At first glance, there was nothing unusual brewing outside Pacha the recent Friday night David Guetta held a few thousand clubgoers in the palm of his hand. The lines customarily snaked down 46th Street in both directions, which meant my companion that evening and I needed to run the guest list gauntlet to avoid an hour-long entrance that had all the visible movement of grass growing. We made it inside without distress, although a subsequent line of people waiting inside to be confirmed could have tipped us off to the spectacle unfolding behind the final set of doors that remained our final barrier to entry.
Nah. We'd seen Pacha at its most boisterous many times over. We gladly took it all in stride, blithely looking forward to a few hours of global anthems from Paris' most affable export since… wait, Parisians are affable?
If only we knew what was waiting behind that door.
From the moment we entered Pacha proper until our exit several hours later than anticipated, the experience was momentous. Foremost, it was notably different than the bridge-and-tunnel New Yorkers who are a mainstay at Pacha during sets by hometown heroes like Jonathan Peters, Erick Morillo and Boris, or the still faithful followers of godfathers Danny Tenaglia and Junior Vasquez. The assembly for Guetta was younger, more polished, and, hard to believe, possibly even more enthusiastic than the regulars of the weekly residency era.
Sign number one: a mass of human resistance as soon as the main door opened. Not angry, not pushy: just a room so saturated with bodies that it took the airing of an entire song to wriggle from one wall to its opposite. And this was one of upstairs floors. The all-too-familiar riff from Robin S' "Show Me Love," recently resurrected for the umpteenth time, had given way to a Bob Sinclar-sounding anthem (based on the scientific formula of Steve Edwards + jangly acoustic guitars = requisite Sinclar summer vibe) which in turn gave way to Guetta turning the volume off completely. Pacha suddenly filled with a rousing choir of surrogates belting their hearts out. We didn't even know the song. And, it's important to note, we know everything.
I have never seen Pacha so overflowing with life, and what was already an extremely high bar was immediately reset.
This camaraderie has been witnessed many times before around the world, but what was startling about taking it in that particular night was that, for me at least, it represented a changing of the guard: in generational terms for sure (I am now officially part of the last era who came of age) but also in tone. Although Pacha is normally open into the morning, the late shift of Guetta's appearance was not marked by the hardcore, drug-fueled afterhours crowd that was once as much a part of the local landscape as the Yankees and street meat, but which has since consolidated into a much smaller and more specific tribe. No, in fact, with their eyes fixated on the blonde, shaggy-haired Frenchman elevated a half-story above them in the booth, these kids behaved as if they were at a the most important rock concert of their lives, giving it up for the band that changes everything they thought they knew. This crowd had a few drinks earlier in the evening but largely retained its composure; they displayed none of the signs of agitation that can set in at the tail end of a long night when people just start getting in the way. Maybe it was because they simply couldn't be bothered; they were busy shouting to the top at any given opportunity. Songs, real songs with hit-you-over-the-head hooks and appeal far beyond the dancefloor, have returned to "serious" clubland en masse. (See Guetta's own "Love Is Gone," which is finally a budding U.S. radio hit a year after its release, for just one example).
Which brings us to Guetta himself. Abetted by Pacha's formidable and currently unsurpassed resources (a sound system that pushes boundaries at both ends, a room both big and intimate, and all-the-bells production—lights in every color, combination and direction, wildly costumed performers, and an old-school foghorn) he provided the throng with an unrelenting selection of hands-in-the-air anthems that for years were included as a minority among darker, tougher instrumentals in American clubs, or that had fallen province more to gay clubs. It's another sign of an empirical shift in the United States of Clubland (although New York always retained more song for its buck than most American cities).
