![]() ![]() “Nobody knew much about the music so they weren’t about to come to deep Brooklyn just to hear it. “Maybe two or three years back, the crowd here was like a little family of electro,” he says. He performs here a handful of times a month and spends off-nights at the bar among the other regulars. I’m going on at 2am.”Īfter performing in a host of Brooklyn-based techno bars, Ginseng’s only regular gig is Bossa. “Tonight will be awesome,” a DJ seated at the bar who refers to himself as Kid Ginseng tells me, donning a primary red snapback. For those spinning this particular brand of steady, bass-reliant techno, Bossa is holy. In addition to wielding their shiny Bossa Nova membership cards - a perk that allows them to forego the weekend cover charge - they spend hours supporting their musical peers and confidantes. Tonight, Bossa Nova is not lined with Sinatra-types, but rather, a host of niche techno and electro DJs who worship the place as the CBGB of its day. But over the course of the last hundred years, the law morphed into a veiled platform for not-so-subtle racism, a justification for exorbitant cover charges at venues with proper licensing, and a dated framework for a city that supposedly never sleeps. So yes, you have likely broken the law, you shimmying hoodlum.Įnacted in 1926, legislation was a paternalistic effort to patrol speakeasies. This meant a crackdown on modest hip-shaking. In a metropolis with some 25,000 venues, barely 100 could host fully sanctioned social dancing. What most of them don’t know is that this is no ordinary Tuesday.įor nearly a century, the city’s tyrannical Cabaret Law forbade dancing in bars without proper licensing. A painted “No Dancing” sign glows white against the back wall, and a gaggle of neighborhood locals take up residence at the bar, sipping IPAs and nodding to reserved electro tracks. A lone DJ occupies the checkered dance floor. Bushwick’s Bossa Nova Civic Club is quiet.
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