More generally, though, vibe at a basic level means a good atmosphere, and more than that a coherent atmosphere. Not necessarily rowdy or euphoric, it could be a downtempo, moody atmosphere. But it’s about when you enter a club and there’s a palpable feeling of energy or emotion that everyone’s tuned into and, more than that, everybody is helping to create. That’s not necessarily a black thing: it can be any place organized around a monolithic mood-sensation. Gay clubs, especially the more hardcore kind – banging NRG music, boys with their shirts off – are totally vibe-full. You get drug-inflected crowd dynamics in trance clubs, gabba raves, metal gigs – all sorts of subcultures work through vibe. Vibe is about collective single-mindedness .
That often entails a degree of homogeneity, as when a dancehall bashment is ninety-eight per cent Jamaican. I attended a conference where an African-American guy in the audience argued that black music scenes got ruined when too many white people started turning up to them, because the bodies of white folk vibrated differently. Everybody laughed, but he kinda meant it. If there is an element of truth there, it’s because different ethnic groups or classes have different codes of behaviour and expression, which sets up different rates of energy transmission, thresholds of disinhibition. There’s a lot we don’t understand about crowd dynamics, pheromones and so forth. For instance, there’s been research that suggests that Ecstasy is more toxic at a rave than taken at home. You hardly ever hear of people dying of E unless it’s at a rave. It’s not just because it’s hotter – these particular experiments controlled the temperature parameter – but because being in a collective environment of hyperactivity and overstimulated nervous systems somehow aggravates the drug effects. The stereotyped actions, the repetitive gestures, the frenzied atmosphere, all add up to create a kind of social toxicity. Which is the same as social intoxication if you think about it – that ancient concept of the contact high.
‘Vibe’ is also related to secret knowledge, being an initiate, the idea that the music is only understood by an exclusive sect. You can see it in those knowing smiles and the electric glances that pass around when a certain drop happens in a track, or a particular sound or riff comes in that creates synergy with the drugs that everyone’s on. It’s a little initiates-only, but the crucial distinction here is that it’s not elitist so much as tribal. Subcultures are vibe-tribes, and with tribalism there’s always a small ‘we’ that get it and a larger ‘them’ who don’t. There is a certain tribe-vibe you get when the participants are all committed to the music as a subcultural project and they’ve made an effort. With outdoor raves, there’s the whole element of the physical journey, putting up with a certain degree of discomfort – the lack of proper toilets and other club facilities. There’s also the collective buzz of doing something illegal, being a co-conspirator in carving out a little zone of outlaw space in our over-controlled world. But equally the tribal commitment could involve going to a legal club or warehouse that’s in a shady part of town, with similarly bare-bones facilities. There’s an element of a rave as a collective construction project, people building something temporary but special, an EVENT. Especially at American raves, where the punters are part of the entertainment, part of the decor – what with their spectacularly over-the-top clothes, the ‘liquid’ dancing and complicated glow-stick-as-majorette’s-baton twirling they do.
Homogeneity – whether it’s racial as with dancehall, or sexual with gay-club music – facilitates a strong vibe-tribe effect. But mostly it’s an elective tribalism, people of all sorts of backgrounds and types coming together and merging around a particular vibe. With real tribes, you’re born into them and its world view is the total horizon of reality for you. With elective tribes, it’s a role you step into and then step out of when you go back to your ‘civilian’ existence of work and family. Social homogeneity isn’t essential to creating vibe, but musical homogeneity is. Clubs based around eclecticism, it’s very hard for them to have a vibe. It takes a really inspired DJ to take a load of disparate styles and thread a vibe through it. Another thing that’s key to vibe is a visceral element of people letting loose, that collective thing of releasing the pressure. IDM performances, people standing around and watching a guy whose face is glowing from their open laptop, that’s not gonna generate much vibe, and nor are sound-art installations at museums. The word ‘curated’ – that’s the death of vibe right there! That sort of music is better served as home-listening, even as a headphone thing – it’s about the individual lost in a sound-world. Vibe is totally about a shared experience, the collectivization of sound sensations. It’s no coincidence that vibe-full musics often derive their names from social spaces, like ‘house’ coming the Warehouse in Chicago or ‘dancehall’ coming from the place where people come together to get down.
One of the things that techno people certainly used to talk about a lot was the idea of electronic music as placeless and global. What you’re saying about the importance of location goes against that . . .
There’s this big tension in dance culture between music as a post-geographical phenomenon, a force of deterritorialization, and on the other hand, the tremendous mystique and mythology to do with specific cities that spawned the sound, like Detroit, or legendary clubs where the music is heard at its utmost. It’s like both syndromes are going on simultaneously. The music drifts around the world, as import records or nowadays through the web as MP3s and downloadable DJ sets, and the music also absorbs influences from everywhere. Most scenes have some kind of global presence, outposts in the major cities throughout the developed world. Yet equally, these subcultures totally go in for fetishizing origins and roots, they have this intensely territo-rialized sense of ancestry. They’re all about the tribe coming together in a particular temple of sound, a club – Cream, Twilo, AWOL, FWD. You get tracks being made specifically for one club and its sound system, like the tune ‘Twilo Thunder’.
The idea of techno as placeless gets overstated, there’s that equation of the post-geographical and the utopian – utopia literally meaning ‘no place’. The culmination of that line of thought was when the Future Sound of London staged a ‘virtual club’ through the internet, the idea being that in the future no one would go to clubs, they’d just tune in from across the globe. But the idea didn’t catch on because the screen is no substitute for the sensory overload of a club, the physical experience of being a body in a crowd of other bodies all tuned into the same sonic force field. The heat, the smell of it.
There’s another aspect to this idea of dance music as site-specific and it’s that the music is designed for huge sound systems, for the DJ’s mix, and most of all for dancing. It’s site-specific and rite-specific – the tracks contain behavioural cues, the breakdowns and drops are designed to trigger collective responses. Any given track is a component in a subcultural engine, and in isolation it could easily seem as perplexing and functionless as an engine part separated from the car. There’s a certain surreal appeal to having a carburettor lying on your coffee table, but you’d not be getting much use out of that component. The vast majority of dance tracks are functional and context-dependent. They’re like the soundtrack to a movie.
How does all this relate to the concept of ‘scenius’ that crops up regularly?
Brian Eno’s ‘scenius’ definitely fits the idea that it’s not about a record and a listener in isolation, it’s about music that’s activated and potentiated when it’s part of a subcultural matrix. The main appeal of the scenius-versus-genius dichotomy, though, is that it provides a way of understanding how rave music evolved without the traditional music historian’s reflex of fixating on specific individuals who changed the course of the music and precise places and moments where turning points occurred. The development of breakbeat science is a case in point, people will tend to fixate on key DJs like Fabio and Grooverider, producers like Goldie and 4 Hero, the club Rage. But the idea of speeding and chopping up breakbeats occurred independently and simultaneously across the UK and other cou
ntries too all through the early nineties. Breakbeat science evolved in tiny increments on a month-by-month basis. It was driven by consumer demand in a sense: the crowd will respond to some micro-innovations as opposed to others, so the music gets pushed along in a certain evolutionary path as much by popular desire as by producer intent. Producers are often DJs or in close contact with the DJs, so they get a sense of what is working on the dance floor. The name DJ will sift through the tracks offered by his stable of producers and only press up as dubplates the ones he knows will work.
Scenius doesn’t exactly get rid of auteurism so much as it collectivizes it. Instead of art as this quasi-autonomous realm separate from the social, art that’s ‘timeless’ and ‘placeless’, this music is ‘dated’ and ‘placed’ – but in a good way. Some tracks are only good for a dance floor season, and only speak to a particular population. Perhaps the most interesting line to follow is the diagonal where there’s a tension between the experimental impulses of the auteur-producer and the demands of the dance floor. Labels like Reinforced in jungle or PCP in gabba are particularly compelling to me for the way they walk that line between experimental and populist. Stuff that’s either side of the diagonal can be either too homogeneous (pure scenius) or too quirkily non-functional (pure genius).
You’re quite dismissive of dance music that isn’t functional – that’s your bone of contention with IDM, right?
Well I love a lot of purely experimental electronica. But it’s the idea that this is more intelligent than pure dance-floor fodder that is annoying. I’m fascinated by the mystery of groove, what makes one set of relations between textured percussion elements so compelling, and another just ordinary; all the ways that a drum track can dovetail with the bass and the other melodic-percussive cogs in a song. Creating something that works on the dance floor is no mean feat – it involves its own kind of intellect. The idea that leaving behind the groove, or complicating it to the point of dysfunction, is smarter than building dance floor killers is ridiculous. The slippage there is this idea that something that fails to work your body must therefore be cerebral! Actually, making a track that doesn’t function probably requires less brain power, because it’s easier to break the rules than it is to bend them. You can break the rules of jungle easily, by making a track that’s 40 b.p.m. too slow or too fast. But to make a track that brings a new flavour but still works as jungle is quite hard.
The anti-groove thing you get with so much IDM, where they take rhythmic ideas from dance genres but mess them up, is related to another assumption in experimental music generally which is: absence of structure = freedom. Not only is this both pat and old hat, but genuinely startling surprises are relatively scarce in the experimental field. In their own way, all these subgenres of abstract whatnot are quite conventionalized. The innovations become clichés really rapidly, something you saw with the whole post-Oval glitch area. A lot of the signifiers of supposed intelligence or experimentalism are actually conventions constructed at particular moments by labels, fans, artists and critics together. Overall, I think the ratio of maverick inspiration to herd mentality is about the same in dance and non-dance.
Another genre you don’t seem to rate that highly is Detroit techno. What gives?
Actually, I have total respect and love for the original music. Well, I can remember being slightly underwhelmed by that first Detroit compilation in 1988, it didn’t seem as out-there as the acid-house tracks. But as music, all the original stuff is undeniable. That said, at the time, Detroit seemed more like an adjunct to Chicago house. You only really started to get people going on about Detroit as this lost origin and foundational set of principles that had been betrayed when hardcore took over in 1991 – 2. It was a reactive and reactionary myth. The rave explosion had really been fuelled by acid house, Todd Terry and Italian piano house. ‘Strings Of Life’ was a rave anthem, sure, but if there had only ever been Detroit techno . . . there’d simply be no rave culture. There’d just be this network of small, hipster scenes in various cities around the world. This idea of Detroit as the alpha and omega of electronic dance music seems historically inaccurate because it’s not like electronic dance music didn’t exist before Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson and May started making tracks. They were largely responding to music from Europe. It’s more realistic to see Detroit as a crucial node in a network, a way station, somewhere the music stopped for a while before moving on. Detroit’s big innovation was stripping out the voices and the song element. That was an important shift.
When those guys decided – quite late in the day, almost a last-minute thing – to settle on the word ‘techno’ as the name for their music, that in itself was something that set off a lot of reverberations. What do you think of the role of technology in all this music?
It’s complicated. Techno and its sister genres identify themselves as machine music, there’s a cult of various sound or rhythm-making equipment, bands taking names like 808 State or House of 909 after Roland drum machines. And sonically there’s a cult of the machinic, whether it’s a mechanistic rhythm feel that isn’t swinging but inhumanly regular, or it’s square-wave synth-sounds that don’t resemble acoustic tonalities, or hard-angled riffs. But the idea that techno music is about cutting-edge technology obscures the fact that the culture is largely based on outmoded machinery and media! Vinyl, by the time rave took off, was already meant to be obsolete. If you think of pirate radio . . . the idea of broadcasting through the air, rather than cable, was pretty quaint: it’s something that’s been around since the early twentieth-century. A lot of the most fetishized drum machines and synths weren’t the latest gear, they were often outmoded or discontinued models, as with the Roland 303. The latest top-of-the-line equipment is more likely to be in the recording studio used by Celine Dion or some modern rock band than in Jeff Mills’s studio. Even MDMA had been around for years. Somehow all these old things that had been hanging around for ages came together in this amazing cultural synergy, like the parts of a jigsaw puzzle.
Clearly, though, the idea of new technology, or finding the new thing to do with technology, is at the heart of electronica’s self-conception. What happens is that a new piece of technology becomes available, and at first it’s so expensive that only established, wealthy musicians and producers have access to it, and they use it to do things that are old-fashioned, in line with the music that made them wealthy in the first place. Then the equipment drops in price dramatically and everybody has access to it, and in those circumstances it tends to be culturally astute non-musician types (some in the Eno mould, others street-smart teenagers) who find all the unexpected applications of the new machinery. You get a bunch of startling innovations, and then things level out again as everyone assimilates the new technology and the old hierarchies of talent over non-musicality reassert themselves again. Being a post-punk veteran I tend to valorize the surge moments when the sharp-witted DIY barbarians seize the new tools or think up new ways of bending existing tools, e.g. hardcore, with the sped-up breakbeats and sine-wave basslines and squeaky voices. I really like those moments when people who break the rules because they don’t know the rules seize the initiative, and you get all kinds of interestingly wrong-sounding music, improperly integrated fusions. When ‘musicality’ comes back, as it inevitably does, it’s less interesting . . . because ‘music’ has been done really hasn’t it? There’s an awful lot of good, musical stuff on the planet already!
People often find the ‘genre thing’ in dance music annoying. Why are there so many subgenres? Isn’t a lot of it just hair-splitting or hype, generated by journalists and scene boosters?
I’ve always been slightly amazed by how rock critics get in a lather about dance’s genre-mania. Their genre-phobia often presents itself as virtuous scepticism, this ‘I’m not easily fooled’ immunity to hype. But it’s less about not being credulous as it is incredulity – sheer stubborn disbelief that this dance-music thing could be big enough or deserving enough to have all these internal
divisions. But the electronic dance culture is massive, it involves millions all across the globe, and it’s been going on for twenty years at least. Something that big is bound to fragment and many of the fractures are going to be meaningful. Ninety per cent of the genre terms originate from the subcultures themselves. Rather than journalist inventions imposed from above, they’re semantic condensations of popular desire. Mostly they arose for practical reasons. In the earliest days, people just talked about ‘house’. Then differentiations within house gradually crept in: deep house, hard house, tribal house. At a certain point, the word ‘house’ alone wasn’t useful as an umbrella term for everything. So many records were being made, in different territories, that the stylistic parameters were drifting apart. When DJs or punters went to record stores and asked the salesperson about the new records that had come in, the assistant would ask ‘What you looking for?’ and as a result a degree of terminological precision emerged to characterize these different flavours of house. Some terms would gain currency and spread through the culture, often materializing first in flyers for raves or clubs. Promoters found it expedient to give some indication of the range of sounds you could expect at the event. You want people who are into the sound to come to the club, otherwise it’s neither viable nor vibey.
The first major split was between house and techno, the latter indicating a harder, harsher sound, more overtly futuristic and instrumental rather than songful. Then as the music mutated and splintered further, talking of all these new flavours as subcategories of house or techno made less and less sense. Hence hardcore, jungle, trance, gabba. Usually the split-off was preceded by an intermediary phase – I remember people talking of ‘jungle house’ or ‘jungle techno’, ‘gabba house’. Then the new genre breaks off as an independent entity.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 68