Culture

Queeroes 2019: How Eris Drew and Christine McCharen-Tran Find Healing In Dance Music


Eventually I moved to New York City right after, because I was in love with music and I was starting to get into DJ culture.

ED: Gee, I didn’t think I would have a career in music until like a year ago.

CMT: Same!

ED: Music was always just a big part of my life and how I explored the world. My mother’s appreciation for antiques was definitely something that got me interested in the relationship between human beings and matter. I liked to manipulate my grandfather’s player piano was I was young — I always had a fascination with sound, but not in ways my family would recognize as musical sound. [laughs]

I used to babysit, I was like 12, and I would listen to the radio at this one couple’s place whose kids I watched, and after the kids would go to bed, I would stay up listening to Chicago dance music radio on their speakers at a very low volume. It was the late 80s and dance music had just hit the radio. It was a pretty futuristic sound, so that music captured my imagination, and I’ve never been the same.

What do you feel it means to create space or be inclusive a music community?

CMT: Inclusivity is such a general word, but for me my passion point is the infrastructure of music, and seeing how not only people on stage are represented and seen, but also thomse behind the scenes. Like people who book festivals, agents, managers, all these people who will hopefully support a diverse group of artists, as well as having more people get into a space to have agency to make decisions. Hopefully we grow beyond just being diverse in lineups.

ED: I agree with Christine wholeheartedly. Diverse festival lineups are important, but it is literally one part of a long list of things that are necessary to make good events feel inclusive.

I’ve actually tried to define this for my own events, and I get asked this sometimes, and it’s something that every artist and promoter should sit down to think about. One example is thinking how body imagery is used. How can events feel inclusive to anyone if all the body imagery is white or cisgender?

It’s also about anti-harassment. Your events have to be pro-sex worker. Inclusivity would include throwing events in spaces that are accessible for people with disabilities. That’s the broad view people need to have, to be on these minute levels of detail. Event organizations have to include people of color at all levels, and that means the security staff, the building owners, the promoters, the sponsors, everything. We haven’t come very far.

CMT: What you’re talking about is very real. It gets complex when we talk about accessibility on many levels.

ED: Yeah, there aren’t many opportunities to talk about this stuff. One issue we have in the scene right now is that a lot of these events are not accessible to the local communities where they happen. That’s not good.

I also feel like no one in the industry knows how to use they, their pronouns. This whole scene has a lot of queer energy, and lot of it is non-binary people making incredible art, and the scene needs to fucking change fast.



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.