Las Vegas is an endlessly interesting place that I’m very eager to leave. For reasons not entirely clear to me, I’m here for a conference on something called Sitecore, although three days have gone by and I remain pretty in the dark on what that is. Not literally, of course - I’m not sure that there’s a square inch of this city that isn’t neon-lit around the clock. Possibly somewhere outside. I haven’t seen much of outside since arriving here.

I’m actually not sure if I would even recognize it - the defining feature of Vegas seems to be a sort of multi-sensory assault (sonic, visual, olfactory, in that order) that changes very little from environment to environment. Sure, I probably ought to have expected the constant EDM blast on the casino floor, but I was completely unprepared for how seamlessly it transferred - partially due to clever speaker placement, partially due to how generic the sound is - to the outdoors. From the center of the Strip, I’d guess that you’d have to walk for half an hour in any direction to hear music at anything but 128 BPM (and another mile or so to hear nothing at all). Upon arrival, I was a bit dismayed at my room’s lack of soundproofing until I realized that the faint strains of Wild Thoughts were actually coming from an in-room speaker that, sweet Christ, was on the same circuit as the overhead light.

You get the picture. But what about the actual performance spaces, venues where music was featured more prominently (still background noise, but for dancing rather than, uh, breathing). What about the club? Have I ever got answers for you. On the final night of the conference (i.e. last night), Sitecore rented out an entire club (one that I’ve heard about in rap songs, no less) for hundreds of sweaty dudes to stand around in. To their credit, it was dim enough to be less obviously comedic than it might have been. There was free food and drink (I had the distinct pleasure of ordering more than one double Dewar’s, a beautiful-sounding phrase on par with cellar door) and a couple of actual DJs, most notably Samantha Ronson, sister of superproducer Mark and, Wikipedia tells me, erstwhile paramour of Lindsay Lohan. For what I assume was some of the easiest money of her life, she played a lot of Chance the Rapper and cued up the already-classic transition of One Dance into Fade. There was also a very good run of Work It into Ride Wit Me and Hot In Herre.

Speaking of pictures, I posed for a couple lest you think that I was having any fun at this thing. Even a quadruple Dewar’s deep, I recognized that it would be important to document my ironic remove from the situation to maintain my ability to credibly write about, rather than experience, the experience. Here’s one, and here’s another, taken at a considerably fancier photobooth, for which I tried presenting a more oblique angle. During the taking of the second, someone in a Chewbacca mask asked if I wanted any company, and I’ve regretted politely declining ever since.

Turns out clubs are actually pretty cool if you’re able to eat and drink as if money were no object, and doubly so when the spectrum of dancing abilities is shifted such that my extreme limitations in that arena are still good enough for the 95th or so percentile of the crowd. And what about the rest of Vegas? Local legend holds that the city has non-tourist residents, with some estimates of the herd putting its population as high as the hundreds of thousands. The historic downtown of Las Vegas is centered around Fremont Street, which is only slightly less weird but considerably more pleasant. As far as I can tell, the city’s entirely non-Strip workforce is employed by Zappos.com, which they like so much that not one person I talked to was able to refrain from singing its praises (three different people told me, with the air of a resident of Montpelier, Vermont mentioning that theirs is the only state capital without a McDonald’s, that the company’s multi-millionaire CEO lives in - get this - a dang Airstream! Just down the road! Imagine that). Another tenet of company culture seems to be the worship of Modest Mouse, whose music I heard drifting out of four distinct bars.

This turned out to be less about sound than I’d intended, but it turns out that there are multiple approaches available to make the ultimate point: don’t go to Las Vegas. While normal enough, there’s a reason that the city’s permanent residents are exclusively Nevadan by birth. I’ll leave you with two images:

1.
Because of the mind-boggling amount of LED screen real estate already available, there was no need to make new signs or banners to display the omnipresent #LasVegasStrong; instead, a commemorative slide was just put into the rotation of the existing signs. This means that it was quite common to see a vast black screen bearing the hashtag, which would shortly transition (via a star wipe, of course), to an ad for the Gucci store or some sort of show called Donny & Marie.

2.
Optimistic about finding something to do besides gamble, I was quite excited to see a highway sign for Chinatown on my ride in. I asked the driver about it, to which she said is that where you’ll be staying? It’s a hotel, I guess.