The concept of PLUR – Peace, Love, Unity, Respect – in the electronic music/rave community is a concept woven throughout the culture and that sums up a general philosophy of how to behave and treat other people. A sort of raver golden rule, if you will. It dates back to the rave days of the 1990s and is still ever-present today. People use it when talking about something bad that might have happened at a show or festival (“stealing from people’s tents is not very PLUR”), there’s a PLUR handshake that people use when exchanging kandi (beaded bracelets), and I most often see the word thrown around on Facebook when people are trying to buy or sell concert tickets (“looking for 2 tickets to Armin Van Buuren, PLUR prices please,” which basically means, “sell me something cheap”).
It is understandably a little bit corny to use terminology like this, which is why almost no one I know would actually use it in a serious way. Yet something happened over the weekend that I can only really describe as a story that is very much in the PLUR spirit.
Some friends and I made a last minute decision to go to one day of Mysteryland, a weekend-long festival at the site of Woodstock. We were able to buy severely discounted tickets as there were a ton of people who had won tickets but didn’t need them because they had already purchased some (the fact that people won free tickets and then sold them is not very PLUR, but I can’t blame them as I would have done the same thing).
Because people won tickets in pairs, my group of friends ended up buying 6 tickets for the 5 of us, not really caring that we paid “extra” because the tickets were so cheap that we still came out very much ahead.
On the day of the festival, we arrived at the box office to pick up our tickets, and had to make a last minute decision about what to do with our extra ticket – either find a home for it quickly or just get rid of it.
Our willcall line was right next to the sales line, so I leaned over and yelled, “DOES ANYONE NEED A FREE TICKET?” and immediately got a response. “If you’re serious, I have a friend who needs one.” So I told the guy to bring his friend over.
We handed the guy our ticket, and he gave me a hug and seemed very sincerely grateful.
His friend then turned to my group. “Seriously, thank you so much. He got scammed with a fake ticket but the rest of our group didn’t, so he wasn’t going to be able to come in with us.”
I was – and still am – overjoyed that this guy was the one who got our ticket out of anyone who might have possibly been standing there at that moment, just happening to be in the right place at the right time. While I would have been happy for anyone to get our free ticket, no matter how (un)deserving, I really think that somewhere out there was a tie dye-clad, bracelet-wearing, bass-music-loving PLUR god smiling down upon that kid.
Not My Forte 