S. Porter is an entrepreneur and writer whose 17-year run in Brooklyn nightlife became a front-row seat to hip-hop’s rise from music to cultural power. From 1998 to 2015, he built and operated The Lab, a nightclub that survived—and evolved—through multiple eras: raw hip-hop nights, radio-driven “grown and sexy” energy, and later the EDM wave that transformed the room, the crowd, and the business.

But the real story wasn’t the parties. It was the pressure—keeping the doors open while the neighborhood outside was changing fast. During the same years The Lab was building momentum, a local neighborhood gang conflict flared up right where the club was located, and the room often sat at the crossroads where reputation, money, loyalty, and fear intersected. At moments, the tension became personal—the author’s own safety was at risk, and the consequences of being “in the middle” didn’t end when the night was over. What happened in and around that period reshaped his relationships and the way he understood risk, responsibility, and survival.

Porter’s memoir, The Lab: An Outsider’s Adventure Inside the World of Hip-Hop, isn’t a local club story. It’s a universal tale of transformation under pressure—an inside look at the real infrastructure around hip-hop, and the collisions it rarely admits, including the uneasy overlap between hip-hop masculinity and gay nightlife culture operating in plain sight.