Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  Born in 1955, Knuckles grew up in the South Bronx. At Nicky Siano’s underground dance club, The Gallery, Knuckles helped out by, amongst other things, spiking the punch with LSD and even going so far as to inject the drug into the free fruit. In the early seventies, Knuckles DJ-ed for several years – alongside another future ‘deep house’ legend, Larry Levan – at The Continental Baths, a gay ‘pleasure palace’, and then at SoHo. Levan was originally the first choice of the Chicago entrepreneurs who set up The Warehouse. But Levan decided to stay on in New York at SoHo, so it was Knuckles who moved to Chicago in early 1977 to take up the DJ spot. A three storey, former factory in West Central Chicago, The Warehouse drew around two thousand mostly gay and black hedonists to dance from midnight Saturday to midday Sunday. The four dollar admission was low, there was free juice and water, and the atmosphere on the middle storey dancefloor was intense. It was here that Knuckles began to experiment with editing disco breaks on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, reworking and recombining the raw material – Philadelphia International classics, underground club hits on the Salsoul label by the likes of Loleatta Holloway and First Choice, Moroder-beat – that would soon evolve into house.

  In 1983, The Warehouse’s promoters doubled the entrance fee, prompting Knuckles to quit and set up his own Friday night club, The Power Plant. The Warehouse retaliated by opening another Saturday club, The Music Box, based around a young kid from California called Ron Hardy. Playing in a rawer style than Knuckles, Hardy created an even more intense and disorientating atmosphere; using two copies of the same record, he’d stretch a track out into a Tantric eternity, teasing the audience by frustrating their anticipation of the breakdown. Unlike the Detroit scene, where drug-taking was unusual, Chicago house went hand in hand with stimulants and hallucinogens. People smoked pot, sniffed poppers (also known as ‘rush’), and snorted cocaine. Acid was popular, because it was cheap, long-lasting and the blotters were easily concealed on your person. And some clubbers smoked ‘happy sticks’, reefers dipped in angel dust (the deranging hallucinogen PCP). At the rougher and more hardcore hedonist Music Box, where it got so hot people tore their shirts off, the vibe was accordingly somewhat dark; Hardy eventually became a drug addict, and died in 1993.

  With other regular parties emerging like The Loft, The Playground, and East Hollywood, competition between DJs grew fierce. To get an edge over their rivals, DJs would devise more complicated mixing tricks and employ special effects, like Frankie Knuckles’ steam locomotive sound. Both Farley and Knuckles started to use a live drum machine to bolster their mixes and make the experience more hypnotic; Knuckles is said to have bought his Roland 909 beat-box from Derrick May. The stomping four-to-the-floor kick-drum would become the defining mark of house music. Other elements – hissing hi-hat patterns, synthetic hand-claps, synth-vamps, chiming bass-loops, drum rolls that pushed the track to the next plateau of pre-orgasmic intensity – emerged when Chicagoans started making records to slake the DJs insatiable demand for fresh material. Called ‘tracks’, as opposed to songs, because they consisted of little more than a drum track, this proto-house music was initially played by DJs on reel-to-reel tape and cassette.

  Although many have claimed the title of ‘first house track’, most agree that the first vinyl release was Jesse Saunders’ and Vince Lawrence’s ‘On and On’ (a raw, ultra-minimal version of the Salsoul classic by First Choice), which the duo put out in 1983 on their own Jes Say label. Saunders and Lawrence approached Larry Sherman, a local entrepreneur who had bought out Chicago’s only record pressing plant, and asked him to press up 500 12 inches for them on trust. They promised to return within twenty minutes and pay him $4 per disc. Not only did they come back and pay him in full, they also asked him to press another thousand copies.

  Stunned by the demand for this new music in Chicago, Sherman started the Trax label, and débuted with another Jesse Saunders track, ‘Wanna Dance’, released under the name Le Noiz. Sherman’s role in the genesis of house is much disputed. Some regard him as a visionary entrepreneur who fostered the scene and provided work for the musicians in the day to day operations of Trax. Others accuse Sherman of pursuing short-term profit and neglecting the long-term career prospects of his artists, thereby contributing to the premature demise of the Chicago scene in the late eighties.

  In the mid-eighties, though, Trax and Chicago’s other leading house label DJ International played a major role not just in developing a local market for house tracks, but in getting the records distributed to other cities in America and to Europe. It was a DJ International track – Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk and Jesse Saunders’s ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’, a cover of an Isaac Hayes song – that became the first international house hit, making the UK Top Ten in September 1986. Propelled by a bassline made out of what sounds like a sampled tuba motif and by almost boogie-woogie piano vamps, ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ features the fabulously overwrought histrionics of Darryl Pandy, whose hyper-melismatic vocals are the missing link between gospel and gender-bending male-diva Sylvester, the disco star responsible for ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’.

  Other hits followed in early 1987: ‘Jack The Groove’ by Raze (actually from Washington DC) got to Number Twenty in the UK, and Steve Silk Hurley’s ‘Jack Your Body’ was a Number One smash in January. But by the middle of that year, house seemed to be petering out like any other clubland fad. The self-reflexive song-titles, which usually involved the words ‘house’ and ‘jack’ (the Chicago style of palsied dancing), seemed to place house firmly in the pop tradition of dance crazes like the Twist and the Mashed Potato, novelties with in-built obsolescence. House’s depthless doggerel (funktional catchphrases like ‘work your body’, ‘move your body’, ‘let’s rock’) and sonic gimmicks (the stutter effect often put on vocals) were impressively post-human and depersonalized, but quickly became irritating. At the time, I remember commenting in a singles review column that house had proved itself a lame duck; compared with hip hop, there didn’t seem much of a future for it. I was dead wrong, of course, as wrong as a boy can be, for what we’d heard so far was only the tip of the iceberg. As for house having much of a future . . . house was the future.

  New Jack City

  ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ and ‘Jack Your Body’, early house’s two biggest hits, each represented a different side of house: songs versus tracks, a R & B derived tradition of soul-full expression versus depersonalized functionalism. From my point of view, it’s the ‘tracks’ that ultimately proved to be the most interesting side of house culture. The songful style of ‘deep’ house rapidly collapsed into an affirmation of traditional musicianly values and uplifting humanist sentiments. But ‘jack tracks’, and the ‘acid tracks’ that followed them, honed in on a different potential latent within disco: jettisoning all the residues of soul and humanity, this was machine-music without apology, machine-made music that turned you into a machine. Its mind-nullifying repetition offered liberation through trance-dance.

  In many ways, house seemed like a flashblack to the white avant-funk and experimental electronic music of the early eighties, when post-punks in England and New York turned to black dance styles as the way forward. Generally, with the exception of Talking Heads and PiL, avant-funk never had much impact in its own day. But, in a sort of every dog will have its day syndrome, many of the avant-funksters enjoyed substantial success when they reinvented themselves as key members of the first wave of British homegrown house. A Certain Ratio’s Simon Topping teamed up with another Mancunian avant-disco veteran, Quando Quango’s Mike Pickering, to record the Brit-house favourite ‘Carino’ as T. Coy; Pickering went on to lead the hugely popular but more songful M. People. Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard Kirk reappeared as Sweet Exorcist, 400 Blow’s Tony Thorpe purveyed UK acid house as Moody Boys, Biting Tongues’ Graham Massey became the musical brains behind 808 State.

  Perhaps the most prophetic of the early eighties avant-funk outfits was Dusseldorf’s D. A. F., who began as an experi
mental industrial unit, then stripped down their chaotic sound to a harsh, homo-erotic avant-disco influenced by the New Savagery ideas of artist Joseph Beuys. On their three albums for Virgin, Alles Ist Gut, Gold Und Liebe and Fur Immer, the inelastic synth-pulses and frigid frenzy of the beats are uncannily pre-emptive of acid house. D. A. F. were stripped down lyrically as well as musically. Tracks like ‘Mein Hertz Macht Bum (My Heart Goes Boom)’ and ‘Absolute Bodycontrol’ offered sexmusic shorn of romantic mystique and rendered in clinical, cardiovascular language, while ‘Der Mussolini’ (chorus: ‘dance der Mussolini . . . dance der Adolf Hitler’) put a twisted spin on the standard avant-funk obsession with control.

  D. A. F. and the similar group Liaisons Dangereuses actually had some currency in the early Chicago scene. Their sinewy sound embodied an idea – the dancefloor as a gymnasium of desire, liberation achieved through submission to a regime of strenuous bliss – that was a latent content of gay disco’s erotics. As Walter Hughes notes, songs like Village People’s ‘Y. M. C. A.’ and ‘In The Navy’ used ‘the language of recruitment and evangelism’ to bring out the homo-erotics of discipline, while the lyrics of disco songs often represented love in the imagery of ‘enslavement, insanity, or addiction, a disease or a police state’.

  As house music evolved, this idea – freedom achieved by abandoning subjectivity and self-will, the ecstasy of being enthralled by the beat – became more explicit. Gradually, the hyper-sexual imagery was supplanted by a post-sexual delirium, reflected in the Chicago dancing style known as ‘jacking’. In disco, dance had gradually shed its role as courtship ritual and opened up into what Hughes calls ‘increasingly unpaired, unchoreographed’ freestyle. Jacking took this to the next stage, replacing pelvic-thrust and booty-shake with a whole-body frenzy of polymorphously perverse tics and convulsive pogo-ing.

  Etymologically, ‘jack’ seems to be a corruption of ‘jerk’, but also may have some link to ‘jacking off’. The house dancefloor suggests the circle jerk, a spectacle of collective auto-eroticism, sterile jouissance. ‘Jacking’ also makes me think of jacking into an electrical circuit. Plugged into the sound-system, the jacker looks a bit like a robot with epilepsy (itself an electrical disorder of the nervous system). In jack tracks like Fast Eddie Smith’s ‘Jack To The Sound’ and Secret Secret’s ‘We Come To Jack’, lyrics are restricted to terse commands and work-that-body exhortations. Eventually, acid house bypassed verbals altogether and proceeded to what felt like direct possession of your nervous system via the bass-biology interface.

  Robotnik vacancy, voodoo delirium, whirling dervishes, zombiedom, marionettes, slaves-to-the-rhythm: the metaphors that house music and ‘jacking’ irresistibly invite all contain the notion of becoming less-than-human. Other aspects of the music exacerbate the sense of attenuated self-hood. With a few exceptions, house singers tend to be ciphers, their vocals merely plastic material to be manipulated by the producer. In early house, the vocals were often garbled, sped-up and slowed down, pulverized into syllable or phoneme-size particles, and above all subjected to the ubiquitous, humiliating stutter-effect, whereby a phrase was transformed on the sampling keyboard into a staccato riff. Ralphi Rosario’s classic ‘You Used To Hold Me’ divides into two distinct halves. At first, diva Xavier Gold is in the spotlight, putting in a sterling performance as the cynically materialistic and vengeful lover. Then Rosario takes control, vivisecting Gold’s vocal so that stray vowels and sibilants bounce like jumping beans over the groove, and transforming one syllable of passion into a spasmic Morse code riff.

  House makes the producer the star, not the singer. It’s the culmination of an unwritten (because unwriteable) history of black dance pop, a history determined not by sacred cow auteurs but by producers, session musicians and engineers – backroom boys. House music takes this depersonalization further: it gets rid of human musicians (the house band that gave Motown or Stax or Studio One its distinctive sound), leaving just the producer and his machines. Operating as a cottage factory churning out a high turnover of tracks, the house producer replaces the artist’s signature with the industrialist’s trademark. Closer to an architect or draughtsman, the house auteur is absent from his own creation; house tracks are less like artworks, in the expressive sense, than vehicles, rhythmic engines that take the dancer on a ride.

  As well as being post-biographical, house is post-geographical pop. If Chicago is the origin, it’s because it happens to be a junction point in the international trade routes of disco. Breaking with the traditional horticultural language we use to describe the evolution of pop – cross-pollination, hybridization – house’s ‘roots’ lie in deracination. The music sounds inorganic: machines talking to each other, in an un-real acoustic space. When sounds from real-world acoustic sources enter house’s pleasuredome, they tend to be processed and disembodied – as with the distortion and manipulation inflicted upon the human voice, evacuating its soul and reducing it to a shallow effect.

  But this is only one side of house culture: the machine-music side that evolved from jack tracks to acid house, music that’s all surface and post-human intensity. Just as important was the humanist, uplifting strain of ‘deep house’ that affiliated itself to the R & B tradition: songs like Sterling Void’s ‘It’s All Right’, Joe Smooth’s ‘Promised Land’ and his album Rejoice. Combining Philly’s silky symphonic strings and mellifluous vocals with gospel’s imagery of salvation and succour, this strain of house was sufficiently worthy and wholesome to win over English soul boys such as Paul Weller and his fanboy clone Doctor Robert (formerly of The Blow Monkeys). Weller actually covered ‘Promised Land’ in early 1989.

  In house, there’s a divide between finding yourself (through becoming a member of the house) and losing yourself (in solipsistic hallucinatory bliss). The split in house between finding an identity/expressing your self and losing self/losing control could be mapped on to the tension in gay culture between the politics of pride, unity and collective resilience, and the more hardcore ‘erotic politics’ of impersonal sexual encounters, ‘deviant’ practices and drugs. House offered a sense of communion and community to those who might have been alienated from organized religion because of their sexuality. And so Frankie Knuckles described The Warehouse as a ‘church for people who have fallen from grace’, while another house pioneer, Marshall Jefferson, likened house to ‘old time religion in the way that people just get happy and screamin”. Male divas like Daryl Pandy and Robert Owens had trained in church choirs.

  In ‘deep house’, the inspirational lyrics often echo the civil rights movement of the sixties, conflating the quest for black civic dignity with the struggle for gay pride. Joe Smooth’s ‘Promised Land’ and Db’s ‘I Have A Dream’ both explicitly evoke Martin Luther King; the first promises ‘brothers, sisters, one day we’ll be free’, the latter dreams of ‘one house nation under a groove’. The Children’s ‘Freedom’ is a fraught plea for tolerance and fraternity. The spoken-word monologue beseeches ‘don’t oppress me’ and ‘don’t judge me’, and asks, bewildered and vulnerable: ‘can’t you accept me for what I am?’ The name ‘The Children’ comes from Chicago house slang: to be a ‘child’ was to be gay, a member of house’s surrogate family. ‘Step-child’ was the term for a straight person accepted by gays.

  In other house tracks, religious and sexual rapture are fused in a kind of Gnostic eroto-mysticism. Jamie Principle’s ‘Baby Wants To Ride’ begins with a prayer from Principle, and then the Voice of God declaring that it’s time to relate ‘the Revelation of my Second Coming’. But the ‘coming’ is revealed to be decidedly profane: an encounter with a dominatrix, who strips him and makes him beg on bended knees, then rides him through a porno-copia of sexual positions. Principle revels in the passivity of being a plaything, a (sexual) object, feyly gasping: ‘She took me . . . She made me scream.’ A Prince obsessed androgyne, Principle – née Byron Walton – told Melody Maker: ‘Men always want their women to scream when they’re having sex. But the men aren’t m
eant to scream or wouldn’t admit to doing it. But I can’t accept that male role. If a woman makes a man scream, I think that’s just as important, just as much a success. If I want to scream, I scream.’ Not content with blasphemously conflating SM with the Book of Revelation, ‘Baby Wants To Ride’ adds politics to the liberation theology: Principle exhorts the South African government to set his people free, disses AmeriKKKa as a ‘bullshit land’, and complains it’s hard to ride ‘when you’re living in a fascist dream’.

  In Fingers Inc’s ‘Distant Planet’, this longing for sanctuary from racial and sexual oppression takes the form of cosmic mysticism, à la Sun Ra. The distant planet is a place ‘where anyone can walk without fear’; if you’re treated like an alien, you wanna go where the alien feels at home. Eerie and trepidatious, the track has a mood of desolate utopianism. The musical brains behind Fingers Inc, Larry Heard, is an interestingly conflicted house auteur. With its nimble-fingered fluency and over-melismatic Robert Owens vocals, most Fingers Inc output reflects Heard’s background as a jazz/R & B drummer and keyboardist reared on fusion and progressive rock (George Duke, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Genesis, Rick Wakeman). Songs like ‘Mysteries Of Love’, ‘Another Side’ and ‘A Path’ are the electro-blues of a seeker. Heard declared: ‘Jack means nothing to me’. But ironically, his most thrilling music took the form of the brutally dehumanized and machinic tracks – ‘Amnesia (Unknown Mix)’ and ‘Washing Machine’ – he released under the alias Mr Fingers. ‘Washing Machine’ – an interminable brain-wash cycle of burbling bass-loops and jarringly off-kilter hi-hats – is a mantra for a state of mindlessness.

  Everybody Needs a 303