Damn.... these people always ruin the fun or is it the press that made it sounds bad..

i guess when he interviewing, it did happen cause he wrote that:

"And this was literally seconds after a security guard assured us that the rockers and shufflers almost never caused trouble."



Oh well those fame, glory seekers had successfully killed the malaysia scene. mission completed.

yeh spotted that story, pretty extreme.

Is this the sort of thing that happens a lot, or just because the media were there, and they were showing off?

sum said its happen every saturday there. the scene is now fcked up and down, left and right.

hehe, that's some way to put it

can stop the globe from rotating...

I've never seen it happened before, all of this is new to me, with me coming back to Malaysia and all.. but.. wow.

Haaaahaha, I can see why we dislike authorities. :3

This was a difficult issue in the oldskool.

The battles came from the bboy culture, and in the early 1990's it got very nasty with the rise of gangsta rap.

Shuffle culture is generally a friendly one. It grew at the same time the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall was pulled down. We'd had enough for-real fighting and all of us had grown up with the Super powers USA and USSR forcing us to choose one side or the other. Along with choosing came the threat that, the other side would then kill us as 'the enemy'.

There was no neutral, you couldn't say you don't want to choose. For instance Melbourne had sided with USA and in the late 60's early 70's 18 year old guys were conscripted into the Australian army to go to Vietnam and kill 'the enemy'. I objected and refused to fight. if you did that, you would be called a traitor to your counrty, a coward, and you would be sent to jail for 2 years with hard labour.

But a lot of us objected, both in Australia and USA, and eventually the troops were withdrawn. But it took another 15 years and our global rejection of the continual threats of nuclear war from both sides, and the planet becoming a radio active wasteland, before the cold war was finally stopped.

So the Shuffle began at the end of this. It was a victory dance. We just wanted to have fun and dance. There was no attraction to violence, either for real or as a show.

BUT... there's always a BUT isn't there

We had the Freedom to Express thing which we see today as Dance to 'Express not Impress' which really means - you can dance how you like, be yourself.

So the 'BUT' was, what if some want to be violent or battle - because that is what they are like and that is how they express themselves?

How do you have the freedom to express then, if you are going to say you can only express 'niceness' ?

Melbourne has a really big goth shuffle community, and it is very theatrical, walking around the streets in full costume with fake blood, wounds etc, and we know it's all a bit of fun, we don't take it seriously...well the goths do, but as art.

We found that a life time of stress wondering whether today would be the day that the nuclear war started, and we in melbourne would die from radiation poisoning before we got home from school, took a long time to wear off, years and years.

Part of our therapy was to dance, dress up have fun, have parties. But we also had a dark theatrical side, which helped express our life of cold war pain, it was like a funeral, where even the dead can rise and have fun. Like saying even if the bombs do drop then we'll have fun in the afterlife...

Check out what we looked like. 600 goths spending a year to make their costumes and parade around in a charity ball, it was $65 (1994/5) and sold out 9 months in advance.

Goths dress and dance to IMPRESS that is their EXPRESSION, so the 'Express not Impress' rule really fell apart, and people just made up their own rules, which lead to a 'there are no rules' mainly because, everybody just ignored them as we discovered new things with our new freedom.

This vid has excerpts from my TV show called TOE - Theory Of Everything, which to me was a more accurate 'rule' for the Shuffle Oldskool underground - anything goes, there were no boundaries.



But the unspoken rule was anything but violence, war and battles goes. Everybody in melbourne knew what we meant, we didn't have to say it.

But some of these guys couldn't shake it off, they were in their late 20's and this sort of cold war agression was part of their youth culture, it was big when they were 17, but 10 years later it was 'over' The new youth generation wanted happy friendly parties, where we felt safe and could make new friends. The older generation said we were wimps and real men fought wars and battles

So we just ignored them, they were just attention seekers and on 'power trips' just like those clubbers who wanted to ban the Shuffle

But we had defeated the super powers with all their nuclear bombs and racist hatred of each other, so a couple of dickheads mouthing off were pretty easy to ignore.

Check out this party with such a fight between two guys totally wasted having a drunken brawl over a crate of replica military assault rifles. They were still living in the cold war past.

So we used our Freedom To Express rule to say - "Well each to their own, that's the price of freedom. But we are also free to have nothing to do with them, free to express our own opinion, free to say we are unimpressed, and free to walk away from them and get on with having the fun the way we want."


Urban Disturbance 1994


It was around this 1994/95 era of the oldskool, it became obvious that our Shuffling was more than about just dancing at a party, it was about a new way of living, it was an expression of freedom and tolerance, but our tolerance only went so far, we didn't tolerate hatred, racism or aggression.

When the bboys had this stuff explained to them, they realised what was going on. They knew nothing else, their bboy culture was all they knew, and they thought that's all there was to life. That's why so many bboys became shufflers in the oldskool, the whole 80's bboy thing had collapsed in melbourne by the time of the fight video, these guys were the last of them.

Paradoxically, we also had a taste for the theatre of macabre, and S+M/bondage shuffle clubs where willing patrons could have their body hair burnt off them as a sexual fetish in a Shuffle club called Hellfire, while people shuffled.

Here's a 1994 interview with Manny (Sanchez) a co-owner of the club called Dream which had the Hellfire night. It also had a lot of other nights too, even one which had 'brain machines' which Manny calls computers in 1994, which were online chat rooms/forums for patrons at the club to use.




SO you can see, we're a pretty complicated Shuffle culture in Melbourne, and not everything about the Shuffle is going to be appropriate for other cultures, but some of it will.

Now that the Shuffle is global, it's got much more complicated and that's the stage we're in now, trying to figure out how we can have Freedom to dance as we please, but also include our own culture.

So some cultures may be more extroverted than others, some cultures may be in authoritarian countries or police states, were some of this freedom will be met with real and serious opposition - and jail or execution (no I'm not joking)

So it's a challenge, but we can work it out