San Francisco Lovefest @ Market and 4th St., 9-23-06

The Love Parade, a massive party celebrating electronic music and dance, started out in Berlin in 1989. It quickly became a phenomenon and exported to other cities worldwide. San Francisco, never one to miss an event, caught on to become the American nucleus for Love. But then rave culture started to die out, electronica lost its fad status, and the original Love Parade was cancelled due to financial problems. Fortunately, it was resurrected in Berlin this year and still lives on in Acapulco, Santiago and Tel Aviv. It's still going strong here in San Francisco as Lovefest, attracting crowds in the tens of thousands. So on Saturday, the dark suits downtown were replaced with parachute pants and neon rainbow necklaces. Float after massive float crept down Market Street on buses and flatbed trucks. Girls in vinyl halter tops tossed out handfuls of confetti and laminated postcards. Everyone danced together along the curbs to whatever was being offered that minute: house, drum ‘n bass, techno, jungle, trance. People in T-shirts and jeans mixed in with people in ten-inch heels and twelve-inch wigs. Anything went and everything did. For two hours, it was 1999 again, and the whole world was a neverending party. The only things that mattered were how hard you could dance and how incredible your outfit was. The gentrified length of Market was a musty warehouse in the middle of nowhere. The sunlight on a clear day was our drug. And we all still believed for a few glorious moments that we could dance away our pre-millennium tension in a storm of glitter and glow sticks. * MP3: "Block Rockin' Beats" - Chemical Brothers from Dig Your Own Hole [Buy it] * MP3: "Out of Control" - Chemical Brothers from Surrender [Buy it] * MP3: "Brown Paper Bag" - Roni Size and Reprazent from New Forms [Buy it] * Event Website: San Francisco Lovefest 2006