How Toronto is returning to radical nightlife, despite the odds

By Kinza Zafar

“I never saw myself getting to the place that I am now,” says Nooria Alam, a Toronto-based Queer Afghan DJ who learned to spin on a “dinky $50 Numark” for fun. 

“I started DJ-ing house parties…and then it kind of snowballed from there,” she says. Alam, who goes by Heebiejabi on the decks, soon realized the political potential that her new hobby had, whether it was through material action like raising funds for a community organization or playing a gig to amplify a particular social issue. 

Since their 2018 start, Alam has performed sets for community organizations such as Fierté dans la Capitale Pride in Ottawa and Maggie’s Toronto Sex Workers Action Project, and at fundraiser events benefiting the Toronto Community Justice Fund, the Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance and several Palestine-centred initiatives. “I think of music [and] dance as political. I’ve been lucky enough to support a few acts and organizations who do throw parties, but also raise funds for Palestine, or are Palestinian themselves.”

Alam’s DJ journey is part of a much larger, deeply entrenched history in which music —particularly dance music — has given voice to resistance. Disco music, which derives from Black genres such as funk and soul, gained major cultural prominence among Queer, Trans and racialized communities in U.S. cities like Detroit and Chicago throughout the 70s. This uprising sparked the infamous 1979 ‘disco demolition night,’ when disco vinyl records were set ablaze by the crate, by mostly straight, white men. Across the pond, the anti-Thatcherite acid house movement took root and techno made its way into the ears of young Berliners before the fall of the wall. 

From dubstep in Istanbul to psytrance in Shanghai and gqom in South Africa, electronic dance music culture has become increasingly globalized since the 90s, in tandem with the rise of the internet, according to Matthew Collin in the book Rave on: Global adventures in electronic dance music. Dance music — broadly described as electronically produced rhythmic sounds, often with loops, played loudly at social events dedicated to dancing — is intrinsically Black, Brown and Queer. As Blair Black writes in the article The Queer of Color Sound Economy in Electronic Dance Music, “The sampling of music genres and the use of edit styles employed by Queer communities of color is a generative space to examine how minoritarians articulate the intersections of music, identity, and community.”

Seemingly overnight, everyone Alam knew became a DJ. They note how some new events heating up in the dance music scene — especially those curated under the guise of inclusivity — can fail to live up to their political aspirations. For Alam, the reality of curating a meaningful event lies in keeping it centred on its intended community. 

As she puts it, “Music, dance [and] nightlife have been pivotal in terms of being a place where Queer, Trans, Black [people and] POC have felt safe and comfortable being themselves.” But nightlife can also be “very divisive,” they say, as the politics within the scene continue to shift.

“Part of the discourse [now] is people co-opting ‘joy is resistance, existence is resistance.’” On one hand, the dance floor has become a way for people to mobilize and galvanize political discourse and awareness. On the other hand, corporate interests increasingly permeate the rave scene and the appropriation of resistance sprawls nightlife. 

Alam says they’ve witnessed many instances where people bring a keffiyeh — an embroidered scarf symbolizing solidarity with Palestinian liberation — to events and “wave it around” without engaging in any material acts of resistance. 

Their observations of performativity align with what transpired at a free Boiler Room event in Toronto on Jan. 30, sponsored by Samsung to promote their new Galaxy smartphones. Two weeks before the rave, the global party platform — which has long held a reputation for being synonymous with underground electronic music — was bought by Superstruct Entertainment, a company owned by investment firm KKR & Co. The investment company reportedly funnels tens of millions of dollars into Israeli companies and war weapon manufacturers. 

Following the event’s announcement, social media posts calling for a boycott of Boiler Room’s event began circulating. A post from community organization Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction announced a protest would be held outside the venue one day prior to the event. It read, “Bring your flags, banners, and drums. Let’s let attendees know what they are supporting and investing in and ask those arriving to the event to boycott and join the BDS movement. Stand with Indigenous Land Defenders. Stand with PAL£$TlN£.” The last word, “Palestine,” was spelled using alternative characters in the post’s caption so as not to get ‘shadow-banned’ by Meta.

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement is a global campaign aiming to put economic pressure on Israel. The Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) is a founding arm of BDS and seeks to challenge Israeli apartheid specifically in academic and cultural spaces — like nightlife. 

Despite its last-minute announcement, dozens of Palestinians, their allies and Indigenous community members — along with an estimated 20 surveilling Toronto police officers — gathered outside the west-end warehouse hosting Boiler Room’s RSVP-then-wait-to-be-accepted rave. Among them was Eve Saint, a Wet’suwet’en land defender who brought her two “little ones” to speak at the protest. 

“KKR is one of our targets,” explains Saint in an interview with CanCulture Magazine, noting its multi-billion-dollar investment in the Coastal Gas Link (CGL) pipeline that threatens Wet’suwet’en land, water, air and people. In 2020, Saint — the daughter of a Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief — was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for participating in a blockade against the CGL pipeline. She reportedly sang the women’s warrior song while officers removed her from the site. According to Cultural Survival, the song has become a “symbol of healing and strength” that addresses the imbalance of power across the gender spectrum.’

“Having a free event, owned by KKR and just trying to get more folks to come…It’s really tricky because KKR is involved in a lot,” she says. KKR invests in hospitals, real estate and infrastructure assets, as well as media and tech companies worldwide. In addition to funding the CGL pipeline in Canada and owning war weapons manufacturers, their portfolio includes data centres, a property management platform and a digital content platform — all in Israel.

Saint says it’s important for Indigenous communities across Turtle Island to stand with Indigenous peoples in Palestine. “It’s all colonialism. It’s all [an] attack on the people and the children, and it’s all in the name of land theft and theft of resources,” she says. 

Saint recalls someone walking past the demonstrators and entering the venue while donning a keffiyeh. During the rave, Instagram videos surfaced that showed several Boiler Room attendees, including  a DJ among the lineup, waving keffiyehs in the air and dancing to Mohammed Assaf’s “Dammi Falastini.” Some were holding signs calling to “FREE GAZA” and even waving a Palestinian flag. “I thought that was pretty funny…when I heard that people were in there and throwing up their keffiyehs,” says Saint. “Do you know who’s speaking outside?”

On the sidewalk where Saint and other Indigenous community members spoke about Indigenous sovereignty and solidarity with Palestinians, demonstrators held up a large banner with red handprints and a painted keffiyeh pattern reading “Boiler Room’s parent company KKR funds genocide” and red dresses hung on a fence close by read the acronym for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women,  Girls and Two-Spirit people.

Nazanin Zarepour, who organizes with the Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) in Toronto, emphasizes that no amount of “visual gestures” or “wagging of a Palestinian flag” will change what material resistance looks like. “The material act would have been to withdraw… It doesn’t put pressure on KKR to wave a Palestinian flag.” 

Two corporate-sponsored events in Toronto have been the most notable within the discourse of the “elite capture of nightlife,” according to Zarepour. One is the aforementioned night of Jan. 30 at Boiler Room, and the other is Porsche SCOPES — an arts festival and global party series sponsored by German automobile manufacturer Porsche that made its way to the city in October 2024. 

On October 26, 2024, the Instagram pages for WAWOG (@wawog_to) and DJs Against Apartheid (@djsagainstapartheid) published a joint post calling for a boycott of a Porsche SCOPES event taking place that same weekend in Toronto. The post recapped the five-day Porsche SCOPES festival in Tel Aviv just two years prior and said that Porsche SCOPES aligns itself with ethnic cleansing, is complicit in pinkwashing and normalizes genocide, apartheid and occupation. 

A comment from WAWOG on their post reads: “Building a cultural front in nightlife under the framework of PACBI will help ensure complicit organizations like this are easily isolated and avoided well in advance. We are continuing to host PACBI for Nightlife info sessions and workshops to organize the community under shared guidelines towards the liberation of Palestine.” Zarepour says they and their fellow organizers found out about Porsche SCOPES’ involvement with Israel “quite late” but proceeded to post information to raise awareness. 

“There’s this misconception going around that artists who don’t pull out of these events don’t do it because there are repercussions to them pulling out of the event, which is usually not true,” Zarepour explains, adding that the nightlife organizing group they’re in got ahold of previous Boiler Room artist contracts to confirm this. “For the most part, the only thing that happens when you do not perform in an event is you just don’t get the money that you were supposed to receive.”

“There is a strong ideological element to nightlife. There’s something about it that is appealing to people, especially in the Global North, where they can kind of enter a realm of pure joy, hedonism, ecstasy, with complete detachment,” they explain, noting that the idea of nightlife as resistance can rub some people “the wrong way.” 

“In lots of cultures, it is atypical to party in a time of mourning,” Zarepour says that while they can sympathize with those who hold that view, it’s dangerous to allow the dance floor to continue existing as a site of escapism rather than political territory. 

Bars, clubs and rave spaces are places marginalized people frequent often. “Something is being disseminated to them every weekend and if you do not seize that in some way, it becomes a site of escapism, rather than a site of potentially, political messaging,” says Zarepour, who loves experimental music, sampling and parties that incorporate literature. 

“I think there actually needs to be some kind of cultural grappling by people who are political in nightlife to think about, ‘What does it look like for me to politicize my dance floor? What does it look like for me to not open up this space for escapism, but to leave people feeling touched in a significant way?’ Because I think a lot of people do feel touched by going dancing and it’s a matter of being really intentional about what exactly you’re fostering.”

Soon after Israel’s most recent genocide in Gaza began, a global campaign called DJs Against Apartheid popped up online. The group’s start was a “light bulb moment” for Alam during a demoralizing period of time. “We had DJs Against Apartheid come out, and it was very straightforward… It was really cool to see a lot of DJs, big name DJs, sign on to that,” they recall. 

DJs Against Apartheid’s statement reads: “As DJs, producers, collectives, promoters, parties, clubs, festivals, radio stations, and nightlife workers, we join hands with the people of the world and with the heroic people of Palestine to stop this genocidal war and put an end to 75 years of occupation and apartheid… The dance music scene has always been and must continue to be centered around imagining and creating a safer, fairer, and freer world for all people. It is due to this revolutionary and anti-oppressive origin and our commitment to continuing this legacy today, that we, as members of the nightlife community, have a unique responsibility to use our voice, our physical and digital spaces, and our artistic practices to protest apartheid and amplify the just cause of the Palestinian people and their resistance against occupation and oppression.” Following the publication of their mission, over 3,150 DJs, venues, promoters and nightlife workers worldwide have signed onto the campaign.

Yonah Zeitz, a New York City-based organizer with DJs Against Apartheid, says part of the campaign’s efforts is to reconnect nightlife with its very radical and revolutionary roots.

If there’s an event that supports the Israeli genocide, or companies tied to it, DJs and party-goers alike should make a “conscious decision” on whether or not it aligns with their values and the commands made by signing onto DJs Against Apartheid’s statement, says Zeitz. The group has put together several club panels and fundraisers and is organizing a large mutual aid project for two families in Gaza rebuilding their homes. 

“The origins of dance music, particularly in the U.S. coming from, mainly Chicago and Detroit, were Black-led, Queer-led and they were spaces for folks to build community, and be their true, authentic selves…I think it was always very radical; it was always connected to other social movements and other stuff that was happening politically at the time,” says Zeitz.

In Dance Music: A Feminist Account of an Ordinary Culture, RMIT University lecturer and researcher Tami Gadir argues that the dance floor is both a site of resistance and a product of the very systems it seeks to challenge. She writes, “Dance music fans, or at least, those of us who are politically inclined, concerned, and engaged, would need to do something other than pin our hopes on dance floors as sites for such a transformation. We would need to mobilize a utopian vision in mass, organized, direct action.”

Zarepour, as part of WAWOG’s nightlife caucus, has facilitated discussions on the cultural boycott of Israel in nightlife. She notably moderated a panel called ‘No Escapism in a Genocide: What is the political potential of the dance floor.’ “I’m of the opinion that the culture war must be fought everywhere. You can’t leave certain areas to be untouchable,” says Zarepour. “I think we need to reimagine what dance music…or nightlife can look like.”

In April 2024, WAWOG held their No Arms in the Arts Festival — 11 days of counter-programming to the Scotiabank-funded Hot Docs — which consisted of a series of actions, film screenings, talks and DJ sets, including a performance by Heebiejabi. 

Alam says her set on the last day of the No Arms in the Arts Festival was one of the most meaningful they’ve ever played. “It kind of unlocked a lot of potential for myself and so I’m really grateful for that experience.”

As nightlife continues to evolve, the growing commodification of nightlife and co-opting of resistance — amid the war on Gaza and on Trans bodies — makes it clear that the idea of the dance floor being political is a contentious one. Alam says they’ll continue to observe whether people pat themselves on the back for one action and then stop engaging politically or stick around for the liberation movement in the long run. 

“I hope I’m one of those people.”

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