Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (89 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Grime attempted to turn the Londoncentric hardcore tradition into an authentic UK hip hop, burning up rave’s sonic residues as rocket fuel to propel MCs into the starry firmament of global pop. Dubstep seems much more tied to the past. Where grime adapted to the facialized pop culture of rap and R & B, dubstep sticks with the ‘faceless techno bollocks’ principle. Burial, the artist who has garnered more outside-world attention than anyone else in his scene, is also the most opposed to celebrity: Underground Resistance-style, he refuses to be photographed or reveal his real name. Burial has also made explicit the keep-the-faith conservatism in dubstep through the elegiac tone of his album, which, as Mark Fisher argues, is almost a requiem or funeral eulogy for rave culture. In the song ‘Gutted’, there’s a low-key sample, a faltering but stoic male voice declaring, ‘
me and him, we’re from different, ancient tribes . . . now we’re both almost extinct . . . sometimes . . . you gotta stick with the ancient ways . . . old school ways
.’ Kode 9, whose Hyperdub label releases Burial’s records, has described dubstep as ‘the ghost of jungle’, referring to a rhythmic quality of half-step where the low-end reminds you of the half-speed basslines in jungle and your brain supplies the missing hyperspeed breakbeats. But the other sense – dubstep as rave’s afterlife, or even a form of mourning without letting go – seems just as applicable.
me and him, we’re from different, ancient tribes . . . now we’re both almost extinct . . . sometimes . . . you gotta stick with the ancient ways . . . old school ways
.’ Kode 9, whose Hyperdub label releases Burial’s records, has described dubstep as ‘the ghost of jungle’, referring to a rhythmic quality of half-step where the low-end reminds you of the half-speed basslines in jungle and your brain supplies the missing hyperspeed breakbeats. But the other sense – dubstep as rave’s afterlife, or even a form of mourning without letting go – seems just as applicable.
The ghost of rave stalked UK pop culture in 2006, with the
NME
-pushed phantasm of ‘nu-rave’. The coiners of the term, The Klaxons, covered Kicks Like A Mule’s hardcore hit ‘The Bouncer’, peppered their tunes with rave-alarm siren noises, and talked of their high-energy guitar/bass/drums sound as being an attempt to get ‘that early nineties euphoric feeling’. But they quickly disowned nu-rave as a gimmick to get attention, barely more than a joke. Nonetheless, the fact that there was a flurry of indie bands throwing gigs in illegal spaces to audiences waving glow-sticks, while rave-era style enjoyed a vogue in the fashion world, suggests that the
idea
of rave – blurrily grasped, based on pre-teen memories of N-Joi and Altern-8 on
TOTP
– still signified something in the collective unconscious. The last full-blown youth culture
movement
with its own fashion, slang, dance moves, rituals; an eruption of madness on a mass scale . . . rave’s Dionysian daftness was bound to seem appealing compared with the pall of cool that ruled UK music since at least The Strokes. If nu-rave was a false start, rave’s uptake by retro culture at some point in the fairly near future seems inevitable.
NME
-pushed phantasm of ‘nu-rave’. The coiners of the term, The Klaxons, covered Kicks Like A Mule’s hardcore hit ‘The Bouncer’, peppered their tunes with rave-alarm siren noises, and talked of their high-energy guitar/bass/drums sound as being an attempt to get ‘that early nineties euphoric feeling’. But they quickly disowned nu-rave as a gimmick to get attention, barely more than a joke. Nonetheless, the fact that there was a flurry of indie bands throwing gigs in illegal spaces to audiences waving glow-sticks, while rave-era style enjoyed a vogue in the fashion world, suggests that the
idea
of rave – blurrily grasped, based on pre-teen memories of N-Joi and Altern-8 on
TOTP
– still signified something in the collective unconscious. The last full-blown youth culture
movement
with its own fashion, slang, dance moves, rituals; an eruption of madness on a mass scale . . . rave’s Dionysian daftness was bound to seem appealing compared with the pall of cool that ruled UK music since at least The Strokes. If nu-rave was a false start, rave’s uptake by retro culture at some point in the fairly near future seems inevitable.
Of course, dance culture has been having its own internal revivals since the late nineties (acid has come back so many times now I’ve lost count). And what happened to electronic dance music in the ten years following
Energy Flash
’s publication – not so much the retro-moves, which were mostly amusing, but the general loss of forward momentum – did cause me quite a bit of dismay and distress. Things were pretty bustling at first, but by circa 2002, it started to feel like things were grinding to a halt. Like any embittered believer, I did a fair amount of lashing out. My attitude was probably similar to people who lived through the sixties adventure and then were disillusioned by what happened in the seventies, the fragmentation and entropy.
Energy Flash
’s publication – not so much the retro-moves, which were mostly amusing, but the general loss of forward momentum – did cause me quite a bit of dismay and distress. Things were pretty bustling at first, but by circa 2002, it started to feel like things were grinding to a halt. Like any embittered believer, I did a fair amount of lashing out. My attitude was probably similar to people who lived through the sixties adventure and then were disillusioned by what happened in the seventies, the fragmentation and entropy.
Now the dust has settled, I have a more clear-eyed appreciation of things. New musical and subcultural formations can never maintain their momentum indefinitely: at some point they settle into a steady-state pattern. It happened with jazz, with rock, with hip hop, so how could it not happen with techno-rave? This decade’s major genres of electronic music – microhouse, dubstep, breakcore – are essentially extensions of the ideas and ideals of the previous decade, the nineties. And there is a certain honour to that – knowing your era, keeping faith with its principles. Given the deadlock and outright retreat that characterizes the rest of pop culture in the noughties – rap stuck in a locked groove of gangsta bling, rock regressing in several backwards directions simultaneously, pop prettily vacant – there are worse things than sticking with and sticking by the decade that represents the last blast of full-tilt futurism in mainstream pop culture. ‘We are nineties people’ . . . Yeah, I can live with that.
TWENTY-FOUR
FLASHBACKS
A DIALOGUE WITH
THE AUTHOR
THE AUTHOR
Some people call Energy Flash
‘rockist’ – a rock fan’s version of techno. You do make loads of parallels with rock history and with specific rock bands. Yet many people involved in club culture think dance music has
nothing
to do with rock and they often actively hate guitar music . . .
‘rockist’ – a rock fan’s version of techno. You do make loads of parallels with rock history and with specific rock bands. Yet many people involved in club culture think dance music has
nothing
to do with rock and they often actively hate guitar music . . .
Rock was what I grew up with. I bought dance records from almost the git-go – funk and disco were highly esteemed in post-punk culture – but it’s fair to say that rock was my primary listening for the dozen years before I got into raving in 1991. So inevitably that’s going to inform my take on techno. One reason I made these rock comparisons, though, was as a rhetorical strategy to win people over, to make things understandable to people who know rock history but are pretty unfamiliar with techno. Comparing Joey Beltram to Black Sabbath is a good aural correlate. It transmits an idea of the sound, and the cluster of attitudes associated with heavy-metal parallels a certain hardcore rave mentality. The other thing is that it’s always nice to find patterns in your own taste. In ’91, when I started going to raves, I found of a lot of what I loved about rock music super-intensified in hardcore techno. But it was a new context – different technology, a whole new set of crowd rituals and behaviour – so that made it fresh, ‘the rock of the future’.
These rock/rave parallels are objectively real, I think. There is a certain kind of slamming energy, fusing aggression and euphoria, that you get in rock from garage punk through The Stooges to hardcore punk, and it’s very similar to what’s pulsing inside the more banging kinds of techno. The fact that expressions to do with ‘rock’ – rocking the crowd, ‘let’s rock’ – occur in rave suggests that the energy-essence is really close. Also, rave and rock are riff-based, whereas house music is more pulse-oriented. The riff is one of those things that critics never write about, but it’s central to the power of rock
and
rave. Riffs are hooks that are simultaneously melodic and rhythmic. A riff is a mnemonic motif, but also a rhythmic motive, something that engages your locomotor system, works your body, revs you up.
and
rave. Riffs are hooks that are simultaneously melodic and rhythmic. A riff is a mnemonic motif, but also a rhythmic motive, something that engages your locomotor system, works your body, revs you up.
I totally disagree with the notion of a ‘pure’ dance culture allegedly uncontaminated by rock attitudes. True, house music in the original American form follows this straight line back to disco. But in the UK, whatever its sonic ancestry from house, rave’s
ideological
sources were psychedelia (ideas of the second summer of love, counterculture, an underground of drugged freaks) and punk (do-it-yourself, this brutalist, bring-the-noise aesthetic). So many of the original UK rave participants were punk or post-punk veterans. The same applies to the US rave scene, which is a separate entity from house music over there. I’ve met loads of Americans who were into industrial music or hardcore punk
immediately
before converting to rave. So there’s definitely a migration of attitudes. Then, when rave evolved into IDM, electronic dance culture became the inheritor of rock’s seriousness, all those ideas of musical progress and challenging the listener.
ideological
sources were psychedelia (ideas of the second summer of love, counterculture, an underground of drugged freaks) and punk (do-it-yourself, this brutalist, bring-the-noise aesthetic). So many of the original UK rave participants were punk or post-punk veterans. The same applies to the US rave scene, which is a separate entity from house music over there. I’ve met loads of Americans who were into industrial music or hardcore punk
immediately
before converting to rave. So there’s definitely a migration of attitudes. Then, when rave evolved into IDM, electronic dance culture became the inheritor of rock’s seriousness, all those ideas of musical progress and challenging the listener.
The main area of convergence between rock and rave is the opposition between underground versus mainstream. Most dance scenes have an anti-pop sensibility. True, they are populist, but their populism takes the form of tribal unity against what they perceive as a homogeneous and blandly uninvolving corporate pop mainstream. So it’s the massive versus mass culture. Tribal initiates are felt to have a more committed, participatory relationship with music than the desultory, passive pop consumer.
What does a concept like ‘underground’ really mean, though?
In dance, ‘underground’ doesn’t have a political meaning beyond a vague militancy (being a soldier for a certain sound) and an equally vague opposition to all things corporate. The mainstream pop industry is seen as a purveyor of a diluted, compromised version of ‘the real thing,’ which in its true vital form is music of the streets.
‘Underground’ doesn’t equate particularly with the counterculture or the political left. Like hip hop, rave is a post-socialist culture. Entrepreneurial activity is a medium of expression: throwing warehouse parties and promoting raves, running small labels, Djing, operating specialist retail stores, producers selling their own tracks. All these people want to make money but they want to generate ‘cultural capital’ too, through doing something cool and edgy. So underground versus mainstream, that is a split within capitalism – it’s micro-capitalism versus macro-capitalism. The latter is the enemy not because it’s corrupt or interested in profit, but because it’s bureaucratic, clueless, slow-moving, it can’t respond nimbly to the massive’s rapidly evolving taste.
What happened by the mid-nineties was that some micro-capitalist units were getting businesslike and became more like small corporations (Warp, Cream), while elements within the corporate music industry were moving in to co-opt dance culture (big record labels starting boutique labels, licensing big club tracks). The hallmark of the macro-capitalist mindset is the long-term view and trying to achieve economies of scale (the blockbuster mentality). Micro-capitalism is short-term, it’s oriented to the quick killing – say, a hot white-label bootleg of an R & B tune with uncleared samples that will net several thousand quid in a few weeks, a record that sells itself through word of mouth. Whereas the macro way is to establish artist careers oriented around albums and marketing campaigns.
Does the opposition ‘underground versus pop’ really hold? Surely one of the things about rave – especially UK hardcore 1990 – 2 – is that it’s chartpop?
True. And even the stuff that didn’t smash into the charts was pretty poptastic. I suppose one of the things that runs through all the stuff I like most in music, it’s either art-into-pop or street-into-pop. I don’t tend to have that much interest in stuff that stays ghettoized, whether that means totally street/underground, or the art ghetto of ivory-tower experimentalism. Oh, I like some stuff that is stuck in those ghettos, but what’s most exciting to me is when art ideas or street ideas invade the mainstream, or at least seem to have this pop potential that suggests they could do that, whether it actually happens or not.
The word ‘hardcore’ disguises this poppy side to all that UK rave music of the early nineties. Hardcore makes you think of the opposite of softness, of easily consumable music. Hardcore also suggests ‘not for the general public’, something too raw to be accessible or acceptable to most consumers. Hardcore sounds a bit initiates-only. With hardcore rave, that wasn’t the case: this was populist music and incredibly instant in its appeal, to the point of being philistine. The ‘hardcore’ relates more to the idea of the music getting faster and more intense in parallel with the audience’s escalating drug intake.
‘Hardcore’ as a concept is the intellectual spine of
Energy Flash
. In the first edition of the book it refers not just to breakbeat rave but a continuum of stuff that makes dance-floor crowds go mental, everything from jack tracks and acid tracks through Todd Terry to Northern bleep, Belgian techno and gabba. More often than not, these are tracks that weren’t made with artistic intent or any preciousness, tracks knocked out quickly, sometimes made with mercenary motives, to fit into the ruling sound that month on the rave floor. Tracks that pander to the will of the crowd, its hunger for manic drug-noise. And that cater to the DJs’ need for mixable material, a plethora of hot-off-the-press tracks that sound texturally homogeneous and operate within the same b.p.m. range. So copyists cloning the reigning sound means more grist for the DJ mill.
Energy Flash
. In the first edition of the book it refers not just to breakbeat rave but a continuum of stuff that makes dance-floor crowds go mental, everything from jack tracks and acid tracks through Todd Terry to Northern bleep, Belgian techno and gabba. More often than not, these are tracks that weren’t made with artistic intent or any preciousness, tracks knocked out quickly, sometimes made with mercenary motives, to fit into the ruling sound that month on the rave floor. Tracks that pander to the will of the crowd, its hunger for manic drug-noise. And that cater to the DJs’ need for mixable material, a plethora of hot-off-the-press tracks that sound texturally homogeneous and operate within the same b.p.m. range. So copyists cloning the reigning sound means more grist for the DJ mill.
In the ten years since
Energy Flash
first came out, I have tended to use the term ‘hardcore continuum’ to refer to a specifically Londoncentric tradition going from breakbeat rave through jungle to speed garage and grime. This continuum is based around an enduring infrastructure: pirate radio stations, places like Music House where people get dubplates pressed up, specialist record stores, dingy clubs. And despite all the mutations in the music, there’s a sonic continuum too, the core musical principles from 1990 to now are the same: beat science seeking the intersection between ‘fucked up’ and ‘groovy’, dark bass pressure, MCs chatting fast, samples and arrangement ideas inspired by pulp soundtracks. The b.p.m. have oscillated wildly, particular elements in the mix wax and wane, but in a larger sense
this is the same music
. You could even see it as a conservative culture, except that its credo is ‘keep moving forward’.
Energy Flash
first came out, I have tended to use the term ‘hardcore continuum’ to refer to a specifically Londoncentric tradition going from breakbeat rave through jungle to speed garage and grime. This continuum is based around an enduring infrastructure: pirate radio stations, places like Music House where people get dubplates pressed up, specialist record stores, dingy clubs. And despite all the mutations in the music, there’s a sonic continuum too, the core musical principles from 1990 to now are the same: beat science seeking the intersection between ‘fucked up’ and ‘groovy’, dark bass pressure, MCs chatting fast, samples and arrangement ideas inspired by pulp soundtracks. The b.p.m. have oscillated wildly, particular elements in the mix wax and wane, but in a larger sense
this is the same music
. You could even see it as a conservative culture, except that its credo is ‘keep moving forward’.
Your allegiance to ‘hardcore’ isn’t just sonic, though, it has a class dimension, right? The bourgeois intellectual, attracted to the lumpen energy of dance culture. Isn’t this a form of slumming?
A tiny bit maybe. Then again, the whole landscape of popular culture is criss-crossed by relationships of longing, fantasy, projection. White people wanting to be more like blacks is the classic one, and the British wanting to become American is another (and vice versa, sometimes). No one wants to be what, or be where, they are. I think the essence of pop – maybe of music – is ‘be reasonable, demand the impossible’. So pop culture is full of these strivings to heal the wounds caused by class and race, doomed fantasy attempts to achieve wholeness.
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