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Authors: Simon Reynolds
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BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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My second, fatally addictive rave-alation occurred a few months later at a quadruple bill of top 1991 rave acts – N-Joi, K-Klass, Bassheads and M-People. This time, fully E’d up, I finally grasped in a visceral sense why the music was made the way it was: how certain tingly textures goosepimpled your skin and particular oscillator-riffs triggered the E-rush, the way the gaseous diva vocals mirrored your own gushing emotions. Finally, I understood ecstasy as a
sonic
science. And it became even more crystal clear that the audience was the star: that bloke over there doing fishy-finger-dancing was as much a part of the entertainment, the tableau, as the DJs or bands. Dance-moves spread through the crowd like superfast viruses. I was instantly entrained in a new kind of dancing – tics and spasms, twitches and jerks, the agitation of bodies broken down into separate components, then re-integrated at the level of the dancefloor
as a whole
. Each sub-individual part (a limb, a hand cocked like a pistol) was a cog in a collective ‘desiring machine’, interlocking with the sound-system’s bass-throbs and sequencer-riffs. Unity and self-expression fused in a forcefield of pulsating, undulating euphoria.
sonic
science. And it became even more crystal clear that the audience was the star: that bloke over there doing fishy-finger-dancing was as much a part of the entertainment, the tableau, as the DJs or bands. Dance-moves spread through the crowd like superfast viruses. I was instantly entrained in a new kind of dancing – tics and spasms, twitches and jerks, the agitation of bodies broken down into separate components, then re-integrated at the level of the dancefloor
as a whole
. Each sub-individual part (a limb, a hand cocked like a pistol) was a cog in a collective ‘desiring machine’, interlocking with the sound-system’s bass-throbs and sequencer-riffs. Unity and self-expression fused in a forcefield of pulsating, undulating euphoria.
Getting into the raving aspect of house and techno somewhat late had a peculiar effect: I found myself, as fan and critic, on the wrong side of the tracks. In class and age terms (as a middle-class 28-year-old), I should logically have gravitated towards ‘progressive house’ and ‘intelligent techno’, then being vaunted as the only alternative to the degenerate excesses of hardcore rave. But, partly because I was a neophyte still in the honeymoon phase of raving, and partly because of a bias towards extremity in music, I found myself drawn ever deeper into hardcore. Confronted by the condescension of the cognoscenti, I developed my own counter-prejudice, which informs this entire book: the conviction that hardcore scenes in dance culture are the real creative motor of the music, and that self-proclaimed progressive initiatives usually involve a backing away from the edge, a reversion to more traditional ideas of ‘musicality’.
Hardcore
is that nexus where a number of attitudes and energies mesh: druggy hedonism, an instinctively avant-garde surrender to the ‘will’ of technology, a ‘fuck art, let’s dance’ DJ-oriented funktionalism, a smidgeon of underclass rage. Hardcore refers to different sounds in different countries and at different times, but the word generally guarantees a stance of subcultural intransigence, a refusal to be co-opted or cop out.
Hardcore
is that nexus where a number of attitudes and energies mesh: druggy hedonism, an instinctively avant-garde surrender to the ‘will’ of technology, a ‘fuck art, let’s dance’ DJ-oriented funktionalism, a smidgeon of underclass rage. Hardcore refers to different sounds in different countries and at different times, but the word generally guarantees a stance of subcultural intransigence, a refusal to be co-opted or cop out.
In London circa 1991 – 2, hardcore referred to ultra-fast, breakbeat-driven drug-noise, and it was abhorred by all right-thinking techno hipsters. To me it was patently the most exhilaratingly strange and deranged music of the nineties, a mad end-of-millennium channelling of the spirit of punk (in the sixties garage and seventies Stooges/Pistols senses) into the body of hip hop (breakbeats and bass). There’s been no small glee, let me tell you, in watching hardcore evolve into jungle and drum and bass, and thereby win universal acclaim as the leading edge of contemporary music.
But the experience of being in the ‘wrong’ place at the right time has instilled a useful Pavlovian response: whenever I hear the word ‘hardcore’ (or synonyms like ‘dark’, ‘ruffneck’, ‘cheesy’) used to malign a scene or sound, my ears prick up. Conversely, terms like ‘progressive’ or ‘intelligent’ trigger the alarm bells: when an underground scene starts talking this talk, it’s usually a sign that it’s gearing up to play the media game as a prequel to buying into the trad music industry structure of auteur-stars, concept albums and long-term careers. Above all, it’s a sign of impending musical debility, creeping self-importance and the haemorrhaging away of fun. Hardcore scenes are strongest when they remain remote from all of that, and instead thrive as anonymous collectives, subcultural machines in which ideas circulate back and forth between DJs and producers, and the genre evolves incrementally, week by week.
What I’m proposing in this book is that music shaped by and for drug experiences (even
bad
drug experiences) can go further out precisely because it’s not made with enduring ‘art’ status or avant-garde cachet as a goal. Hardcore rave’s dancefloor functionalism and druggy hedonism make it more wildly warped than the output of most self-conscious experimentalists. In
Energy Flash
, I trace a continuum of hardcore that runs from the most machinic forms of house (jack tracks and acid tracks) through British and European rave styles like bleep-and-bass, breakbeat house, Belgian hardcore, jungle, gabba, big beat and speed garage. A lot of exquisite music was made outside this continuum, and is covered in this book. But I still believe that the essence of rave resides with ‘hardcore pressure’: the rave audience’s demand for a soundtrack to going mental and getting fucked up.
bad
drug experiences) can go further out precisely because it’s not made with enduring ‘art’ status or avant-garde cachet as a goal. Hardcore rave’s dancefloor functionalism and druggy hedonism make it more wildly warped than the output of most self-conscious experimentalists. In
Energy Flash
, I trace a continuum of hardcore that runs from the most machinic forms of house (jack tracks and acid tracks) through British and European rave styles like bleep-and-bass, breakbeat house, Belgian hardcore, jungle, gabba, big beat and speed garage. A lot of exquisite music was made outside this continuum, and is covered in this book. But I still believe that the essence of rave resides with ‘hardcore pressure’: the rave audience’s demand for a soundtrack to going mental and getting fucked up.
This begs the question of whether the meaning of rave music is reducible to drugs, or even a single drug, Ecstasy. Does this music only make sense when the listener is under the influence? I don’t believe that for a second; some of the most tripped-out dance music has been made by straight-edge types who rarely if ever touch an illegal substance (4 Hero, Dave Clarke and Josh Wink being only three of the most famous abstainers). At the same time, rave culture as a whole is barely conceivable without drugs, or at least without drug metaphors: by itself, the music
drugs
the listener.
drugs
the listener.
Rave is more than music + drugs; it’s a matrix of lifestyle, ritualized behaviour and beliefs. To the participant, it feels like a religion; from the standpoint of the mainstream observer, it looks more like a sinister cult. I think again of that declaration: ‘we must make of joy a crime against the state’. In 1992, two aspects of underground rave that particularly thrilled and enthralled my imagination were literally crimes against the state: pirate radio, and the resurgence of illegal raves instigated by renegade sound-systems like Spiral Tribe.
What the London pirate stations and the free parties conjured up was the sense of rave as a vision quest. Both transformed mundane Britain, its dreary metropolitan thoroughfares and placid country lanes, into a cartography of adventure and forbidden pleasures. A huge part of the excitement of the rave lifestyle is the nocturnal itineraries that connect favourite clubs. Anyone who’s ever been involved in rave has their own enchanted pathways: for my gang, one was the pilgrimage between two profane shrines, Labrynth and Trade. It was a journey between worlds – Labrynth’s ultra-violet catacombs thronged with working-class East End teenagers, Trade’s gay pleasuredome in the centre of London – but both, in their different ways, were
hardcore
. It’s in these clubs that I experienced raving in its purest and most deranged form; blissfully ignorant of the DJs’ identities or the tracks’ names, lost in music, out-of-time.
hardcore
. It’s in these clubs that I experienced raving in its purest and most deranged form; blissfully ignorant of the DJs’ identities or the tracks’ names, lost in music, out-of-time.
These kind of experiences, shared by millions, can’t really be documented, although the post-Irvine Welsh mania for ‘rave fiction’ has made an attempt. Most of this writing consists of thinly disguised drug memoirs, and as everybody knows, other people’s drug anecdotes are as boring as their dreams. So how do you write the history of a culture that is fundamentally amnesiac and non-verbal? Unlike rock music, rave isn’t oriented around lyrics; for the critic, this requires a shift of emphasis, so that you no longer ask what the music ‘means’ but how it
works
. What is the affective charge of a certain kind of bass sound, or particular rhythm? Rave music represents a fundamental break with rock, or at least the dominant English Lit and social realist paradigms of rock criticism, which focus on songs and storytelling. Where rock relates an experience (autobiographical or imaginary), rave
constructs
an experience. Bypassing interpretation, the listener is hurled into a vortex of heightened sensations, abstract emotions and artificial energies.
works
. What is the affective charge of a certain kind of bass sound, or particular rhythm? Rave music represents a fundamental break with rock, or at least the dominant English Lit and social realist paradigms of rock criticism, which focus on songs and storytelling. Where rock relates an experience (autobiographical or imaginary), rave
constructs
an experience. Bypassing interpretation, the listener is hurled into a vortex of heightened sensations, abstract emotions and artificial energies.
For some, this makes the idea of ‘rave culture’ a contradiction in terms. One might define ‘culture’ as something that tells you where you came from and where you’re going, something that nourishes the spirit, imparts life-wisdom, and generally makes life habitable. Rave provokes the question: is it possible to base a culture around sensations rather than truths, fascination rather than meaning?
For all my believer’s ardour, there’s a thread of doubt running through this book. As an adult with Left-liberal allegiances, I worry sometimes whether recreational drug use is any kind of adequate basis for a culture, let alone a counterculture. Is rave simply about the dissipation of utopian energies into the void, or does the idealism it catalyses spill over into and transform ordinary life? Can the oceanic, ‘only connect!’ feelings experienced on the dancefloor be integrated into everyday struggles to be ‘better at being human’? Learning to ‘lose your self’ can be an enlightenment, but it can also be strangely selfish: a greed for intense, ravishing experiences.
Dance culture has long been home to two radically opposed versions of what rave is ‘all about’. On one side, the transcendentalist, neo-psychedelic discourse of higher planes of consciousness and oceanic merger with Humanity/Gaia/the Cosmos. On the other, Ecstasy and rave music slot into an emergent ‘rush culture’ of teenage kicks and cheap thrills: video-games; skateboarding, snow-boarding, bunjee jumping and other ‘extreme sports’; blockbuster movies whose narratives are merely flimsy frameworks for the display of spectacular special effects.
For all my reservations about the spiritually corrupting and politically retreatist ramifications of rave culture, my own experience is different. Even as I cherish its power to empty my head, I’ve found this ‘mindless’ music endlessly thought-provoking. And despite its ostensibly escapist nature, rave has actually politicized me, made me think harder about questions of class, race, gender, technology. Mostly devoid of lyrics and almost never overtly political, rave music – like dub reggae and hip hop – uses sound and rhythm to construct psychic landscapes of exile and utopia. One of this book’s themes is the utopian/dystopian dialectic running through Ecstasy culture, the way the hunger for heaven-on-earth almost always leads on to a ‘darkside’ phase of drug excess and paranoia.
Energy Flash
strives to combine the thoughtless immediacy of my experiences in the thick of the scene, with the ‘thinking around the subject’ that ensued after the heat of the moment. As a history, it’s an attempt to chronicle how this extraordinary culture coalesced into being, and to track how those strands have subsequently unravelled to form the current post-rave diaspora. But pulsing inside the text, its
raison d’être
, is the incandescent memory of amnesiac moments, dance-floor frenzies that propelled me outside time and history.
Bliss on.
strives to combine the thoughtless immediacy of my experiences in the thick of the scene, with the ‘thinking around the subject’ that ensued after the heat of the moment. As a history, it’s an attempt to chronicle how this extraordinary culture coalesced into being, and to track how those strands have subsequently unravelled to form the current post-rave diaspora. But pulsing inside the text, its
raison d’être
, is the incandescent memory of amnesiac moments, dance-floor frenzies that propelled me outside time and history.
Bliss on.
PROLOGUE
EVERYTHING STARTS WITH AN E
ECSTASY AND
RAVE MUSIC
RAVE MUSIC
The Oxford Dictionary
defines ecstasy as ‘an overwhelming feeling of joy or rapture,’ and ‘an emotional or religious frenzy or trance-like state.’ In the early eighties, ecstasy acquired another meaning: the illegal drug MDMA, whose range of effects spans all of the definitions above. A ‘psychedelic amphetamine’, MDMA is a remarkable chemical, combining the sensory intensification and auditory enhancement of marijuana and low-dose LSD, the sleep-defying, energy-boosting effects of speed, and the uninhibited conviviality of alcohol. If that wasn’t enough, MDMA offers unique effects of empathy and insight.
defines ecstasy as ‘an overwhelming feeling of joy or rapture,’ and ‘an emotional or religious frenzy or trance-like state.’ In the early eighties, ecstasy acquired another meaning: the illegal drug MDMA, whose range of effects spans all of the definitions above. A ‘psychedelic amphetamine’, MDMA is a remarkable chemical, combining the sensory intensification and auditory enhancement of marijuana and low-dose LSD, the sleep-defying, energy-boosting effects of speed, and the uninhibited conviviality of alcohol. If that wasn’t enough, MDMA offers unique effects of empathy and insight.
Depending on expectations and context, the Ecstasy experience ranges from open-hearted
tête-à-tête
through collective euphoria to full-blown mystical rapture. Used in therapy, Ecstasy can facilitate a profound experience of interpersonal communication and self-discovery. In the rave environment, Ecstasy acts as both party-igniting fun-fuel
non pareil
and the catalyst for ego-melting mass communion. What all these different uses of MDMA have in common is
ekstasis
: the Greek etymological root of ecstasy, its literal meaning is ‘standing outside oneself’. MDMA takes you out of yourself and into blissful merger with something larger than the paltry, isolate ‘I’, whether that trans-individual is the couple-in-love, or the dancing crowd, or the cosmos. MDMA is the ‘we’ drug. It’s no coincidence that Ecstasy escalated into a pop cultural phenomemon at the end of the go-for-it, go-it-alone eighties (the real Me Decade). For Ecstasy is the remedy for the alienation caused by an atomized society.
tête-à-tête
through collective euphoria to full-blown mystical rapture. Used in therapy, Ecstasy can facilitate a profound experience of interpersonal communication and self-discovery. In the rave environment, Ecstasy acts as both party-igniting fun-fuel
non pareil
and the catalyst for ego-melting mass communion. What all these different uses of MDMA have in common is
ekstasis
: the Greek etymological root of ecstasy, its literal meaning is ‘standing outside oneself’. MDMA takes you out of yourself and into blissful merger with something larger than the paltry, isolate ‘I’, whether that trans-individual is the couple-in-love, or the dancing crowd, or the cosmos. MDMA is the ‘we’ drug. It’s no coincidence that Ecstasy escalated into a pop cultural phenomemon at the end of the go-for-it, go-it-alone eighties (the real Me Decade). For Ecstasy is the remedy for the alienation caused by an atomized society.
MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine) was first synthesized and patented shortly before the First World War, by the German company Merck. One version of MDMA’s history maintains that the drug was briefly prescribed as a slimming aid, another that it was originally developed as an appetite suppressant for German troops. If the latter is true, MDMA’s aggression-diminishing, empathy-inducing effects would have quickly disqualified its use in combat situations. When it was used in the early nineties in experimental therapy sessions for traumatized Nicuaragran soldiers, 75 per cent of the subjects expressed a desire for peace and an end to war, with several talking of loving everyone, including the enemy. And in the 1950s, American military researchers experimented with MDMA’s potential as a disorientation-drug, something that would psychologically disarm enemy troops.
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
13.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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