Last year I wrote about how DJing at East Bay Bike Party was a joyful way to contribute to the community, which feels important in these times even though Bike Party lacks an agenda.
Working on my Best of 2025 playlist, I reflected on how things played out during the year. I wound up making 10 out of 12 Bike Parties, the most I’ve done in a year. I learned a ton about music that was new to me, particularly D.C. Go-Go and K-Pop, both of which have fascinating connections to social movements.
I personally built deeper connections within the community, one of which led to me DJing a wedding at Children’s Fairyland, definitely a highlight of the year.
I also got further into my work with the Distributed Sound Collective, which provides infrastructural support for protest actions. Sharing space with powerful activists is a great counter to despair, and an easy way for me to contribute to the resistance. The high point of those efforts was DJing a dance party on Sproul Plaza as a counter-protest to Turning Point USA’s event at Zellerbach.
That action was prompted by student groups who wanted to deflect any possibility that violent clashes could feed into narratives that would embolden our fascists. It wasn’t the most amazing dance party, but the event succeeded in achieving its goals; the only violence observed was from one right-wing asshole who started a fight and lost.
(It was instructive seeing how little interest the on-site TV news crews had in what the students were doing. As soon as they realized our goal was good vibes, the cameras went elsewhere to see if they could find some violence.)
This year I also witnessed a ton of mutual aid within the Bike Party community, as a number of prominent individuals were hit by cars, injured, or had family or housing crises. The community stepped up to support its own.
The joy, alone, is enough reason to keep it rolling in 2026. But I think what I’m observing is, within a creative community, joy is generative. Innovators will find ways to use joy to deepen community and further community goals. And every time I participate in one of these events, whether it’s Bike Party, or a wedding, or whatever’s going to come next in the Bay Area’s resistance to fascism, I feel a little less despair at the state of the world.
I attended a protest de-escalation training where the icebreaker prompt was, “How are we like a hive?” My favorite answer was, “We communicate by dancing.”
That said, here’s my Bike Party Best of 2025 playlist, you will find something to dance to on it. Catch up with Booty on any second Friday in 2026!
* Apologies for using Spotify, but I haven’t found another good way to share a playlist so people can listen to it.
