I’m not sure which stage of grief includes flailing through dimly recalled choreography for the Macarena beneath a strobe lit wax statue of Calvin Harris, his sallow fingers reaching eternally for an EQ knob while his glassy eyes lift skyward toward the god who never should have allowed such a creation. But I recommend it.
So went my Thursday night at Madame Tussauds in Times Square—New York’s finest tourist emporium of six-foot celebrity candles—for the launch of their silent disco series. The party doubled as an unveiling of their new Harris figure and so, conceptually, was “headlined” by him—a move that didn’t feel generous, exactly, given how little the average EDM DJ is assumed to toil onstage. “Calvin” presided over an EQ console in a vaguely Mediterranean-themed courtyard, LEDs flashing furiously above his static form. Elsewhere in this terracotta wonderland, Johnny Depp, P. Diddy, Kate Winslet, Brad Pitt, and other false idols supervised our dancing with great solemnity; Annie Leibovitz lifted her camera toward one girl’s particularly good Nae Nae. Meanwhile, on a balcony above, three (living, breathing) DJs beamed EDM, rap, and soca directly into our wireless headphones, their sets inaudible with those removed, and flung glow sticks into the crowd, occasionally smacking Lenny Kravitz in his frozen face.
I would call this whole display “inexplicable,” but there had been an awful lot of premeditation leading to it. Not on the good lady Tussaud’s end, necessarily—though creating a wax doppelgänger is quite labor-intensive, taking a full 800 hours from first sketch to finished nightmare fodder—but on mine. The invitation had landed on my desk three weeks prior, a red lanyard imitative of a VIP festival badge, depicting two wide-eyed, presumably alive youths dancing beside the freshly carved “Calvin,” ecstatic in this glimpse into the uncanny valley. (The hashtag #whatthefun was also deployed, along with the promise of future wax party hosts “Kylie Jenner” and “Conor McGregor.”) The pass enjoyed a few minutes of riffing from coworkers—the topic of wax boyfriends, and all the possible upgrades inherent, proved rich soil—and then it was buried under a stack of papers, summarily ignored.
But it’s funny, the buoys we find in grief. The next week, deep into a fugue state over family separations at the Texas border, I rediscovered the invitation, and its absurdity hit me anew with narcotic force. Three days’ absent serotonin flooded back, clinging to this inane beacon like a cat up a tree. Suddenly, I needed to go to this party—nay, I was destined to go to the wax rave. Not the thoughts of a rational woman, obviously, but so overwhelming was the relief in that moment. The vigilance on Twitter and 5calls.org felt numbing, a nonstop screaming into the void, but here was a stunt so hyperbolically stupid that it pierced the haze and elicited in me a kind of Jack Nicholson bark. “It’s a proud tradition, the pursuit of hedonism in fraught political times,” I reassured myself as I RSVPed. Look at the Great Depression bootleggers or the Summer of Love lysergics or my parents, I guess, because I was born during Reaganism. (We get the psychological coping mechanisms we deserve, you know?)
None of this prepared me for the first 15 minutes at Madame Tussauds, though, which were terrifying. With the courtyard nearly empty besides the VIP statues, their flat wax eyes clearly glimpsing hells indescribable, the whole affair took on a real Wes Craven subtext. Plunking on my neon headphones, I was greeted with Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll,” and the memory still makes me want to curl up in the fetal position. In a misguided attempt at journalistic due diligence, I marched up to “Calvin” at his decks and craned my face into his—so close that the real Harris would mace me for it—and then jumped back, spooked to discover that it had been painted with hundreds of individual freckles and pores. Reader, I fled. My guest for the evening, fellow Pitchfork editor Quinn Moreland, and I decamped to another, better lit floor of the museum, where we watched families take selfies with Whoopi Goldberg and hissed at the violently citric Trump scowling behind his Oval Office desk. Wandering through the exhibits, there weren’t a great many musicians represented, aside from an anemic Justin Timberlake and a visibly possessed Pharrell; however, if the $648.86 million annual earnings of Madame Tussauds’ parent company suggests a shared consumer belief that proximity to inauthenticity bests distance from authenticity, then meeting their wax Ed Sheeran is surely its apex.
By the time we returned to the “Calvin” soirée, it had much less of a Vincent Price vibe; in fact, it had blossomed into the best bar mitzvah I’ve never been to. Packed with about 50 people in tight clubwear, this eerie space now had an air of guileless enthusiasm. Robert Pattinson had a glow stick around his neck, possibly bestowed by the two girls twerking on him. Patrons were downing Madame Tussauds specialty cocktails, frozen margaritas sweet enough to strip paint. And in the three different headphone channels blasted silly crowd-pleasers ranging from the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” theme to “Y.M.C.A.” to “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)”—each song seemingly shrieked by the whole room, the swaddling sensation of the silent disco headphones inversely coaxing us to be louder. Now I can say, after decades of teen movies unfairly raising my expectations, I have finally seen spontaneous, synchronized dancing erupt en masse (to “the Cupid Shuffle”). I saluted the hand-to-god conga line that erupted during the “Cha-Cha Slide,” a sight nearly as entertaining as the profound confusion on the faces of a German family who stumbled into our party sans headphones. I watched a succession of gymnastic women drop it on an immobile P. Diddy and realized with a jolt that I’d acclimated so much to my surroundings, I half-expected Diddy to burst to life and grind back, like a raunchy Pygmalion reboot.
During the floor-shaking spin through “Bodak Yellow”—in which the bartender incited everyone at the counter to wild moves that, once again, got poor Lenny Kravitz slapped—I tipped back another mango margarita, blissfully. I’d been to few dance parties of such absent pretension, and even fewer where unfamiliar men didn’t try to introduce themselves, aggressively groin-first, on the dancefloor. (After all, on a primitive level, who really wants to procreate at the wax museum?) The whole night was ridiculous and mystifying and just a dash anthropological—tourism into the heart of tourism—and I was intensely grateful for it.
With the pop of the EDM bubble, stunt staging such as this has been pushed to its most insistent heights in mainstream dance culture—an ever-more-present grasping at straws. Meanwhile, unyielding stunts themselves are the new American norm, accelerating us even further from decency. When we’re lucky, these dramatics simply rear their heads in our dance parties, beseeching us to suspend our boredom in a sort of “managed fun” blitz until the next (even louder) calamity turns our heads. These endless past two years have taught us to fight off hyperbole as the norm. But once in awhile, dare I say: You can find hope in a lifeless place.
