Amid a mass boycott, Boiler Room is apparently having trouble recruiting DJs and talent for a proposed San Francisco event.
Boiler Room, launched in London in 2010, is perhaps the most ubiquitous brand in the underground club scene. Last year, it got artists like Tove Lo and Joy Orbison to headline a pair of parties in San Francisco around last year’s Portola music festival, and linked up with the influential party series Fake and Gay to bring acts like Pussy Riot and Ah-Mer-Ah-Su to the city.
But earlier this year, Boiler Room announced that it was bought by a “live experiences” company called Superstruct. Superstruct was acquired last year by private equity firm KKR, which has holdings in Israeli companies like real estate business Global Technical Realty, as well as defense firms like Circo International. The acquisition angered many DJs and musical acts, who have previously performed at these events. It spurred boycotts outside of Boiler Room events, and inspired artists to issue public statements rejecting offers to perform at parties.
Boiler Room has gone as far as attempting to distance itself from the new ownership, disavowing the “values” of its new owner’s other holdings and issuing a statement that it is “unapologetically pro-Palestine.” It also removed all Boiler Room recordings from performances in Israel on its website earlier this week.
In the Bay Area, artists and musical collectives that have been asked to perform Boiler Room sets have broadly refused, in support of Gaza and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, or PACBI.
Boiler Room coordinators began reaching out to local groups and artists last month for a party scheduled in June, reaching out to groups like Amor Digital and Program to help with the evening, artists told Gazetteer. (Boiler Room did not respond to a request for comment from Gazetteer.)
Program issued a statement publicly declining the ask. So, too, did Jorge Courtade, also known as DJ Juanny, the founder of label and party series Amor Digital.
“We feel that our complicity would be voluntary if we were to work with Boiler Room and other Superstruct-owned platforms,” a statement issued by Amor Digital reads.
Courtade told Gazetteer that he had seen calls to action from the likes of Flow Strike — a group of artists boycotting the KKR-owned Flow Festival in Finland — and that he had already made his mind up in the event that Boiler Room did want to work with him again. (He was a performer at a Portola afterparty in October, before the KKR acquisition was made public.) Arthur Javier, who co-founded Program, said he found “the most information” about the boycott and its significance from Amor Digital’s post.
“I do feel that after this, the San Francisco show kind of seemed to be falling apart,” Courtade said of the mass public statements. “That's the same day that they put their statement out, so I do feel like it was a critical mass here in the Bay that made it untenable.”
There’s a culture of solidarity and community in the Bay Area’s arts and music space that makes these calls to action easier to achieve. Or, as Javier puts it, “a history of trying to push towards something better together.”
“We're maybe a little more political,” RITCHRD, the head of Oakland-based label and nightlife series NO BIAS, told Gazetteer SF of the Bay Area’s club scene, “but I think having a smaller scene, we all have to show up for each other a little bit.”
Even so, refusing to work with Boiler Room means money left on the table. Program asked supporters to donate to a GoFundMe or purchase merch and tickets to its event slate, while NO BIAS set up an informal strike fund that received an outpouring of support. RITCHRD was “really surprised” at the level of support their strike fund reached, as was Javier.
“We knew we could substitute what we dropped out of and our community would be there to assist,” Javier told Gazetteer.
Courtade emphasized that he doesn’t begrudge anyone who chooses to take the money for a set, arguing that the focus should be on KKR and Superstruct. “I want people to also have empathy for people who might end up doing it,” he said. “It's not the choice that I would make, but I understand people that need the money to survive.”
Another downside, according to RITCHRD: Boiler Room has lost a lot of what made it cool in the first place.
“We're giving them more,” they said. “You have all these local crews basically co-signing Boiler Room and kind of keeping them culturally relevant. What do we get from it?”
Instead, whatever interest circles around Boiler Room is better suited for supporting local talent in the first place.
“It would be really cool for our local shows, our independent shows to garner similar levels of interest and support as opposed to these huge corporate events, so that artists didn't need to depend on these deals with the devil to make a living,” Courtade said.
