My grandmother died a month before this happened. I had a pile of regrets I hadn’t dealt with. The kind that sit in your chest and make every small thing feel like a referendum on your entire life.
Then I got rejected at the Basement door in Brooklyn.
Not for anything dramatic. Just the standard gatekeeping play — you don’t look right, you don’t know the right people, you’re not on the list. The usual power trip that passes for curation in the NYC underground scene.
On a normal night I would have gone home. But I was carrying grief and anger and a bunch of accumulated frustration about a scene that claimed to be inclusive while running the most exclusive doors in the city. So I went home and wrote a shitpost.
The shitpost was about door politics in the underground scene. How the same people who preach community gatekeep harder than any velvet-rope club in Manhattan. How the “underground” is just another hierarchy with different aesthetics. It was honest. It was angry. And it was very, very public.
That post opened me up to a cancel war I’m still technically in the middle of.
The Bushwick crowd came for me. People I’d never met had opinions. The identity politics faction decided I was a trojan horse — not queer, not Colombian (like most of the hard techno scene), not a liberal. They treated me like I’d infiltrated something sacred by simply showing up and having a take.
Here’s what they didn’t anticipate: the cancel war became a tribal formation mechanism.
Everyone who was tired of moral grandstanding by a small minority — the people who just wanted to go to dark, heavy parties without a purity test at the door — started gravitating toward the account. The boycott generated more supporters than any marketing campaign could have. Because the truth is, most people in this scene are centrists who don’t care about politics enough to boycott a whole community over a meme.
The sequence was clean in retrospect. Grandmother dies. Regrets pile up. Get rejected at the Basement. Write a shitpost from a place of genuine pain. Trigger a cancel war. Find the real tribe.
That’s the origin story nobody asks about. SLIST didn’t start from a business plan or a passion for event production. It started because a venue door told me I wasn’t good enough to enter. And instead of accepting that verdict, I decided to build something that makes the gatekeepers irrelevant.
The cancel war taught me something the scene veterans already knew: there are two types of people. People who are constantly looking for a reason to cry — who I don’t want at my events anyway. And centrists who just want to dance to hard music without anyone policing their identity. The first group left. The second group stayed and brought friends.
9 months after the shitpost: no apologies, no atonement, no rebrand. Booking more DJs in a day than most of my critics combined in a year. Bigger crowds. Higher quality events. More investment into the local scene.
The gatekeeping that tried to exclude me created the motivation to build an institution that excludes the gatekeepers. That’s not spite talking. That’s architecture.