The big one

Bring out the boas and hot pants – Love Parade is back in town.

By Marke B.

FOR ANY HAPLESS , bewildered vacationers to the Bay Area this weekend, here's a quick guide to just what in holy heck's going on here. The half-naked weirdos prancing about in mangy fun-fur, fuchsia boas, velvet hot pants, skin-tight spandex, and glitter-streaked cleavage will be at the giant Love Parade on Saturday. The half-naked weirdos prancing about in mangy fun-fur, fuchsia buttocks, leather hot pants, skin-tight latex, and spittle-soaked crotches will be at the giant Folsom Street Fair on Sunday. And very probably, the half-naked weirdos prancing about in all of the above will be at my house on Monday, demanding orange Popsicles and praying for a swift recovery. Now that's the digital photo you should be sending back to poor Cousin Irma in Toledo.

It's probably best to leave the Folsom Street Fair to the imagination (where I often wish some of the more flab-jiggly, Gollum-pale exhibitionists I've seen masturbating at it could have remained). Let's just say it's one of those times when everyone shines their little light brightest. But the raucous, sprawling mayhem of Love Parade San Francisco is only just entering its sophomore year, and many interested residents or couch-surfing Burning Man leftovers may still be in the dark about it. Which would be too bad, because it's kind of fricking awesome.

What is Love Parade? Well, besides a gargantuan foot-stomping, whistle-blowing miasma that will cover a good chunk of Market Street and the Civic Center with over 50 DJs, 30 handmade floats, thousands of beaming grins, and 100 or so improvised dance floors (plus tons of pre- and after-parties), it's also great timing for San Francisco, and pretty damn important in terms of pop-culture history. Dr Motte's original Love Parade sprang up in 1989 in Berlin, just as the wall was falling, when heart-racing, angular music produced by computers was the perfect apolitical anthem to unite Europe's propaganda-weary youth. Techno then was a spontaneous art form, created with cobbled-together junk boxes and filtered through Korg midi wires into rickety track mixers. This was pre-Internet, when unregulated technology was still suspected of fascist leanings, but Berliners were willing to take that risk and embrace their computer love, partly because of the irony, but mostly because techno was good evidence of a grassroots ingenuity and artistic spirit that Germany really needed to believe in.

Well, that's the lofty explanation. When I went in 1993, shilling for several Detroit record labels, the party had grown from 1,500 to 30,000 attendees and had enough tits on display to fill a SuperBowl stadium. In America this would be considered a Monsters of Rock tour. In Europe it was just downright odd. It was clear that Europeans wanted to get their groove on in more ways than one – where we geeks in the States preferred small, secret, underground rendezvous, the nascent European Union wanted techno girls gone wild, gang bang style. I didn't get much done that weekend, needless to say. But I like to think I lent a hand to German reunification efforts. Nowadays over a million people per year head to the event, which has attained some of the tarnished bloat such large, regular things always acquire, so launching a San Francisco branch makes for a nice, refreshing experiment, despite the lower melon turnout.

What Love Parade is not: almost nothing. Sure, it cleaves loyally to its philosophy of promoting DJ-driven, electronically derived sounds, but at this point that can include anything from underground hip-hop to Japanese pop, from Burning Man's vaudeville calliope to electroclash's sneering stratocaster. Hell, 10-to-1 some Celtic-tattooed wise guy will throw on a mashup of "Hollaback Girl" over "Strawberry Fields" this year just to fuck with our heads a little. They can do that with computers now.

The jubilant mob thronging last year's inaugural route proved a few things straight up. Despite its recent expulsion from our dance floors by the mighty hand of the '80s, there's still a vital electronic dance music scene snaking its way through Bay Area iPods and house parties. There's also a whole generation of neglected ex-ravers ripening for some smart promoter's plucking, eager to relive the frantic nights they can't remember and the days that form-fitting fashions forgot. But mostly there was, yes, the love. Who knows where it had been incubating all those years (psy-trance gatherings?), but a familiar sense of warm, gooey unselfconsciousness eased its way through the crowd. No, I don't mean ecstasy. Nor GHB. No stars, no trends, no wardrobe issues – dude, it was just, like, a great party.

Not that the love part should have been so surprising – we basically own the patent on it, after all – but the Love Parade debut did much to reboot the Bay Area's sagging party spirit. For starters, the promoters did a great job making sure there was enough musical wiggle room to accommodate everyone's personal Love Parade trip – not an easy task in San Francisco's nitpicky style climate, where the slightest shift in music or fashion can spawn a flurry of panic-bred microtrends, insuring no more than 12 people are into the exact same thing at one time. Can anyone really say now why it was once imperative to put the phrase "jungle, breakbeats, two-step, tribal, eclectic, analogue, beatbox, bass and electro" on a flyer, other than to stoke our jones for cutting-edge diversity? We like to call ourselves unique, into our own thing. If that meant sometimes jungle but never tribal, then that's how it was.

But by this time last year, there'd been a lot of fudging on the dance music scene. People had exhausted a few interchangeable syllables (beat-something, break-something, bass-something, go!) on jingles that didn't quite exist yet, pimping voodoo genealogies of echt-o-tech straw men, mixed pharmaceuticals, avant-garde carpetbaggers, and tarted-up local flavas. The overhyped inbreeding finally got so nuts (I think "illbient bliptronics" spelled the end of the bloodline) that the culture cops whipped out their bop guns, forced every microgenre son of a bleep to marry his kissing cousins, and bussed the whole damn mess off to something called Electronica, just past the Hip-Hop exit ramp to Alternativeville. Out here in Electronica, we's all relative.

That's why the decision to launch a Love Parade San Francisco couldn't have come at a better time. Love Parade SF's president, Joshua Smith, harnessed the potential of this new übergenre, keeping the dance floors democratic by having 20 styles going at once in a space that forced them to bleed into one another – which is pretty brilliant, since all that techno shit sounds the same to me anyway. Kidding. The alchemy continues this year, with a lineup that includes the rapid-fire urban spasms of DJ Onionz, stadium-sized techno rock from Crystal Method, Carl Cox's brand of DC circuit hardcore, Soulsalaam's soothing knob twists, the zombie shuffle of Paul Van Dyke, Goldie's gob-stopping riddles, several rockin' female representatives of the young candy-raver revival, and, gee, there's just too many names here. I'm so glad we're over the whole superstar DJ thing, aren't you? Everybody's worth giving a little listen to, whether they sport those goofy Gucci superstar DJ shades or not.

Of course, the communitarian aspect of the event helps glue these several collided clubland worlds together as well: Love Parade's not so much put on as put around, absorbing creative chaos rather than directing it. There will be giant break-dancing chickens. There will be zoned-out OG hippie trash-duty volunteers. There will be pirate ships on Market Street. There will be wobbly drag queens on stilts. And, as all the varied aspects of the world's most reviled yet most ubiquitous musical genre continue to meld together, you know there'll be the love there too, knocking on yo' fat backdoor.

Love Parade San Francisco takes place Sat/24. Opens 11 a.m., Market and Second Sts, SF; parade begins 1 p.m., travels to Civic Center. www.loveparadesf.org.

Marke B. will be in the second-to-last Port-a-John on the left all weekend. He writes the Bay Guardian's biweekly Super Ego clubs column.