Parfaits and Pop House: 2014 Was the Year of Breakfast Raves
Looking back at the health craze that turns raving, once the dominion of hedonistic vampires, into smoothie-fueled morning workouts for the yuppie set.
(Photo courtesy of Daniel Leinweber/Razberry Photography
Nothing starts off your morning like a granola parfait in a room full of sweaty strangers dancing their asses off to deep house. At least, that's the logic behind breakfast raves— the health/clubbing craze that turns raving, once the dominion of hedonistic vampires, into smoothie-fueled morning workouts for the yuppie set. In LA, we attended morning workouts that included a live three-piece horn section (why?), communal poem readings (alright then), and impromptu conga lines (oh hell yes!).
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Photo courtesy of Daniel Leinweber/Razberry Photography
In the UK, the breakfast raves were more catered to the hippie set, with free massages, live saxophonists in onesies, and maybe a few too many toddlers.
In New York, the Lululemon yoga pants and Manduka mats were plentiful, as were the suit-wearing poets writing inspirational haikus for morning ravers.
Wherever the city, each morning rave shared one trait: bemused DJs spinning sets for a totally sober crowd. Organizers promise that all of this earnest jumping around will leave you super energized for the work day, but maybe that's the problem.Breakfast raves borrow from a long history of party culture but remove its wasteful excess, turning it into a sterilized exercise regime—a form of bourgeois recreation that ultimately aims to create productive workers. As erstwhile THUMPer Max Pearl pointed out in The New Inquiry:The health rave perpetuates this insidious logic of party-as-steam valve, positioning the warehouse as a "second world" where attendants can momentarily shirk off the repressive mores of civil society. Whereas hardcore party culture is built atop a tangle of tensions and ambiguities—pleasure/pain, health/death, work/relaxation—the health rave flattens that dynamic world into a childlike vision of untarnished utopia. It produces a self-aware facsimile of a familiar form ("let's play rave!"), one that excises both the pleasure and and the pain of excess. Unlike its more devilish nighttime analogue, the health rave doesn't require that its proponents submit to a "strenuous regime of bliss"; in fact, there's nothing strenuous about the experience. By eliminating the hard work and stress associated with an average night at the rave (it only lasts four hours; anyone can get in; nobody's going to rob you on your way home) it ironically opens the form up to a different kind of regime—the regime of productivity.As every raver knows, partying is hard work. But mabye we shouldn't have to party just to get through work?Read More: I Woke Up at 6AM to Take Yoga and Dance I Went to a Breakfast Rave with a Bunch of Babies and Hippie Weirdos We Went to LA's First Breakfast RaveMichelle Lhooq is THUMP's Features Editor.
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Wherever the city, each morning rave shared one trait: bemused DJs spinning sets for a totally sober crowd. Organizers promise that all of this earnest jumping around will leave you super energized for the work day, but maybe that's the problem.Breakfast raves borrow from a long history of party culture but remove its wasteful excess, turning it into a sterilized exercise regime—a form of bourgeois recreation that ultimately aims to create productive workers. As erstwhile THUMPer Max Pearl pointed out in The New Inquiry:The health rave perpetuates this insidious logic of party-as-steam valve, positioning the warehouse as a "second world" where attendants can momentarily shirk off the repressive mores of civil society. Whereas hardcore party culture is built atop a tangle of tensions and ambiguities—pleasure/pain, health/death, work/relaxation—the health rave flattens that dynamic world into a childlike vision of untarnished utopia. It produces a self-aware facsimile of a familiar form ("let's play rave!"), one that excises both the pleasure and and the pain of excess. Unlike its more devilish nighttime analogue, the health rave doesn't require that its proponents submit to a "strenuous regime of bliss"; in fact, there's nothing strenuous about the experience. By eliminating the hard work and stress associated with an average night at the rave (it only lasts four hours; anyone can get in; nobody's going to rob you on your way home) it ironically opens the form up to a different kind of regime—the regime of productivity.As every raver knows, partying is hard work. But mabye we shouldn't have to party just to get through work?Read More: 
