N.C. Raves: 'Geriatric' ravers
The people who rave : 'Geriatric' ravers (4 of 7)

 

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At 34 years old, when Todd Morman goes to a rave, he knows he's probably the oldest one in the room. He jokes about being a 'geriatric raver,' but says it's hard sometimes to hang out with people half his age. MORE
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Morman laughs about the 'geriatric raver' e-mail list, where the minimum age to sign up is 25 years. "I mean, they're joking," he says. "But it's kind of a poke at the scene, because it is so young."

"Although I like kids, I'm kind of sad that raving itself has come to be identified with youth culture," Morman says. Though many deejays, party promoters, and music producers are in their mid-thirties or older, most partygoers are of high school or college age.

Morman says it's sometimes hard to relate with the many young people flocking to the scene. "Personally, I'd rather party with more mature people," he says. But then he quickly reverses himself: "Of course, as I just said that, the first thing that popped into my head were five people under 18 who have made my life incredibly better over the last couple of years I've been in the rave scene."

The problem with young people, Morman explains, isn't necessarily their age, but their expectations of what raving is. "There's no mechanism within the rave scene by which we teach new kids what it's about. It's all very spread out, very informal," he says. "There are a couple of magazines, like Urb, that do a decent job. Every once in a while a production company will put out a flyer that will say, 'welcome to our scene, this is what it's all about.'"

Promoter and deejay Harley Walker, also 34, agrees. "I'm not dissing kids and saying they're not smart," Walker says. "But when you're a kid, you've got peer pressures, friends saying 'Aw, man, you need to be cool, you need to do [drugs] ... At some of the raves, you've got 13 and 14 year old kids, and you can't really blame the promoters. You've got to ask, why aren't the parents there?" TOP