2019: A Year in Review - Bittersweet Music Festival Performances and Turning 30 in Jail
Another year in the books calls for some self-reflection and writing. For the past five years I have continued the tradition of oversharing everything about my personal life in the last year and this year will be no different. It’s been a solid year, the last month of it was a doozy though I’ll be honest. I have continued to grow the Fire Aux brand with countless club nights, parties and radio shows. Also, I have continued to grow on a personal level by trying my best to be self-aware and critical of myself and trying to learn from all my mistakes. If I’m being honest, this past year might have been the best year of my life and simultaneously the most traumatic. If I were to break the year down in numbers it would look like this; I DJed for a crowd of approximately 2,000 people, which would make that the largest crowd I have ever performed in front of, I was in jail for exactly 15 days, I traveled to exactly 5 different countries, I was the supporting act for exactly 3 major international artists, I was booked to play exactly 3 music festivals, I was banned from exactly 1 country and had my heart broken exactly 1 time.
My first major DJ gig of 2019 was opening up for Denzel Curry, which was a major opportunity for me. It turned out to be one of the best hip hop shows HK has ever seen, or at least since I’ve moved here. Honestly this was a great year for hip hop in Hong Kong and some of the other shows that happened later this year could now claim that.
Art Week in Hong Kong is always a chaotic period for creatives here considering there’s a ton of artists and celebrities and “influencers” all over the place. During this week I was asked to DJ for a Moncler party that was organized by Hypebeast. My early years of college were spent scouring the Hypebeast blog to glean what I could about fashion, art, music and just culture in general. There was an ongoing joke with a college roommate that I was going to move to Hong Kong to intern for Hypebeast, so in a roundabout way, I kind of did move to Hong Kong and work for Hypebeast. Anyway, it was super exciting to work with them and see my photo on their website after the night was over. Check out the write up on the event here.
A few weeks after that I flew out to Manila to DJ a few gigs. This was really cool for me because it was the first time I was able to travel to a new country exclusively to DJ. Everything went very smoothly and although I was nervous because it was a new country and a new crowd I think I crushed my sets out there and connected with lots of dope people. I genuinely enjoyed the vibe there and would love to go back soon.
In June I started a podcast. I enjoy talking and hearing myself talk and I started one in Chicago that went really well, so I was just waiting for the right time to start one here. After about a year and a half, I felt like I had enough connections in the creative world here and wanted to start a podcast where I would interview people that do cool shit in Hong Kong to provide a platform for local creatives. I started with close friends and eventually branched out to people outside of my circle. The guests and episodes are still inconsistent, and in general it’s still a work in progress, but I enjoy it.
Outside of the podcast, I also started a new party series called Auxidize. This is something I have wanted to do for a very long time and I’m happy with how it all came together. Hong Kong’s nightlife scene is immersed in exclusionary hierarchy and politics, although I would presume the same could be said about most metropolitan cities. Either way, I hate that shit. What I wanted to do with Auxidize is to foster an environment that condones self-expression through dancing and dance music. No judgement. No rules. No exclusivity. No bullshit. This kind of concept is hard to explain to bar and club managers that don’t care how douchey their clientele is as long as they spend lots of money on booze, but fortunately I was able to make it work at a few places. I threw exactly 3 Auxidize parties this year and I feel like they were on par with my expectations in regards to the ambience, the turnout and the attitude of the attendees. As of right now, it will intentionally remain as more of a pop-up concept with no regularity or residency at any specific venue, because I want to do it on my terms, wherever and whenever I want.
Something really exciting happened to me in August, I was booked to play for a massive hip hop music festival in Bali, Indonesia. Some of my personal favorites were on the lineup, like Famous Dex and Key!, but I think the most exciting thing was that I was basically the headlining DJ outside of the live rap performances. I was booked to close out the show after the headlining rapper. It was a huge stage, and I would be a liar if I said it wasn’t nervous. The overall experience of the festival was insane. There was pyrotechnics, live body suspensions, a motorcycle circle of death, and lots of other crazy components of the party. During my set there was a surprise performance from this rapper named Silento, he is most well known as the guy that does the “Watch me (Whip/Nae Nae)” song. Being a part of that was both hilarious and awesome. Since, as a rapper, he’s mostly just a cornball, I figured I would play the Old Town Road song after his performance. It made sense to me because that song is basically just the 2019 version of his hit single and holy shit that went over well with the crowd. The whole music festival was hyped up and singing along and, wow, it was such a moment for me.
I felt like I crushed my set, but I was dealing with a lot of personal issues at the time that distracted me from basking in the glory of such an amazing performance. Basically, I had made some promises to an acquaintance and he turned out to a self-absorbed jerk that ended up wasting my time while I should have been focusing on my big night. Coincidentally, I also basically got dumped by the girl I was more or less enamored with at the time. Both of these issues happened that weekend and came to a head on the day of the show. The day after, I thought I would feel like I accomplished something remarkable, but I just felt empty and numb to it all. Performing at a music festival like that, to a crowd that big, was basically what I dreamt about when I got into DJing, so why wasn’t I satisfied? The whole experience made me question if everything I had been working toward was really worth it. Until that day, I had never really experienced something that completely took the joy out of music for me like that. It took some time for me to work through all of the emotions I was feeling at the time, but eventually I decided to keep pursuing my passions and to try not to let assholes and relationship problems distract me from what actually makes me happy.
After my Bali trip, the protests here got really bad and eventually started disrupting my day-to-day activities, which was hard to deal with. Being surrounded by that kind of violence on the internet and in-person every day for that amount of time can really take a toll on your mental health, so I think a lot of people in the city were struggling. I wasn’t on the frontline and fighting for the rights of my home, and I still felt it, so I could only imagine what some of Hong Kong’s youth are going through right now.
And Jail…
Fast forward to the end of November. I was booked to play a club in Shenzhen, China. I arrive at about 6pm, stop into my hotel to drop my stuff off and immediately head to the venue for sound check. After sorting all of that out, I went to grab dinner. On my way back to the club at about 11pm, I am surrounded by about 10 men that are all barking orders at me in Mandarin Chinese. I understand none of it. Eventually they throw me in the back of a white van. Initially, I thought they were undercover police, but after being shoved into a serial killer van, I had no idea who they were or what was going on. For a moment I thought I was being kidnapped. When I’m allowed out of the van I am at a police station, so thankfully I wasn’t actually being kidnapped, but at that point what was the difference? They held me in a cell for about 24 hours with only a cold tile floor to sleep on and soggy bread to eat. At one point they took me out to ask me questions, but I guess they didn’t trust me because they hand cuffed me to some weird torture chair for the interrogation. After a whole day, they unlock my cell and let me out only to tell me I am going to jail for 10 days for breaking some law that I didn’t even know existed and logically makes absolutely zero sense. I was crushed, but all I could do at that point was just accept my fate. I was in the hands of the Communist Party of China and there was nothing anyone could do to help me. They let me make two phone calls. I called the promoter that booked me to ask him to gather my belongings from the hotel and hold on to them for me while I was locked up. Then I called the colleague that I trusted the most to let him know I would be out of work and asked him to help me sort everything out back home. When I got to jail they took all my belongings and gave me a prison uniform and took me to my cell. The room they put me in was like an 80 square foot room that I shared with about 30 other grown men. There were two showers, two toilets and no doors, so nothing you did was in private. We were given one cup, one plate and one spoon to use for our entire sentence and we washed these dishes in the showers after every meal. We slept on basically a long wooden table and no one had their own table, they were shared so we were sleeping like sardines on hard wood. They gave us blankets but no pillows. We could not leave this room for the entirety of our detention, so all we did was sit around. It was hell.
I used to joke about how I wasn’t able to cry because I haven’t really ever cried in my adult life. It was half a joke, and half me being concerned about whether or not I was capable of expressing emotions or if I genuinely had a physical issue with my tear ducts. Anyway, after a few days in there, I received a call from the US embassy in Guangdong, China. They said they had a message for me from my parents and read me something my dad wrote to me. I could hear my dad through the message. Some random guy I had never met before was saying something through a telephone, but I could hear my dad saying it verbatim. I could hear the desperation and worry in the note and hearing my dad say it in my head it just broke me. At that point my eyes became waterfalls and I genuinely couldn’t hold back. For the first time in probably ten years I cried. And I really fucking cried. I’m actually fighting back tears as I’m typing this.
The good news was that my release date was on my birthday and I could be back in time to celebrate, so I had something to look forward to and give me hope throughout my time there. On the day of my release, the guard comes into our room for the daily update, which is the standard routine at this point. Before I say what he told us, I should mention the guards only spoke Chinese and the only translator we had was another inmate that was fluent in Chinese and English. So he nonchalantly tells our de-facto translator at the end of the announcements, “By the way, the American guy, he’s not leaving today”. When asked why, he simply responded ‘because’ and when asked when I would actually be leaving, he said he didn’t know. What I thought was the worst case scenario somehow got worse. I went from being able to be home in a few hours to being stuck there indefinitely, not knowing why or when I could leave. Finally, another cop pulls me out of the cell and tells me I can’t leave because the government has decided to deport me and ban me from China. After five more days, they’ve completed whatever paperwork they have to do and decide to send me back to the states. They booked me a flight from the HK airport and said I didn’t have to take it, they just have to book the flight for bureaucracy purposes because I was being deported and that I could stay in Hong Kong instead. I think I’m finally going home and then, as I should have grown accustomed to at this point, the nightmare just continued. I find out that because I entered the Hong Kong airport from China, I have to leave through China, and obviously I’m banned. I cannot leave to Hong Kong because of some law having to do with immigration and customs between mainland China, the airport and Hong Kong. So, my only way out is on the flight. I flew to San Francisco and fortunately, I was able to meet my sister for dinner and then the next day flew back to Hong Kong.
That day I left Hong Kong and genuinely expected nothing like this to happen. I was supposed to DJ a party, hang out, then head back to Hong Kong the next day. I have never been to jail in my life. I mean, I’m not a complete square, but I’m also not a criminal. I lost 15 days of my life because of some petty bullshit. I missed 3 weeks of work, 3 dj gigs, a whole vacation I had planned and my birthday. I missed out on so much money and also had to spend about $2,000 USD on flights after all was said and done. I am not being dramatic when I say that might have been the worst experience of my life. On the positive, when I got out, it was a painfully beautiful reminder of how many people in this world love me. I couldn’t even tell you the amount of people that were genuinely concerned for me, and that was touching and humbling.
Oh yeah, I continued to skate as much as ever this year. My friend Alex put together some of my footage for a quick Instagram edit:
119 Likes, 11 Comments - Josh Dubman (@dj_fire_aux) on Instagram: "Some clips from the past few months. Shot n chopped by the one and only @alexctact. 🤙🤙"
Also, throughout the year I got a lot more media coverage than I ever have in the past. I started doing all of this for the sole purpose of loving music, loving to share it and to create positive vibes and experiences for people, but I would be lying if I said the validation didn’t feel great and boost my fragile ego. I got placed on a pretty big local publication’s list of ‘artists to watch in 2020’ and was booked to play Clockenflap, the biggest music festival in Hong Kong (which ended up getting cancelled because of the protests). These both felt like two huge accomplishments. Realistically, this was probably the most successful year of my life. I DJed so many fantastic events and parties and connected with lots of amazing, creative and talented people.
It also challenged me in ways I never, ever, thought I would be challenged. Relationship struggles will be consistent throughout life I’m sure, and honestly the whole Bali situation wouldn’t have been a big deal if it didn’t happen literally during the biggest DJ gig of my entire career. The jail situation is different though. It might take a while to fully recover from all of that. Most days since then have been okay, but some days have been tough and filled with anxiety that I could likely attribute to that experience.
Jeeze, what a year. I can only hope for more growth and less jail for this upcoming year. I don’t really have any specific goals at this point because I’m still trying to process everything that happened to me, but I’m sure I’ll be back on my grind soon. Thanks for all your support.
Love,
Josh
