Disposable Plastic Beauty
Contemplating Café del Mar
It’s the year 2000. I’m nine years old, and watching Video Hits on a Saturday morning. An advertisement comes on for Café del Mar - Volume Seven. The scene is one of elegant young people crowded around a pool, drinking cocktails, adorned with bikinis or boardshorts and those y2k-ish sunnies that people are now wearing again.
There are short snippets of songs on the CD, shining downtempo numbers with commercial-grade production values, an audio equivalent of a swimming pool on a sunny day with the correct ratio of chlorine. The names Moby, Bush, Nightwares on Wax flicker across the screen, but they aren’t important to me, and maybe aren’t to anybody.
The album cover is of a bikini-clad model on the beach, soaked in red evening light, the blue-to-orange gradient of the sunset foregrounding her sillhouette. Her expression seems to beckon you to come with her somewhere, but it also suggests that where you are going, not everything is well. What has she seen there?
~
It’s the year 2024 and I’m towards the end of a two-and-a-half week trip which has been great fun, while being marked by subconscious tumult. For the final three days of the trip I’m in Bali.
While I’m waiting at the spa to get a facial (my first ever - I should have done this years ago), Tess asks me over message if I’ve been to Café del Mar yet. I became aware there was one here prior to the trip, told people, and then forgot about it.
Bali seems like the place for it. An island with enormous natural beauty that has been inalterably changed by the influx of foreign capital and people in possession of foreign capital.
I presume the same could be said for Ibiza, where Café del Mar was born.
After being founded in 1980, Café del Mar’s stature in the global consciousness began to grow alongside the prominence of their resident DJ from 1991, José Padilla. He was known for his eclectic DJ style which managed to blend contemporary downtempo and post-rave chillout music, with the jazz and funk that I imagine lounge-goers in the 1980s would have been accustomed to.
In particular, Padilla and Café del Mar are associated with the compilation albums and DJ mixes that he began home-taping and selling at a market in Ibiza, and eventually attracted major label interest for, eventually selling as many as four million units per release.
As the story so often goes, this led to rifts between owners, between labels, and even led to imitation Café del Mar venues and albums popping up around the world. I wonder if the Bali Café del Mar is legit. I wonder if I would care either way.
~
I cancel my plans and after the facial, jump on the back of a scooter and head straight there.
I’m so excited to be there. It feels somehow consequential - like the completion of some childhood dream that marks me as an adult, and one of the type of which I would have aspired to being.
Someone who works there bemusedly sees me snapping selfies out the front, and offers to take a picture of me. A little embarrassed, I thank her and accept, choking out something like “I’m just so happy to finally be here”. It was ridiculous and I’m proud to be so cringeworthy.
I go inside, visibly unable to contain my excitement.
The place is exactly as I expected. Weathered sunlounges sit beneath white umbrellas. The venue is orientated towards a swimming pool, sited above the shore of the beach beyond. A stage and grassy dancefloor is located towards the edge of the venue, with a DJ standing in front of a huge LED screen, upon which his press shot is projected with his moniker oscillating atop the photo in golden typeface.
Phone video by me on arrival
Most of the lounges are unoccupied, and the staff present seem to outnumber customers by a significant ratio. It looks dated, and honestly feels a bit sad. I thrive upon this bizarreness, which only fuels my delirious enthusiasm for the place.
The DJ plays an edit of Jorge Ben’s ‘Mas que Nada’ which has been sped up and quantized to within an inch of its life, the swing entirely removed from the song in order for it to sit more comfortably with the repeating 4x4 beat. This edit was a crime against humanity, and the DJ should also be sent to the Hague for trial after playing it on such a large soundsystem.
He’s playing mostly commercial house and nu-disco edits. There’s something bizarre about hearing a number of upbeat disco songs with all-too-easily-ignored lyrics about suffering in a venue like this. The music selection wasn’t exactly unanticipated, but it’s far from the moody, sunset downtempo I would go to Café del Mar to hear.
Because that’s something that has always characterised the Café del Mar sound to me - a type of sadness that manages to reflect the fact that the reason sunsets, vacations and parties are beautiful is because they’re always over too soon.
I order a drink and some food, and lay back on one of the sunlounges, opening up the novel I’m reading - Pure Colour by Sheila Heti. Christy recommended it for this leg of the trip, the other two novels she lent me would have apparently been a bit much for the supposedly relaxing part.
I read the following paragraph from the book, which seems to perfectly articulate how I’m feeling at that moment, about Café del Mar and about everything:
That winter, walking through her neighbourhood, she saw the little red, green, white, blue, purple and yellow Christmas lights, which dotted the porches and were strung across the trees in the front yards of most of her neighbours. They shimmered like the most beautiful stars, just giving off their humble light, their cords curled and mangled, their plastic—obvious—but they shimmered like the souls of a million long-dead people. That humans felt like adorning a tree with lights at Christmastime made her think that an intuition of some other realm wasn’t completely gone from us; that humans still felt something, that there was still something to honour. People wanted to lift themselves up and lift up their neighbours with these silly little adornments—which to her, the winter her father died, meant so much. She walked through her neighbourhood, choked up with gratitude over all those tiny shining souls that adorned the trees and the falling-down porches. Humans knew! They remembered! These lights spoke to our knowledge of another world, the world behind this world, the world of the spirit. Nobody was thinking it, but they knew it, nonetheless. Humans hadn’t lost what was most beautiful; our very small and tentative sense of the hidden, magnificent, divine. No one said it, but buried in their hearts, there it was. These little lights, strung across all the trees, proved it. We knew so little about who we were, or what we were doing here, but this little gesture spoke so gently of our not-knowing, our hope, our sense of connection to something universally shared—which was our not-knowing, so magnificent and dizzyingly deep. It was her most reliable comfort in those winter months, when her heart was bare. It was the only thing that warmed her. I always found them cheap, a woman at a party said. Yes, of course, she replied. I did, too. But she wanted to explain that she finally understood them, and saw through their cheapness to their deeper beauty.
Excerpt from Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
~
It doesn’t matter if the Café del Mar I visited was authorised by whatever corporation owns it now. It was never going to be the same as the past, and it could never match up with my childhood memory, which was never actually mine, and was never real.
Really, Café del Mar in 2024 is a disaster. The rich melancholy that coexisted with the futuristic artifice of the music I know as the Café del Mar sound has been washed away, with all that’s left being a tourist trap that bears little relevance to any culture I would have anything to do with, playing music I would typically loathe. What’s left is some plastic furniture, a crew of underpaid staff and a whole lot of waste that would result from the maintenance of such a premises.
José Padilla died of cancer in 2020.
The young and fashionable people who would have been there were not. They might not exist anymore. Perhaps the tourism industry is more hollow than ever. With the omnipresence of social media, which has shifted tourist behaviour further towards the boastful and the photogenic, the balancing melancholy of this music would probably be perceived as an unwelcome intrusion into people’s otherwise picturesque vacations.
The girl from the cover of Café del Mar - Volume Seven saw the future. No wonder she looks concerned.
I was there thinking of my life to date - my successes and my failures, my aspirations, and the person I’ve turned out to become - all while feeling the sorrow of this profaned sacredness. The bittersweetness, a result of this jarring assemblage of personal associations, was beautiful. It’s only through our personal experience that we can access the divine, and like those Christmas lights in Pure Colour, I’m glad I had cause to see beyond Café del Mar’s cheapness to its deeper beauty.
I wait out the front for the motorbike to come pick me up so I can make my flight home. As I get on to leave, the DJ is playing Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You.
As a bonus, here’s a Spotify playlist I made a while ago titled ‘cafe del mar with the shit tunes deleted’. It’s a few hours of songs that have appeared on the Café del Mar compilations. Hit shuffle and feel the warm breeze. Some ‘shit tunes’ may have snuck through…