sweltering mass of people vibrated underneath the causeway with their hands extended toward the DJ as if welcoming a long-awaited Messiah.
“Good and sweet Lord” I muttered, petrified at the inconceivable turnout at Ultra Music Festival on this, its eleventh year. Little did I know that after almost two hours of scavenging for parking (even with a forged disability sticker) and around forty-five minutes of profuse sweating in a larger-than-life line, I would gain entry to an alternate reality so decadent, reckless, grandiose, and obscene that none of us would ever be the same.
It is true what parents and preachers fear: this festival is nothing but a celebration of the terminally decadent and obscene. There are, within this park, enough drugs to send Tim Leary running for the hills, enough sonic boom to silence a Challenger take-off and sufficient debauchery to make even a drunken Caligula blush like a Lolita.
Our chances of survival were slim at best, I determined, as the mothership-like Main Stage covered almost every piece of blue sky in the horizon. After all this was, indeed, the day that all the freaks crawled out of the woodwork, the day that even the seemingly decent and All-American morphed into wild eyed creatures, covered themselves in fluorescent paint, and ran amok in a bare-chested orgasmic frenzy with dangerous epileptic overtones.
“Hello, Miami” a robotized vocoder voice hollered from far away in the imposing stage, over the half-naked mass of freaks, creeps, and not-so-innocent by-standers, all of them fighting, copulating, dancing, desecrating, and medicating. The weird and the dangerous had found their perfect utopia in this piece of land, a haven unlike anything else I’d ever seen.
After the first couple of hours my head was spinning viciously from the distorted drum-beats. Every attempt at note-taking had been savagely disrupted by one calamity or another and the physical strain that the proper coverage of the story entailed was about to turn me into one more of the Ultra-casualties at the first-aid tent. At first I was leaning towards characterizing the whole thing as a celebration of the man-made, the digital and the high-tech. Sort of what would happen if the Star Trek series rudely copulated with Louie XVI’s court, spawned a bastard child, and named it Ultra. Far-fetched? Maybe. Nonetheless a good decimal approximation to what the festival really is like.
“It’s all about like the love, that intense feeling of like bliss… You know?” asserted an anonymous source by the kebab stand, but his eyes were far too wild and glazed to be taken seriously. Like every other time I had approached anyone for interviews and quotes the process had turned unfruitful. All I could get out of these freaks were garbled oral oddities and manic spontaneous laughter.
It was about 10.30 pm, one and a half hours before closing, just when I was about to dismiss of this whole festival and sub-culture as a non-sensical excuse for brainless brutes to shove down their raspy throats unholy quantities of multicolored pills with funny names, that I came to understand the common sentiment that validated all this depraved craziness.
Under the epochal, primitive roar of Carl Cox’s music, a strange thing happened. An outlandish zenith took place, a weird peak under the incessant and vital drumbeats when every individual seemed to merge, to melt, into one giant collective entity pulsating in unison with the ever-increasing energy into a staggering absolute climax. A communion of joy that can’t be fully explained by words or brought back was found a beautiful myriad of people then and there.
A good time was had by all, except maybe the trampled, overdosed, dehydrated, knocked-up, knocked-down and terminally exhausted. Nonetheless they’d all assent to the notion it was all worth it, a strange feeling of universal love and understanding had prevailed if only for those two days. From March 28 to March 29 a striking utopia had been created and peaked, in a perverse and dysfunctional way we had prevailed.
