ABSTRACT
Raves and electronic dance music (EDM) clubs are often described, both in the popular press and in scholarly accounts, as a primarily white, middle-class phenomenon (Measham et al. 2001; Yacoubian and Urbach 2004). However, as soon as we started observing and interviewing participants in raves and dance clubs in the San Francisco Bay Area we were immediately struck by the prevalence of Asian Americans in these scenes. While the early rave scene in San Francisco may have been predominantly white, today white and Asian American participants describe the increasing prominence of Asian Americans as a significant turning point in the rave and dance-club scenes. This belies two popular misconceptions. First, that the rave and electronic dance music scenes in the US are completely white-dominated affairs; Asian Americans have generally been ignored or invisible inmedia and scholarly analyses of these scenes. (See Maira 2002 for an important exception and Zhou and J. Lee 2004 for more on Asian American youth studies more generally.) Second, that Asian Americans cannot be drug users. Stereotypes about Asian Americans as a “model minority” tend to preclude an understanding of drug use among Asian American youth and the drug literature has tended to replicate this pattern. The available research data on Asian American drug use is relatively limited in comparison with the availability of research on other major ethnic groups; the available data on Asian American club-drug use is even scantier.
