Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  From tracks like ‘Pirates’ to the artist alias itself (an almost scholarly allusion to the reggae soundclash and the ‘burial tunes’ that slay the rival sound system), Burial’s album could almost be an audio essay about the London hardcore continuum. Yet in another sense Burial’s music, and dubstep in general, could equally be about any city anyway. The tension and dread, the sensations of grandeur and possibility battling with desolation and entrapment, would be familiar to any metropolis dweller across the globe. Which must surely explain dubstep’s success in spreading across the world, helped through blog buzz and uploaded DJ sets. It’s managed to proliferate more effectively than grime, which is so bound up with local character (and characters). Grime is about mouthy MCs spitting in thick accents and impenetrable slang; more often than not, their subject matter is parochial business, feuds with other MCs and such like. Instrumental music goes international so much easier. Dubstep has a far better fit than grime with all those old nineties notions of techno as a post-geographical sound, a musical force that is actively deterritorializing and border-crossing.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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

  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 . . .

  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.

  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, whe
n 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.

  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’.

  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.

  There’s definitely a certain romanticization of the lumpen in my hardcore obsession, but it’s not based in a desire to actually live that life in all its desperation – more that I’m impressed by the sheer rapacity of proletarian pleasure-taking. It’s like that Pulp lyric in ‘Common People’, ‘they burn so bright and you can only wonder why’. Yet that is chastened by the knowledge that many burn bright, then burn out.

  I’d always been suspicious of rock writing that romanticized the noble workers as the salt of the earth. Partly because the music I loved and supported as a critic up to that point had been more art-into-pop than street-into-pop: psychedelia, post-punk, indie rock. What really changed was encountering, in rave, a working-class culture that was avant-garde and bohemian in its excessive hedonism: a psychedelic proletariat. So really I became infatuated with this working-class music only when it crossed into ‘my’ terrain. It’s not like class tourism, taking a trip into some exotic, other place. ‘They’ had come nearer me. But that happened through rave’s own drug-fuelled dynamic rather than conscious attempts to be arty or avant-garde. Suddenly, this music that had seemed a bit lightweight back in 1989, with all those piano-vamping Italo-house tracks, it got ‘heavy’. It was like an upsurge of the Dionysian in pop music, and as such on the same wavelength as the late-eighties rock I’d celebrated in Blissed Out.

  But there was definitely a fascination and a weird sort of admiration for the headstrong pill-popper mentality . . . That E-monster vocabulary embedded itself in me. It almost became my own personal ‘new lad’ cult. Hardcore’s way of talking about drugs was way more appealing than all that transcendentalist, techno-pagan prattle you got in other sectors of the rave culture. Hardcore slang, all about rushes and buzzing hard, made it much less lofty. It wasn’t about changing the world, like in the more high-minded bohemian scenes, but about
altering the energy in a room right here, right now. It was juvenile and present tense, a glimpse of how intensely life could be lived that maybe would inspire you in other contexts, but it wasn’t too freighted with political or philosophical significance.

  This ‘slumming’ critique . . . This idea that I should ‘stick to my own kind’ goes against the spirit of boundary-crossing, mutagenic energy that is the essence of this music. The energy can’t be contained, it will infect people it wasn’t intended for. Take jungle in 1994 – I still cannot understand how anybody could hear that music and not respond to it as an energy signal, a summons. So rather than ‘slumming’, I’d represent it in a better light: a refusal of class destiny. But ultimately, it’s purely selfish: I just associate better vibes and better nights with the hardcore clubs. Whereas the scenes full of people ‘just like me’, like those early nineties chill-out parties or the later ‘eclectron-ica’ /illbient events . . . there’s no real spark, no energy in the air. So it’s all about the kind of room you want to be in.

  You’re talking about ‘vibe’ here – a word that crops up a lot. What do you mean exactly? In what circumstances does ‘vibe’ emerge?

  ‘Vibe’ is one of those vague terms that can mean lots of things. It tends to signify blackness, as in Vibe magazine, which is all about ‘urban’ music – rap and R & B. Vibe got used in UK garage in a similar way, code for black. So when I talk about the vibe disappearing from drum and bass, I’m talking about the blackness going as the ragga samples get phased out, the bass loses its reggae feel and becomes more linear and propulsive, rather than moving around the beat with a syncopated relation to the drums.