Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  According to Steven Melrose, co-founder of the City of Angels label, the West Coast breakbeat sound has little connection with house apart from its use of ‘acid builds’ (Roland 303 bass-riffs), and its 125 – 135 b.p.m. tempo. The breakbeats are popular because the four-to-the-floor house beat is just too European and disco for most American kids. ‘Funky breaks stems from the first rave music from the UK that was big in the USA – the ’91 breakbeat hardcore of SL2 and Prodigy.’ This makes West Coast breakbeat the American equivalent of jungle, except that it’s not as fast or as polyrhythmically complex; tracks usually feature just one looped break. The West Coast tracks also have a sunny, upful vibe compared with jungle, making the music ‘better for that 5 a.m. in the morning, palm trees vibe.’

  Formed by Scottish expat Melrose and his English partner Justin King, City of Angels is one of the leading funky breaks label. Its first release, ‘Now Is The Time’ by The Crystal Method (a Las Vegas outfit named after a technique for staying up all night, i.e., taking speed) defined the sound. Other West Coast pioneers include Überzone, The Bassbin Twins, Bass Kittens, DJs like John Kelley and Simply Jeff, and labels like Bassex and Mephisto. In Florida, the regional variant of funky breaks is influenced by Miami Bass – electro-descended, party-oriented rap that consists of little more than drum machine beats and booming Roland 808 bass. The leading lights of Florida breakbeat are Rabbit In The Moon and DJ Icey, whose Zone label is named in homage to UK 1991 breakbeat house labels Ozone and D-Zone.

  Southern Death Cult

  Florida now rivals Southern California as the USA’s number one rave state. These two sunshine-states have a lot in common. Geographically and culturally, Florida is not really part of the traditional Dixie South. Just as Los Angeles was imposed on the desert, Florida is a leisure paradise carved out of an inhospitable Jurassic environment. It only really came into its own as a vacation and retirement hotspot after the invention of air conditioning. Like the So-Cal region, Florida is a subtropical suburban sprawl, a car culture of booming bass-speakers and rootless anomie. Ostensibly the polar inverse of the state’s other big youth culture, death metal, Florida rave puts the morbid metal-kids to shame; it is infamous for taking excessive hedonism to the point of near-death experience, and sometimes taking it all the way. ‘Florida, it’s an active place, but the whole state’s done too many E’s,’ says Scott Hardkiss. ‘We’ve played a lot of parties where 3000 people are there, but no one’s dancing. Everyone’s off their head on [the downer] Rohypnol and E that’s like heroin, sit-down E.’

  Probably because of the number of wealthy old people who retire there, Florida is one of the most conservative states in America. Hardly surprising, then, that its rave scene is under siege from police departments and legislators. As with Los Angeles in 1992, the local news media used a series of rave fatalities to marshal public opposition to the deadly ‘drug supermarkets’. In July 1994, eighteen-year-old Sandra Montessi died from ‘cardiac dysrhythmia due to MDMA intoxication’ after consuming one and half tablets at Orlando’s Edge club. In the same year, Ecstasy also killed twenty-year-old Teresa Schwartz at the pioneering Orlando rave-club Dekko’s. And in 1996, a young woman and her two male friends went into convulsions at a Tampa nightclub after a dealer used an eyedropper to deposit GHB on their tongues. With overdoses a regular occurrence, Orlando formed a Rave Review Task Force in 1997, while the city legislature passed a bill to prohibit clubs from renting their spaces out for alcohol-free after-hours raves. But the ordinance only shifted the problem elsewhere – to illegal raves outside the city limits.

  This kind of repression is not unique to Florida. All across America, police departments, fire marshals and city councils use teen curfews, ordinances and licence restrictions targeted at particularly notorious clubs. The anti-rave crackdown is nationwide simply because there are very few states in America that don’t have a rave scene. According to the Hardkiss brothers, the entire South is kickin’ – Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland. ‘In the Bible Belt, the kids go a little crazy, they need to break loose,’ says Robbie. Heading up the East Coast, the Washington DC/Baltimore area is a stronghold, thanks to DJs like Scott Henry and promoters like Ultraworld. Washington/ Baltimore is really part of an integrated East Coast network that connects Boston, New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia, a circuit of one-off raves to which kids travel by chartered buses as well as by cars. Another burgeoning scene, says Scott Hardkiss, is the Pacific North West: from San Francisco right up to Vancouver, via Portland and Seattle.

  In the Hardkiss Brothers’ hometown San Francisco, the rave scene is still going strong. Younger kids attend Martin O’Brien’s The Gathering. Wicked are still active. The elders of the scene have formed ‘rave communities’, says Jody Radzik, tight cliques who throw small parties: the Rhythm Society of St John the Divine, Sweet, Friends and Family, Cloud Factory, Gateway Systems. The distinctive Bay Area spirituality endures, often in unusual ways – like the Planetary Masses at Grace Cathedral, modelled after the Nine O’clock Service in England and organized by Rev. Matthew Fox, who joined the Episcopalians having been defrocked as a Dominican priest after a dispute with the Vatican. On the techno-pagan tip, Dubtribe and other small outfits still throw renegade parties. The Full Moon concept migrated South to Southern California, thanks to a crew called Moon Tribe. Along with parties in the desert, many LA raves take place on Native American reservations, where the police have no jurisdiction. Like the post-Spiral Tribe sound-systems in Britain, American rave outfits exploit the local terrain, looking for ‘cracks and vacancies’ left by the state.

  From illegal free parties through borderline events like Even Furthur to massive commercial extravaganzas, American rave survives, despite its stylistic fragmentation and regional dispersion. Whether it will benefit from the record industry’s enthusiasm for ‘electronica’ is unclear. The major labels are trying to distance the music from drug culture by marketing techno as band music rather than a DJ culture. Where that will leave the ‘real’ American rave scene remains to be seen.

  THIRTEEN

  SOUNDS OF PARANOIA

  TRIP HOP, TRICKY AND

  PRE-MILLENNIUM

  TENSION

  Musicians, bless ’em, hate categories. ‘Don’t pigeonhole us’; ‘It’s all music, man’; ‘is there any kind of music we don’t like? Just bad music, really’ – these are the kind of platitudes regularly encountered by the journalist. In recent years, no genre designation has been more resented and rejected as a press-concocted figment by its purported practitioners than ‘trip hop’.

  Personally, I always thought the term was just fine. Not only does ‘trip hop’ sound good, but it instantly evokes what it describes: a spacey, down-tempo form of hip hop that’s mostly abstract and all-instrumental. Coined by Mixmag’s Andy Pemberton (although others have claimed parentage), trip hop is a handy tag for a style that emerged in the early nineties (hip hop without the rap and without the rage, basically) and that, while not exclusively UK based, nonetheless remains almost totally out-of-step with current American rap, where rhymin’ skills and charismatic personalities rule.

  Designed for headphone-listening as opposed to parties, reverie rather than revelry, trip hop retains the musical essence of hip hop – breakbeat-based rhythms, looped samples, turntable-manipulation effects like scratching – but takes the studio wizardry of pioneering African-American producers like Hank Shocklee and Prince Paul even further. When not entirely instrumental, trip hop is as likely to feature singing as rapping. Widely regarded as the genre’s inventors, Massive Attack deployed an array of divas both female (Shara Nelson, Tracey Thorn, Nicolette) and male (roots reggae legend Horace Andy) alongside rappers 3D and Tricky. The latter’s solo work mixes singing and rapping, with Tricky often providing bleary ‘backing raps’ to his partner Martina’s dulcet lead vocal. Generally, when trip hoppers do rap, their style is contemplative, low-key and low-in-the-mix.

  Opponents of the ‘trip hop’ concept of
ten argue that it’s nothing new, citing precedents for abstract impressionist hip hop like the early collage-tracks of Steinski & Mass Media and The 45 King, the sampladelic fantasia of Mantronix, cinematic soundscapes like Erik B and Rakim’s ‘Follow The Leader’, obscure one-offs like Red Alert’s ‘Hip Hop On Wax’ or ‘We Come To Dub’ by the Imperial Brothers. True enough, but the fact remains that, with the twin rise in the late eighties of ‘conscious’ rap (Public Enemy, KRS1) and gangsta rap (NWA, Scarface, Dr Dre), the verbal, storytelling side of hip hop gradually came to dominate at the expense of aural atmospherics. Just as this was happening Stateside, the idea of instrumental hip hop was flourishing in Britain (perhaps because of the difficulties involved in rapping convincingly in an English accent). Some of these early collage-based ‘DJ records’ – M/A/R/R/S’s ‘Pump Up The Volume’, Coldcut’s ‘Beats and Pieces’, Bomb The Bass’ ‘Beat Dis’ – were sufficiently uptempo to get swept up into the burgeoning house scene. But others, by the likes of Renegade Soundwave, Meat Beat Manifesto and Depthcharge, jumbled up elements of hip hop, dub reggae and film soundtracks to create a distinctly UK sound; a moody downtempo funk, high on atmospherics, low on attitude, and a precursor to today’s trip hop.

  In America, hip hop and rave culture are utterly separate and estranged subcultures. But in Britain, trip hop can be considered an adjunct to rave culture, just another option on the smorgasbord of sounds available to ‘the chemical generation’. Like rave music, trip hop is based around samples and loops; like techno, it’s the soundtrack to recreational drug use. In trip hop’s case, that drug is marijuana rather than Ecstasy. Funky Porcini’s James Bradell went so far as to define trip hop as ‘the mixture between computers and dope’.

  Living in my Headphones

  Hip hop’s influence in the UK blossomed in the form of jungle and trip hop, distinctly British mutants that Black Americans barely recognize as relatives of rap. Where hyperkinetic jungle is all about the tension and paranoia of London, trip hop’s mellow motherlode is Bristol. Laidback verging on supine, Bristol is Slackersville UK, a town where cheap accommodation allows bohemia to ferment; members of Portishead describe it as a place where ‘people take a while to get out of bed’ and ‘get comatosed’ of an evening. Because of its history as a port in the slave trade, Bristol has a large, long-established black population. Combined with a strong student and bohemian presence, this has made the town a fertile environment for genre-blending musical activity. All these factors fostered a distinctive Bristol sound, a languid, lugubrious hybrid of soul, reggae, jazz-fusion and hip hop.

  The story begins with The Wild Bunch, a mid-eighties sound-system /DJ collective renowned for its eclecticism. Members included Nellee Hooper (who later brought a Bristol-ian jazzy fluency to his production work for Soul II Soul, Neneh Cherry and Bjork) and Daddy G and Mushroom, who went on to form Massive Attack with rapper 3D. Tricky contributed raps to both Massive albums, while Portishead’s soundscape-creator Geoff Barrow assisted with the programming on Massive’s 1991 debut Blue Lines.

  Blue Lines was a landmark in British club culture, a dance music equivalent to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, marking a shift towards a more interior, meditational sound. The songs on Blue Lines run at ‘spliff’ tempos – from a mellow, moonwalking 90 b.p.m. (exactly midway between reggae and hip hop) down to a positively torpid 67 b.p.m. Massive Attack make music you nod your head to, rather than dance. ‘Right from the start, we never made music in line with the tempos that were required in clubs,’ Daddy G told me in 1994. ‘Our music’s more like something to . . . eat your food to, y’know. It’s made for after clubs, when you want to chill out, learn how to breathe again.’

  Distancing themselves from the party-minded functionalism of dance culture, Massive Attack cited instead conceptualist, album-oriented artists bands across the spectrum, from progressive rock (Pink Floyd) to post-punk experimentalism (Public Image Limited), from fusion (Herbie Hancock) to symphonic soul (Isaac Hayes). Hayes’s influence came through on string-laden, mournful epics like ‘Safe From Harm’ and ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, both of which were hit singles in Britain. But Massive Attack’s real originality lay in more tranquil tracks like ‘One Love’, with its mesmerizing clockwork rhythm and jazzy, electric piano pulsations. On ‘Daydreaming’, 3D and Tricky drift on a stream of consciousness, quoting from Fiddler On Roof and The Beatles and floating ‘like helium’ above the hyperactive ‘trouble and strife’ of everyday life. Expounding a Zen-like philosophy of sublime passivity and disengagement from the ‘real’, they rap of ‘living in my headphones’.

  Victims of ‘Bristol time’, Massive Attack took three years to record the sequel to Blue Lines. The title track of Protection and the album’s downtempo despondency reiterated the basic Massive Attack anti-stance: the longing for refuge and sanctuary from external chaos, music as healing force and balm for the troubled soul. But in 1994, Massive were dramatically upstaged and outshone by two of their protégés, whose different takes on Bristol’s ‘hip hop blues’ were more eerie and experimental (Tricky, about whom more later) and more seductively sepulchral (Portishead).

  Throughout Portishead’s debut Dummy, singer Beth Gibbons sounds like she’s buried alive in the blues. Dummy is like eavesdropping on the cold-turkey torment of a love-junkie; her lyrics are riddled with imagery of bereavement, betrayal and disenchantment. ‘Biscuit’ is at once the album’s aesthetic highpoint and emotional abyss. Through one of Geoff Barrow’s dankest, most lugubrious palls of hip hop noir, Gibbons intones a litany of lyric-fragments, disconnected shards of anguish. ‘I’m scared / got hurt a long time ago . . . at last, relief / a mother’s son has left me sheer.’ Compounding the faltering, fragmentary quality of this abandoned lover’s discourse, ‘Biscuits’ pivots around a lurching stuck-needle sample of Johnny Ray singing ‘never fall in love again’, which runs at a grotesquely lachrymose 16 r.p.m., so that it sounds like the Nabob of Sob is literally drowning in tears.

  Throughout Dummy, Barrow expertly frames Gibbons’ torched-songs with sombre soundscapes whose jaundiced desolation is steeped in the influence of film noir and sixties spy-movies. ‘I like soundtrack music, ’cos of the kind of sounds they use to create suspense,’ he says. ‘Modern soundtracks, they’re too digital and synthesizer-based, whereas the stuff I like involves orchestras and acoustic instruments.’ Perhaps in an attempt to ward off the cliché applied to their kind of impressionistic, evocative music – ‘a soundtrack to a non-existent movie’ – Portishead went ahead and made an, er, existent film to accompany the single ‘Sour Times’. Entitled To Kill A Dead Man, the ten minute short aspires to a Cold War feel, in homage to seedy espionage movies like The Ipcress File (starring Michael Caine). The thing about that particular cinematic genre which fits Portishead’s bleaker-than-thou mood is that there’s never a happy ending.

  Mind-Movies

  The influence of soundtrack music is a common denominator running through trip hop. Take DJ Shadow, a white B-boy from Davis, California, who’s one of the very few American exponents of the genre. Shadow cites film-score composers John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith as particular favourites; his long suites of sample-woven atmospheres and spoken-word soundbites are designed to encourage people to drift off into reverie and generate their own cinematic mind’s eye imagery. ‘I like the music to take me places. I want people to just space out for a while,’ Shadow says. Pinpointing the difference between his rap-free take on hip hop and current American hip hop, he says that he prefers to be ‘the director rather than the star’.

  Shadow’s music offers the listener what some call ‘deep time’ – the kind of tranquil, spellbound immersion that you experience as a child when you’re lost in a book, and which is becoming harder and harder to recover in the age of channel-surfing and blip culture. Shadow’s music isn’t social (he’s said many times that he’s not making music for the dancefloor), nor is it anti-social (as with gangsta rap), it’s asocial: an aural sanctuary from the hurly-burly, musi
c that hushes your soul.

  ‘Ever been in a car, hanging out with people, and a song comes on, and even though everyone may be in a particular mood, really hyped up, but then the song comes on and the mood changes? Everyone starts looking out the window, staring into space, or just gets quiet. Nobody will admit that it’s because of the music, but it’ll affect everyone the same. There’s a lot of power in that. I don’t understand how it happens, but I’m trying to figure it out.’

  After early efforts on his own imprint Solesides, Shadow first grabbed attention when he hooked up with London’s Mo Wax label. First, there was the twelve minute epic ‘In/Flux’, a panoramic early seventies groovescape whose disconsolate strings, lachrymose wah-wah and fusion flute recalls both the orchestral soul of The Temptations’ ‘Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone’ and Miles Davis’s elegy for Duke Ellington ‘He Loved Him Madly’. These two early seventies classics captured that era’s sense of ‘slippin’ into darkness’. With its ghostly shards of liberation rhetoric drifting by on the breeze – ‘people’s power’, ‘it’s only a matter of time’, ‘FREEDOM!’ – ‘Influx’ is at once an elegy for the lost ideals of the sixties and an evocation of the nineties’ own gloom and millennial trepidation.