From the desk of Nat Friedman
27 Jul 2000

Fellow Ravers,

An issue has recently come to the forefront of our culture which I would like to discuss, if you can spare a moment of your synthetically inebriated lives to consider the thoughts of another rave-goer. That issue is: excessively baggy pants.

Rave boys and rave girls, these pants are an embarrassment to us and everything we stand for (phat beats and plur). They are not only aesthetically displeasing, they decry of ill-made decisions and mistakes yet to come. Not to mention the risk of bodily harm a rave-person takes on! I need not speak of the hazards of passing through revolving doors with superfluously large slacks trailing behind, catching, face slamming to glass, blood, screams.. funeral ill-attended by large-slacked and slack-jawed mourners… a monstrous scene.

And then there is the mountainous cost of the cloth which goes into these tremendous trousers. Bolt upon bolt of denim, meticulously cut and sewn by sore-fingered bleary-eyed eight-year-old Malaysians, who themselves are clad in the most meager hodge-podge garments, hewn together from whatever refuse happened to catch in the drainage tracts that week, yearning for something more substantial. An entire Malaysian orphanage could be clothed using the material from just one raver pant leg (numerous pockets and zippers included).

And yet we, the children of electronica — the harbingers of a new generation of music, culture and thought! — we continue with this life of undeserved pantaloonial excess. Hazardous and humiliating slackitude, all paid for by dad’s platinum card. Why, Levi Strauss would turn in his grave if he knew that modern dungarees bore a more striking resemblance to the ship’s sails from whence the fabric which powered his empire was originally taken than to the garments that launched his career.

Webster’s dictionary defines “pant” as:

pant, n., 1. an outer garment covering each leg separately and
usually extending from the waist to the ankle — usually used in
plural 2. plural, chiefly British: men’s underpants 3. plural:
PANTIE 4. with one’s pants down: in an embarrassing position (as
of being unprepared to act).

People of the rave, I ask you not to get caught with *your* pants down. Save us all the mortification of these unnecessarily baggy leggings, save yourselves from their dangers, and let’s all save our money for the pacifiers, glow sticks and bottled water by which we define ourselves and our place in the universe.

Ecstatically yours,
Nat Friedman aka “Lieutenant Flibbity Gibbits”