The Nightmare of Nightclubs

Clubs are dreadful. Nothing is more soul destroying than dragging yourself to a club because your friends are going.  Is there anything worse than spending time at a claustrophobic, overpriced furnace with the latest idiot theme tunes thumping through the humid air so loud you can't hold a conversation? They are an insufferable dungeon of abject misery; the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they "enjoy" clubbing. They don't. No one does. They just enjoy drugs and alcohol.

For some time I've suspected that the reason that we, as a society, have such a problem/obsession with alcohol is that actually, a large number of us don't really enjoy large social gatherings and have to literally addle our brains in order to literally "get into the spirit" and convince ourselves that we're having fun spending time with a load of loud, "sociable" and similarly addled folk.

A typical example of a claustrophobic nightclub

The very notion of a nightclub always seemed as an imbecilic invention to me- waiting in a queue to get a cocktail and pay for it six fold, then stand around, or maybe jump up and down for a while, as if dancing- being surrounded all night by hideous characters and dodgy tarts imagining themselves as models. But it doesn't surprise me at all: after all, these are the people who learn how to live their lives from the television- and what one finds there, more often than not, is just as imbecilic, pointless and loathsome as "going out to a club". Everyone wants to be a celebrity rock star cliché in some way, even if it's in their own self-indulgent Facebook microverse of 1,500 ‘friends.’

People are so preoccupied with documenting their memorable moments in life that they forget to actually enjoy them at the time. I'm fed up of seeing these vacuous shells with their camera phones held up everywhere they go, whose only goal in life it seems is to make it look like they had 'just, like, the best ever time' the night/day/week previous. Social websites such as Facebook give these self-obsessed horrors a convenient platform to document their daily escapades as though it is a part of a picture book novel that the rest should emulate. All I ever had witnessed in my time at clubs is people standing around in expensive outfits, snapping away with phones and cameras, one pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place; just posturing and flashbulbs all around.

Pouting and posturing. Rinse and repeat.

 Another reason I despise their existence is mostly because they're not aligned with me and my tastes. It is the mecca of self-absorbed, plastic, over-privileged, "entitled" gits and morons. That's not to say that there aren't wonderful, creative, intelligent, real people in this world; there are- but rarely are they found in nightclubs.

I'm left wondering why these people keep coming back to drink and deafen themselves to the same pattern of organised noise week after week. Nightclubs were inexorably bound for hellishness when music became democratised. The people going to them have always had resoundingly undemanding tastes in music, which is why every revolutionary change in music was driven by artists and not by audience. Through the nightmare that is dance music, and DJ's who believe that playing records constitutes some sort of talent, the lunatics have now taken over the asylum. That is how we come to a point where dance music constitutes an achingly dull succession of bumps and bleeps, and those willing to dance to it end up making it in an endless cycle of onanistic idiocy. The one good thing, of course, about the noise level in clubs is the fact that you won't have to actually converse with the sort of people who want to tell you that they are in touch with their sensuality.

A DJ getting ready to pollute the airwaves with generic beats and pulses.

Nightclubs do seem an overly complicated and expensive way to acquire Chlamydia. More soberly, they are now targets of terrorists. Why bother? Do you want to spend your last moments of life with these drugged up posers? I can't imagine a more depressing end. Anyone who likes nightclubs is a total pleb. The earth produces these people naturally, and without excessive effort. Perhaps it cannot do without them. Pity the world is set up this way.