UP ALL NIGHT

A grand tour of nightlife culture, from medieval Japan to modern raves.

Historian Willetts’ first book has an appealing premise and some surprising insights, the first of which is that the idea of going out at night for fun is a relatively new concept—matters of safety and public morality often proscribed the idea. In the 1650s, the Yoshiwara district of Edo, Japan, was a kind of state-sanctioned party center she describes as an “Orwellian Coachella of feudal Japan.” More often, though, nightspots have been private enterprises. A century later, Vauxhall Gardens in London provided a host of amusements to coax crime-wary citizens from their homes; Montmartre did much the same for Paris at the time. By the 20th century, major cities had established districts for music, dancing, and carousing: Storyville in New Orleans, Lenox Avenue in Harlem, casinos in Las Vegas and Havana. In nearly all cases, nightlife culture was in an awkward dance with moral authorities (who prohibited dancing), police (which cracked down on infamously louche Weimar Berlin), and/or organized crime, which shaped Las Vegas and 1970s New York hotspot Studio 54. From stop to stop, Willetts is an entertaining guide, and she laments how various forces have eroded nightlife. Blame the smartphone: “Our obsession with documentation combined with the knowledge that any misdemeanour could be captured, shared and posted (and worse, go viral) is the death of chaos and spontaneity.” Still, even allowing that the book of this scope will inevitably miss some important places and movements (Vaudeville, Chicago house), the book feels curiously decentered. Willetts offers little in the way of a unifying theme about what makes nightlife valuable, how it has shaped social values, and what might preserve it.

An informed if scattershot study of a global good time.