Jim Johnston was never meant to be visible. For more than three decades, he worked behind the scenes of one of the loudest entertainment machines on the planet, composing music heard by millions while remaining largely anonymous outside wrestling’s inner orbit. From 1985 to 2017, Johnston served as WWE’s in-house composer, producing thousands of pieces of music that would come to define not just performers, but eras. He didn’t arrive through the wrestling world. Johnston’s early career ran...

Vancouver’s underground scene has always survived on one thing: trust . Trust that the party is real. Trust that the vibes are organic. Trust that when someone says “secret location,” they don’t actually mean a geotagged parking lot with three corporate sponsors and a branded photo booth. Some brands in this city are straight-up lying to your face —and then selling ad space on top of it. The Myth of the ‘Secret Location’ There was a time when a “secret rave” meant sketchy directions, broken...

(or: Why Every Rave Now Comes With Kombucha and a Mission Statement) Vancouver’s underground didn’t collapse because of lack of talent — it collapsed because it got institutionalized from both sides : the wellness-industrial complex -on the grassroots end, and the cultural grant bureaucracy on the top-down end. Somewhere between the crystal-healing DJ and the arts-funding application template, the city’s nightlife was quietly sanitized into something safe and polite. The piece breaks down...