How To Party with Purp

The DJ, programmer and proprietor of The Dollar Party talks DELAWARE CLUB, BEING A CLUB KID and hints at a CLUB TO JAZZ PIPELINE? (plus, my new job!)

(Photo by Tyrell Gittens)

These days it seems like everyone wants to be a Club Kid. As much as I fantasized that the pandemic era would lead to some unthinkable nightlife future, and it still might, more notably it has awakened a new wave of nostalgia for various nightlife eras of the past–remember zoomers trying to party in the upper east side? I wrote for Hell Gate a couple weeks back about the New York jazz club becoming a minor TikTok aesthetic for earnest graspers.

A particular vein of nostalgia has been for the semi-mythical Club Kid era: Cipriani’s Musica, now New York’s largest club, opened last year with the blessing of original Club Kid Susanne Bartsch, and as pop stars are shining a spotlight on dance music communities, the original Club Kids are becoming a minor fixation for some TikTokers, some of whom explore the era as a sort of historical and aesthetic fascination, others of whom are attempting to appropriate the moniker as a form of influencership.

I have a lot of empathy for all this “Club Kid” self-identification. First of all, what a phrase: the two words crackle together with an electric glow that anyone would covet, embedded with the glamorous implication that one was simply born belonging.

But most of us were not; let’s be fucking real. If you’re like me, you didn’t emerge from some subcultural incubator, you hobbled out of your teenage years with so little cultural capital that you wouldn’t have two pennies to rub together, and even in adulthood you’re still putting together a sense of what your whole deal is. Some days you might still feel, as one Twitter user put it, “so desperate for community you’d join a pack of stray dogs.”

But TyQurah Pride, who performs as Purp, is the genuine article–not in the strict cultural geneology of New York’s “Club Kids,” but a club kid that was raised in and contributing to a music and dance community, in her case “club,” the musical genre with various homes in New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Pride’s home state of Delaware. I first saw her opening for “Jersey Drill” rapper Bandmanrill last summer, where she performed a club set I wrote was "prodigious,” and since then she has launched The Dollar Party in Brooklyn, a replication of the types of accessible events that made up the club scene she comes from.

ADLAN: How did The Dollar Party start?

PURP: I started The Dollar Party back in August of 2022 at Casa Maya. I had three or four of them there. Where I'm from in Delaware, dollar parties are a very common concept that's been around probably since the early nineties: inner city, underground party in somebody's mom's basement type vibe. That's always been the energy that I bring to my programming, that intimate club feel.

ADLAN: Is it at Paragon from here on? What was that process like?

It actually just got too big for Casa, low key, because it's a very intimate space, which we love–we call it the crib. But the last one that I had there, the step broke because there were too many people. So I just hit up John [Barclay] of Bossa [Nova Civic Club] and Paragon, and I was like, can I do it there please? And he was like, yeah, but he gave me a Tuesday. Usually I'd have it on first Saturday, but he gave me a Tuesday and I ran it the fuck up. It was one of their bestselling Tuesday nights; they weren't expecting that kind of turnout. And so he was like, cool, do you wanna partner with me and Paragon and do it in the basement?

ADLAN: What’s your history with nightlife?

PURP: I've been a club kid forever. I've been going to underground raves and shit since I was 14. But we’d have these spots in Delaware, because there's not a club scene, you know what I mean? Because one, we have guns, so things get shot up, honestly. It's just violent. There was never safe enough space to have a nightlife, especially for the under-21 crowd. So it was really up to us to do this DIY ass shit and raves, and we didn't even know that's what we were doing, but that's what we were doing. And so a lot of the venues would be event halls, like it'd be in an African hall, or the Jamaican spot, and after hours you turn that jawn into the club. There's a buffet on the side. That was the club scene. And we'd be listening to club music, dancing to club music, and that just was what I was exposed to growing up, there was just no other outlet for dancing and creativity really.

Once I got to my senior year of high school, I had always been involved in my town's underground music scene, so we just would start throwing parties for our scene and for the younger kids because nobody else was gonna do it. We just started doing a lot of popups, performances and shows with Quadie Diesel, having niggas DJ and shit like that.

ADLAN: How did you get into DJing?

PURP: The summer after graduating from high school, on some High School Musical shit, we all got hired at this country club. It was so off-the-books and stupid, we were doing absolutely nothing. So I would pull up there and sit at the snack bar and I was really obsessed with chopped-and-screwed music at that time. I was really, really into The Chopstars, Slim K and DJ Hollygrove. And so I really wanted to try to make my own chop songs of shit that I liked, so I just downloaded Virtual DJ to chop stuff. I wasn't trying to make mixes or DJ at first, intentionally. Like all my early stuff on SoundCloud is just me chopping shit on a computer. I would just start putting my own chop mixes together so I could listen to them in my car. And then once I realized I was doing that, I was like, wait, this is DJing. It just made sense.

ADLAN: Yeah. So this might kind of be self explanatory now, but how did you get into club music?

PURP: I consider myself a very open format dj, but I would say that I get very well known for my club pocket. And that's because as we were saying earlier, I genuinely have been listening to club music my entire life. So most of my set is songs that people don’t even know are 10 to 15 years old. And I genuinely love those songs because I was dancing to them when I was 14. Delaware gets left out of a lot of club conversations just because we're so small, but, you know, we're still 20 minutes down the highway from Philly. I’ve been partying in Philly, partying in Baltimore, partying in Brooklyn. It's all been interconnected.

ADLAN: When I saw you open for Bandmanrill, your visuals had a lot of DDR and anime imagery. Where does that stuff come from?

PURP: I'm very enamored with Japanese culture. I studied abroad in Okinawa. Delaware [State University] had the option to take Japanese, but I was like, why the fuck would I learn Japanese in Delaware? Lemme just pull up. I found this really nice program, I went, I studied the language in the culture, so I'm pretty decently fluent in Japanese. My harp is a Aoyama 42 string, so it's a Japanese harp. I've always been very into J-Jazz. I'm self-taught, though. It's my first instrument. I was a choir kid growing up, so I really didn't touch instruments growing up other than the piano, but the harp was mad beautiful. I realized it's just a piano standing up. It's literally just a big ass piano. It's even color coded and shit. It's actually very simple. I really got it, too, because as a beginner instrumentalist, you can still play the simplest of things and it still sounds so beautiful.

ADLAN: Is there gonna be harp in your own releases?

PURP: Oh, there absolutely is gonna be harp. I'm a part of the ballroom community, so I intend on, you know, dropping some vogue beats here and there. But when it comes to my own projects, I am really excited to hop fully into jazz. That will be the pocket that I really get into as my music career continues. But for now, especially when it comes to this next tape, it's definitely gonna be on the dancier side, continuing to build on this club momentum. But even with that, I'm gonna throw some harps into that shit.

Follow Purp on Instagram.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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• I got a new job! Starting tomorrow, I’ll be a writer and editor at Hell Gate. Subscribe! You’ll like it if you like this sort of thing.

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