Because E generates a surfeit of love and will-to-belief, a lot of that energy ends up focused on the DJ. This syndrome of Ecstasy-induced worship elevated the first-wave-of-rave DJ godstars like Sasha and Oakenfold, and now it created a new pantheon of crowd-pleasers like Tall Paul, Judge Jules and Paul Van Dyk. ‘When Paul was playing the encore to one of his six-hour sets, me and my friends held up a sign saying “Van Dyk Is God”, with each word on a piece of A4 paper,’ a Gatecrasher regular who travelled 124 miles from his home town Preston to get to the club told me. Although Van Dyk himself rejected the linkage of his popularity to the Mitsubishi upsurge and claimed to have never tried Ecstasy, the dewy-eyed melodic refrains and twinkling textures of tunes like his glorious remix of Binary Finary’s ‘1998’ fit the MDMA sensation like a glove.
The first Ecstasy explosion was messy and chaotic, its dazed participants creating a new culture as they went along, improvisational and adhoc. What’s different about the Mitsubishi-driven trance resurgence – and the reason why it couldn’t be a revolution – is that the social and economic mechanisms were in place to channel and exploit its energy. The ‘big room’ sounds of progressive and trance, with their audio-visual pyrotechnics and punctual climaxes, illustrate how rave’s explosive energies have been corralled by the clubbing industry. Sound becomes spectacle; dancers become pseudo-participants. The fact that even the illegal substructure to European club culture – the drug labs and big-time dealers – realized that the only way to salvage Ecstasy’s fading prestige was to put out ‘quality’ pills, a dependable product competitive against other drugs like cocaine, only reinforced the sense that rave had become a big business.
People who hate trance often accuse of it of lacking ‘funk’ or ‘soul’ – for basically being too white. The ‘funkless’ accusation is pretty undeniable. Rooted in Giorgio Moroder’s Eurodisco with its rhythmic grid of evenly emphasized four-to-the-floor beats and regular-as-clockwork sequenced pulsations, trance creates a sensation of surging through a frictionless soundscape. The ‘soulless’ critique is a bit unfair, though.
Mild-mannered Van Dyk let slip a hint of anger when I put the ‘soul’ accusation to him: ‘When people talk about “soul”, they mean black people, music that comes out of the blues. But we Europeans have soul – I have a heart, I have feelings. They don’t have a monopoly on that.’ And it’s true, there is a European soulfulness to trance, a quality that descends from Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, Trans-Europe Express and most of all The Man-Machine’s ‘Neon Lights’, with its serenely gliding monorail-like motion. Listen to trance and you think of the glistening, hygienic beauty of a modern unified Europe where parochial differences are slowly fading, the Europe of high-speed trains, autobahns, the pedestrian-only and pristine boulevards of city centre shopping districts, the noiseless moving walkways of airports. (It seems somehow appropriate that seminal trance club Dorian Gray was actually located inside Frankfurt’s airport.)
This is why trance and progressive flourish wherever the romance of streamlined, sterile modernity holds sway, from Hong Kong to Sao Paolo (the most European and modern of Brazil’s cities). Part of the point of progressive and trance is that they’re everywhere-and-nowhere sounds, completely post-geographical. With the Global Underground series of progressive superstar DJ mix-CDs, the sleeve notes always point out that the hip, ‘educated’ crowd in whatever city that mix-CD is notionally based around – Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Cape Town – always already know the tunes that Sasha/Trevor Seaman/whoever is spinning. Progressive/trance is music whose ‘locale’ is the Globe – an abstraction. A big part of the music’s allure is its aura of streamlined pleasure-tech, where the tracks are components to be assembled into seamless mixscapes by ultra-skilled technicians, who whiz back and forth across the global superclub circuit. The matt silver-grey fabric of progressive’s sound seems like it’s made from the same shiny synthetic material as the DJ bags and vaguely space-age-looking clothes these jet-setting jocks favour.
A world away from progressive’s global quasi-underground, psy-trance is a genuine subculture. The Mitsubishi wave didn’t have much impact in these quarters, because psy-trance fans tend to look down on E as a ‘fluffy’ drug strictly for lightweights. ‘You’ll find a lot of people at psy-trance parties who are only on mushrooms or acid,’ a psy-trance fan called Gordon told me in Puerto Rico. ‘They’re much more honest hallucinogens, because they let you go where your mind chooses to – you’re not locked into one emotion like with Ecstasy.’ Gaia-given ‘organic’ substances like peyote, DMT and psilocybin are preferred over synthetic designer drugs. Mushrooms and DMT evangelist Terence McKenna is something of a godfather figure to the psy scene, his voice frequently sampled on tracks.
Like the original counterculture and its offshoots from the Grateful Dead to Popol Vuh, psy-trance combines the shamanic use of hallucinogens with the gamut of Eastern spiritualities and polytheistic pagan-isms. The result is a syncretic spirituality mishmashed from chunks of Tao, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, hatha yoga, Mayan cosmology and Wicca, then spiced with alien abduction theories and other renegade forms of parascience. At psy-trance parties, you frequently spot signs of overt transcendentalism: a guy meditating in yoga’s lotus position, a conga of people sitting on the floor massaging the neck of the person in front.
Chai shops selling a very strong Indian-style tea laced with honey, cream and cardamom spices (ideal for replenishing energy after all-night dancing) are a big part of the scene. There’s also a bazaar marketplace element, with people selling self-designed T-shirts, jewellery, handcrafted objects and food. And psy-trance has developed a whole fashion look that mixes sixties hippie garments (loon pants, bell-bottoms, ponchos, shawls, tie-dye and paisley leggings, op art bikinis, knee-high boots in shaggy white mohair), Third World ethnic kitsch (batik fabric, mesh sarongs, cowrie-shell necklaces, fluorescent Hindu-style bindis between the eyebrows) and cyberdelic rave gear (luminous tongue piercings, flashing light contraptions wrapped around your wrist, ‘No Speak Alien’ T-shirts). A lot of the ethnic garments come from Bali, while the intricate, fractal-patterned T-shirts done in glowing inks are made by a UK company called Space Tribe.
To an unkind eye, your average psy-trance party resembles a detention camp for fashion criminals. The scene puts a premium on looking like a freak: absolutely anything goes. At El Cuco, I see a plump chap wearing one-strap dungarees decorated with astrological moons and planets and a boy wearing an outsize papier mâché monster-head. Other popular looks for the male psy-trancer are the ‘Jesus Christ Superstar/Khao San Road in Bangkok’ backpacker look (straggly-bearded, lank-haired, body odour optional) and the ‘Israeli hunk/Milli Vanilli’ look (mocha skin, long mane of oily curls, hairy muscled chest on display). Psy-trance women look a whole lot better, for some reason. Combining ultra-feminine flamboyance and tomboy practicality, the female trancepacker blends hippie chick, Tank Girl, and beach babe (white halter-tops, hair swept away from the face using white plastic sunglasses, suntans). Another micro-trend is for girls to wear headscarves and kerchiefs, making them look like peasant milkmaids on a Soviet collective farm or kibbutz women picking oranges. Indeed this trend actually stems from the huge Israeli influence on the scene. Even the characteristic psy-trance style of dancing – bouncing on the balls of their feet, shoulders braced as if dancing in a wind tunnel – is nicknamed ‘the Israeli stomp’.
For psy-trance fans, Goa and all the other far-flung destinations that have superceded it, represent a fantasy of taking a permanent vacation from Western industrial reality in the mystic Orient. It’s psychedelic tourism, basically. And this is the subculture’s major ideological blind spot. Despite the Gaia-awareness and the fluoro imagery of Hindu goddesses like Shiva and Ganesh, places like Bali, Nepal and Thailand really serve as exotic backdrops to hi-tech raving, with the added attraction of being places you can live very cheaply and where drugs are inexpensive and readily available. There is also some truth to the widespread ‘trustafarian’ stereoty
pe that identifies psy-trance with the upper middle class. Possibly it’s the sheer cost factor of taking plane trips across the globe that makes it a sport of the well off, or perhaps it’s a class-inflected generational rebellion: the children of money taking trips outside the parental culture of ambition and acquisition, looking for something both spiritual and earthy. Despite all this, there remains something inspiring about the willingness of psy-trance devotees to travel long distances and deal with the absence of Western comforts and conveniences. It’s this dedication to adventure that makes psychedelic trance a true underground, whereas its mainstream counterpart is ultimately an anti-culture.
I start to understand this in the last hours of the El Cuco festival. The grey predawn light is demystifying, stripping the site of its silvered full-moon enchantment and revealing what looks disconcertingly like a bulldozed clearing in the deforested Amazonian jungle. But it’s eerie, too, like that 7 a.m. moment in nightclubs when the lights come up and you can see the hardcore survivors – spent, zombie-eyed, yet still manic. There’s a man in fluorescent warpaint and black loon pants, stomping back and forth across the dance floor in a lurching frenzy, his eyes black and lost. There’s a Dalai Lama lookalike kneeling in the lotus position and beseeching the heavens with outstretched arms, and a dainty Japanese waif frozen still, lost in the music, utterly freaked. Dawn is peeking through the treetops, but X-Dream are still in full-on darkside mode, grinding out the harshest sounds of the entire weekend, barely more than a vast blare of distorted kick drum and pummelling bass. A willowy girl with waist-length blonde hair, cobwebby lace shawl and bell-bottoms starts to rock out dementedly, stamping her feet and flailing her arms – her eyes narrowed to burning slits of intensity, her mouth a snarl of joy. She grabs her headscarf-wearing friend by the hand and the two hippie chicks caper and prance in a full circuit around the dance floor, like Greek maenads celebrating the rites of Pan. The look on the blonde’s face explains everything, a strange mix of fiery-eyed glee, defiance and triumph. It’s the ‘we-made-it’ look – not just ‘we made it through the night’, but ‘we made this adventure, this scene, for ourselves.’
TWENTY
TWO STEPS BEYOND
UK GARAGE AND
2STEP
London: late summer, 2000. Step into Twice As Nice, a Sunday-night club in the dead centre of the city and it’s like the ‘in da club’ sequence of an R & B video. Everywhere you look there’s Brandys from Brixton, Beyonces from Bethnal Green, Sisquos from Stepney. And look, there’s Aaliyah – the real one, cavorting on the gigantic video screen that shows non-stop R & B videos. Make your way through the sharply dressed press of flesh, and you find the main dance floor bumping ’n’ flexing to the sound called 2step garage. The name distantly originates from the legendary Manhattan club the Paradise Garage and the tradition of soulful house music it (posthumously) inspired. But sonically 2step is a bastard child rather than a purist descendant. It’s a mongrel mishmash of influences – Timbaland-style R & B’s twitchy beats, jungle’s booming bass, house’s slinky synth-riffs, dancehall’s raucous MC jabber, and still more. After two years hatching in London’s dance underground, 2step has the UK pop charts locked down, with artists like Artful Dodger and Sweet Female Attitude busting into the Top Five all through the year 2000. Yet the sound has paradoxically remained an underground pirate radio-driven sound even as it dominates the mainstream.
Like every Sunday, Twice As Nice is ‘a roadblock, off the hook’, as the MC boasts. People flock there to be seen as much as to wind down after a weekend’s clubbing at other UK garage hot spots. Look, there’s drum-and-bass icon Goldie in the DJ booth ostentatiously hugging Spoony from The Dreem Teem, a trio of leading garage DJs. Goldie’s no fool, he knows that jungle is no longer runnin’ t’ings on the streets of London town. The producer’s trademark teeth aren’t the only glittering things at Twice As Nice. Everybody’s rolling with gold – bracelets, rings, necklaces, hoop earrings. Women sport ice-encrusted chokers and diamond-twinkling cheek studs. Bad boys stride through brandishing Moët bottles, little towers of plastic champagne flutes stuck on the bottle neck. Twice As Nice is incandescent with money. The dry-cleaning bills alone must run into thousands. ‘We bubblin’ criss,’ chants the MC, using a Jamaican patois term that means shiny/ slick/sharp-dressed to simultaneously praise Spoony’s mixing and celebrate the ghetto fabulous crowd.
Like most UK garage clubs, Twice As Nice bans trainers, jeans, baseball caps. Scene outsiders often criticize the dress code as elitist. Defenders of the policy argue that it’s good to encourage people to make an effort, and that the dress code keeps trouble out. Actually, the only people deterred by the garage veto on trainers and jeans are scruffy but harmless white college kids. And everybody knows that gangstas like to dress expensive – which is why there are metal detectors on Twice As Nice’s doors.
Compared with the early days of the scene, when the soundtrack was ‘speed garage’, the designer-label flaunting is more subtle – discreet Versace logos on the back of the collar, rather than pants covered with the word Moschino or ‘Dolce & Gabbana Is Life’ T-shirts. The bodies underneath the costly clothes have been hard-earned too – one muscle boy sports a condom-tight pink vinyl T-shirt that looks like it’s been sprayed on. Everybody is immaculately groomed and sweatlessly cool; some guys even carry handkerchiefs to dab away any perspiration. Then there’re the real stylists – Jamaican rude boys in bowler hats or even dove-grey morning dress, like they’ve come straight from a wedding; dancehall queens in diamond-brimmed Stetsons and glitterball-like frocks made entirely from dazzling decals. The men purse their lips disdainfully into a scowl-sneer, as if some appalling affront to taste and decorum has been perpetrated (could it be my trousers?). The women have perfected a blank gaze of hauteur, occasionally shattered by sunburst smiles when the DJ drops a ‘ladies tune’ like B15 Project’s ‘Girls Like This’.
According to London folklore, the garage scene spawned itself from the jungle scene when the women left the dance floor en masse, bored by the harsh, tuneless dead end that drum and bass had driven itself down with the techstep sound of No U Turn et al. The girls sought refuge in the smaller garage room that most jungle raves offered, where the music was soulful, sensual and more manageably groovy at 130 b.p.m. rather than jungle’s frantic 170 b.p.m. It was like a giant light bulb clicked on above the collective head of London’s jungle massive: no women on the floor = no vibe. In 1997, virtually every pirate radio station in the city switched from jungle to speed garage. Since then the refrain ‘the girls love this tune’ – typically uttered by record-store assistants as a recommendation, not a diss – has functioned as a self-policing mechanism, keeping the scene on track. Garage’s deference to the ‘ladies massive’, to the female demand for singalong choruses, diva vocals, and wind-your-waist rhythms suitable for close dancing with your partner (or somebody else’s partner), has kept the music deliciously poppy even in its most underground form. In 1998 – 9, as the stop-start, push-me/pull-you 2step style evolved out of pumping four-to-the-floor speed garage, it really felt like garage was a new form of chartpop in exile, just biding its time until the inevitable mainstream breakthrough.
Although there are lots of inputs in the 2step mix, the style really achieved self-definition as a London-specific spin on the stuttering kick-drums template built by R & B producer Timbaland on tracks for Missy Elliott, Aaliyah, Jay-Z and many more. Timbaland’s innovations opened up a whole new ‘BeatGeist’ for American R & B and hip hop, as his ideas were creatively plagiarized by producers like She’kspere (TLC, Destiny’s Child) and became hegemonic across urban radio in America. 2step was UK rave culture recognizing and assimilating the cyborg funk of this nu-R & B, saying ‘yeah, we’ll ’ave this, ta very much.’
In America, there was a famous advertising campaign for pork that disingenuously described it as ‘the Other White Meat’. Someone could, much more honestly, do the exact same for Aaliyah, Missy and the rest of the Timbaland stable:
sell it as the Other Electronic Music, to experimental techno connoisseurs who reckon weirdy-beardy types like Squarepusher are actually doing anything original rhythmically. At its utmost, R & B can be as denatured and borderline dysfunctional as the most abstract, arty electronica from Cologne. It figures that UK garage – a scene largely composed of ex-junglists – would dig the Timbaland sound, as both his style of R & B and jungle uses rhythmic patterns as melodic hooks. Jungle, Timbaland-style R & B and 2step all have a breakbeat aesthetic: they break up the even flow of four-to-the-floor rhythm (as in pumping house and traditional garage, including speed garage), riddling the groove with hesitations, erotically teasing and tantalizing gaps. Drum and bass slowed to a languorous frenzy, 2step is lovers’ jungle. But the style is rapaciously omnivorous, stealing ideas from all over the genrescape: nu-R & B’s clusters of rapid-fire kicks, jungle-style micro-breakbeats, house-influenced hi-hats and synth-vamps, electro’s Roland 808 bass-boom, reggae’s slinky skank. Hearing these intricately programmed tracks is like moving through a mesh of pointillistic percussion, your body buffeted and flexed every which way by cross-rhythms and hyper-syncopations. On tracks like Leee John’s ‘Your Mind, Your Body, Your Soul’, the drums are so digitally texturized it’s as if the whole track’s made from glossy fabric that crackles, crinkles and kinks with each percussive impact.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 58