Venus rising
Venus X, DJ and founder of GHE20GOTH1K – the club night that transformed New York City’s after-hours culture – is celebrating 10 years of changing the game. Vogue talks to an artist who is continuing to push the envelope.
Venus X didn’t just fall into DJing. Years of choir and dance practice as a child readied the eldest of seven siblings for a storied career in music. “I was building on that foundation because I studied dance for 10 years and I studied music for eight years … ballet, tap, jazz, musical theatre. It’s [been] a long part of my life,” the 32-year-old says on the phone from the US.
Born in New York City, Venus X’s upbringing inspired her musical style. Her sound is a mash-up of intrinsic discipline – instilled by her mother and by growing up in a family of Catholic faith – and a freedom of exposure to different genres that a city like New York allows. From an early age, navigating the city’s streets and attending school, Venus X developed a well-rounded ear. She recalls “a lot of hip-hop, baroque, ballet, salsa [and] merengue” music that would inflect what she identifies as her DJ experience with “a variety of sounds that are global and range in perspective”.
At 22, when she first became interested in DJing –“I saw boys doing it and thought I could do that, too” – she began to hone her craft, eventually starting GHE20GOTH1K (pronounced Ghettogothic) in Brooklyn. At the height of financial and political turmoil in 2009, Venus X identified the potential of DJing to unite people and to dovetail the changing climates of the music industry and world at large, charging an entry fee of only a few dollars. “We were really fixed on the apocalypse [at that time],” she recalls. This anxiety informed her DJ style, born of her tendencies to overlay news clips, integrate random sound bites and
combine different genres to reflect the chaos of the times. It is this oeuvre that enabled Venus X to “rewrite the story [of any given artist to] amplify certain parts of it and decrease the volume on other parts”.
This approach has gained favour with music and fashion tribes alike. Virgil Abloh has played sets at GHE20GOTH1K and Alexander Wang is a regular attendee, facilitating the artist’s diversification into curation and design. An opportunity to curate MoMa PS1’s Warm Up Series, a collaboration with Nike and a pop-up store called Planet X are all outlets for Venus X, fostering new communities she believes cannot be nurtured on the internet. “We need people who approach these mediums in a sophisticated way, that take the truth into consideration and not just the smoke and mirrors,” she explains. This ethos extends to her personal style, which she underscores with an understanding that social norms dictate “how people are allowed to do business and in what attire”. Venus X balances a penchant for a “Goth, hyperfeminine extreme of mini-skirts and leather jackets [in] all black, and really colourful baggy clothes”, she says, reflecting that playing into neatly categorised style tropes is limiting.
While she continues to cultivate these platforms, Venus X is conscious that her privileges do not extend to all of her colleagues. Refusing to wait for either industry to catch up, she emphasises the importance of inclusivity, adaptability and creativity to move forward. “All I can do is bring my taste and perspective to these spaces to think about what I have to bring to the table and what kind of seat I deserve.”