There is one major downside of the style-fragmentation syndrome in dance music, and this is that it’s made clubbing less unpredictable. Since sonic styles are often linked to different groups of people, this increasing genre-precision went hand in hand with social stratification. The original ethos of rave – social mixing, sonic mishmash – has faded, although there have been periodic attempts to resurrect the original notion of ‘house’ as a more diffuse and catholic category, and also anti-genre revolts into pure eclecticism.
If you’re plunging in at the deep end as a dance-music neophyte, the genre-mania can be confusing and off-putting. But the definitions and distinctions get more urgent the more steeped you are in the culture. It’s a way of talking about the music, about where it should go next. One of the reasons dance culture keeps generating all these new genre terms is because the participants have this urgent feeling that they’re moving into new territory and they want to signpost that. So it’s an expression of the culture’s neophiliac and future-minded orientation. Rock has loads of subgenres too, but generally speaking hype-energy condenses more around individual buzz-bands or artists. In dance, where auteurism is not such a force, it coheres around new genres or scene formations. The genre is the level at which it makes most sense to talk about the music, its future and its past.
What are the specific challenges in writing about dance music?
‘Rhythm Is A Mystery’, as K-Klass put it. It is hard to write about why one groove or beat is more compelling than another. Even if you get into drummer talk of triplets and so forth, or into programming technicalities, the ‘it’ – that edge of distinction, of excellence and difference that sets one track or producer apart – just endlessly recedes from your grasp. It’s relatively easy to write generalities about ‘breakbeat science’ but almost infinitely harder to convey the signature that makes, say, a Dillinja track instantly recognizable to the trained ear. The same applies to any genre of dance music – it’s really hard to explicate precisely what makes a producer superior to another. That said, you could say the same about a songwriter’s melodic gift in pop music, or the ineffable quality of a certain guitar player’s way with riff or solo. But with these other genres there tend to be more ways you can avoid the music, and talk instead about lyrics, persona, biography. Dance music, by diminishing or stripping away altogether the other elements that you might critically latch onto as a bulwark against the mystical materiality of music, does shove you head first into the realm of pure sound. Writing about dance music confronts you in a very direct way with the old ‘dancing about architecture’ futility/absurdity dilemma – because it is so purely musical, functional . . . I suspect a lot of the people who might have made good dance critics, who have real taste and knowledge of its history, become DJs instead – because you can actually support the music and evangelize in a very direct way: playing it to people. Why bother to write about it, then? As my old fanzine comrade Paul Oldfield put it, because there’s ‘the possibility that words might fail interestingly or suggestively.’
Most dance reviews, when you boil them down, all they’re saying is ‘this is a funky record’. One odd thing about dance journalism as a whole is that it almost never discusses dancing itself – the specific physical responses triggered by whatever genre they’re writing about. I do go in for that a bit in Energy Flash – discussing how the music demands or enforces certain kinds of movement – but I’d like to have taken it further.
So what would you change about this book, or add to it, if you were doing it again?
I’d have more about the experiential side of clubbing and raving. The structure of a night, the journey you go on. The adventures, the ephemeral encounters, the fleeting perceptions. Scoring drugs, the anticipation and nervousness involved in that. The crowd reactions and the relations between intimate strangers on the floor – those pursed, knowing smiles of people on E. A big part of what dance culture is about as an experience is hard to capture and convey.
In a lot of ways, poetry is more effective. There’s a book called Cyber Positive by an outfit called o [rphan] d [rift] that contains a lot of prose poetry evocations of the more extreme experiences you can have with techno and drugs. The one good bit in the club-culture Britmovie Human Traffic is where the annoying storyline finally reaches the rave floor and the white hole of Ecstatic experience in which narrative incandesces: the voice-over from the lead character Jip intoning about how ‘we’re thinking clearly yet not thinking at all . . . We flow in unison . . . I wish this was real . . .’ Some of the ‘talking head’ commentaries in Maja Classen’s Feiern: Don’t Forget to Go Home, a documentary about the Berlin techno scene, have this quality, with the interviewees slipping into a phenomenological or spiritual register: ‘it was the wordless time . . . it was our poem of bliss’, ‘time feels like a space that’s expanding and finally disappearing’. What’s great about that documentary is that it sidelines the whole trainspotter side of dance culture in favour of what the music makes possible: certain sorts of spaces and relations, a loss of self that feels like finding your true self, an intense if transitory sensation of contact and communion.
There’s a massive contradiction running through Energy Flash. As a critical history, it’s necessarily ‘recollected in tranquility’; there’s an impulse to collect and contain, contextualize and interpret. Genre genealogies are traced, auteuristic arcs delineated. Yet the energy centre of the book, what fuels it, is anti-historical and against interpretation. It’s my memories, blurred and fragmentary, of this period of my life organized around convulsive bliss. Throughout most of my really intense raving experiences, I never really cared who the DJs were or what the tracks playing were called. I can’t name a single DJ that I went to check out in that first year and a half, and although I would really have liked to know what the tracks were on all the pirate tapes I was recording off the radio, I wasn’t making any effort to find out. I was just going with the flow of it all. At that time raving was primarily about the experience of going out with my friends as a gang and bonding: you had a rough idea of what the music would be depending on the choice of club, but that was it really. It was only later on that I became a discriminating consumer, started to develop a knowledge of labels and producers.
That seems the next stage in the process for a lot of people, going from being a mad-for-it raver to an informed fan. But initially you’re just infatuated with the scene and the weird adventures you’re having. It’s like a love affair, you fall in love with the culture and also with your crew, but it’s a kind of pure, sexless love, like being a child-gang almost. Most of my UK crew were girls, but I was married. It’s precisely the asexualizing aspect of Ecstasy that enabled new forms of collectivity to emerge. In a sense E breaks up the couple dyad, while simultaneously making coupling much less of a priority. You’re there for the scene.
Talking of rave and gender . . . it seems like rave in its purest form was a liberating space for women and they’re strongly represented on most dance floors. Yet the ratio of female to male when it comes to DJing or producing the music is poor – significantly worse than rock.
That contradiction is puzzling. Obviously there are a fair number of female DJs, more so than there are producers, but it’s a long way from fifty-fifty and, kinda like the corporate world, the top-paid DJs are overwhelmingly male. Yet it’s true that rave did free things up for women, the absence of an oppressively predatorial sexual vibe made a big difference. You could see it in the clothes raver girls wore – often there’d be tomboy, techno-warrior, tank-girl-type clothes, or a sort of cybernaut look that’s not explicitly sexualized. You’d get quite a lot of short hair, androgynous, sometimes a faintly lesbian-like look. Or that candy-raver, girly-girl look redolent of the C86 look that’s been big in indie rock culture since the mid-eighties – cute but innocent, desexualized. But then, gradually, as rave turned into a superclub thing, you started to get a reversion to the pre-rave idea of dancing as display and sexual theatre. And with
that came the glammed-up ‘club babe’ phenomenon, furry bras and lots of exposed tanned skin. You’d get this cheesy imagery on dance-magazine covers and club flyers and worst of all on CD sleeves, especially funky house compilations and all those awful chill-out comps. For some reason these are as likely to be paintings of some non-existent perfect glamour babe as they are a photo of a model. Really bad paintings of semi-naked women – that’s become a house-music signifier! It’s as though Woman has became the symbol of Pleasure itself, this state of paradisiacal perfection. Either that, or Woman becomes a symbol of abandon and rapture, at once object of the male gaze and a self-pleasuring subject. You can see it the way the Chemical Brothers’ videos almost all feature an athletic and physically graceful girl as the focal figure.
To auto-critique myself a bit here, in some of the chapters in Energy Flash there’re places where I focus on a particular girl or pair of girls dancing, making them into emblems of the Dionysian, the ecstasy and surrender that’s the essence of the music. It’s a slippage that’s easy to do, especially as girls often are dressed better, look cooler and dance better than the boys. But there’s more than that going on, it’s like a slippage between ‘Rhythm is a Mystery’ and ‘Woman as Mystery’. There’re various respectable arguments you can make that dance music is innately feminine in its structure, that it avoids the phallic orientation of rock (I’m not sure about that, a lot of rave music is really riffy and aggressively thrusting). But what’s interesting, and depressing, is that the feminization aspect to the music and culture co-exists with an indifference verging on aversion to feminism. Instead of sexual politics, you get sexual apolitics.
That brings up the question of what exactly are the politics of Ecstasy + electronic music + dancing?
Rave is weird, because for the most part any political edge it had was largely imposed on it by outside forces, who literally made dancing (in certain contexts) a crime against the state. My general feeling is that whatever ravers’ political commitments or lack of them in their outside-world lives, the raving space in itself serves as a haven from the struggles of the real world. There was an element of impudence and insubordination in taking over abandoned buildings or staging unlicensed outdoor events, but with a few exceptions it was nonideological disobedience, closer to criminality than to anarchism. Through provoking hostile responses from authority, rave got reluctantly politicized to some degree. Just by turning up, the raver was in some senses insisting on the right to peaceful assembly. And by taking illegal drugs, there was an assertion of the right to use one’s own body in the pursuit of pleasure in any fashion you wish, so long as it doesn’t harm anybody else. Michel Foucault might possibly have regarded these activities as anti-fascist, untheorized strategies of resistance against the police, against medical and psychoanalytical institutions, all these disciplinary regimes that supervise and control the flow of populations and the proper uses of the citizen’s body. In fact, Foucault, towards the end of his life, got involved in the American gay disco subculture in San Francisco and had all these hardcore sex-and-drugs experiences. In one interview from that era, he talked about the need to bring drugs ‘into culture’, arguing that there were good and bad drugs, and the real question was discriminating between them.
The other aspect of rave that is proto-political is its collectivism. In the UK, rave emerged at the end of a period in which the idea of collectivity had undergone a violently imposed erosion. The trade unions (which were incredibly powerful during the seventies such that as a child I knew all the names of the union leaders from TV and they were so famous that TV comedians would do impersonations of them) were pretty much crushed. Thatcher’s ideology was that there was no such thing as society, just collections of individuals involved in the exchange of commodities; things like public transport were being systematically run down in favour of private car ownership. So rave was answering social needs, and also spiritual ones, for places where you communed with large numbers of fellow humans. Hence the enduring analogies between rave and church, between rave and the football match. Governments have always had a problem with the people assembling, have always feared the mob and popular disorder. And a rave is like a constructive riot.
Constructive, in the sense of being positive energy, yes. But these temples of sound are temporary. They don’t leave anything behind. Aren’t they just a waste of energy, in the end?
Years ago I ran into the writer Steve Beard at a jungle-event. He’d read this early, rabidly enthused and hyper-theoretical piece on rave I’d done for Artforum, and his gloss on it was that I was describing ‘a sacrificial cult of base materialism’. The terms are from Georges Bataille, who believed there was this innate, aristocratic drive in human beings towards extravagance, a will to expenditure-without-return. In other words, the opposite of the Protestant bourgeois ethics of prudence, thrift, investment for the future. Bataille and others like the Situationists would see this potlatch spirit as anti-capitalist in the sense that the Gift or the totally Gratuitous Act break with relations of exchange. One of the most striking things about rave is how wasteful it is – financially, but also in terms of energy and emotion (all that squandered-in-advance serotonin). The sheer amount of money people waste on getting wasted is staggering – the number of pills and other substances. All those overpriced soft drinks. In rave, there’s a literally ecstatic aspect to this expenditure without return. (The word ‘spend’ incidentally was Victorian slang for having an orgasm, the male ejaculation.) Raving is totally unproductive activity, it’s about wasting your time, your energy, your youth – all the things that bourgeois society believe should be productively invested in activities that produce some kind of return: career, family, politics, education, social or charity work . . . That’s the glory of rave. It’s about orgiastic festivity, splendour for its own sake. Who’s to say these fleeting intensities aren’t as valid a pursuit as building something that ‘lasts’? All things must pass, and you can’t take it – your life-force – with you, after all.
In Energy Flash I wanted to convey that delirium, but also examine the sociohistorical reasons why a whole culture grew up based around delirium. So the book flits back and forth between the historical mode of past tense and the tense present of the drug/music interface. The urge to escape History occurs within History, it’s conditioned by its context. So there’s a split impulse there and it comes back to this contradiction at the heart of the book: I suppose you could say with this chunky tome I’m trying to salvage something from all this wasted energy, my own but also millions of people. This is what we did with our time; this is how we made it Our Time.
Index
2 Bad Mice
2 Unlimited
3D
3MB
4 Hero
4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse. See also Foul Play
10cc
10 City
20/20
23 Skidoo
26 Mixes for Cash
45 King
76:14
80 Aum
90
94 Diskont
100 Lbs.
187 Lockdown
400 Blows
808 State
1987: What the Fuck is Going On?
2001: A Space Odyssey
A
Aaliyah
Abba
Ability II
Ableton
Absolute Sundays
Abstrakt (New York)
Accident in Paradise
Acen
A Certain Ratio
acid. See LSD
Acid House
A Collection of Short Stories
Adam F
Adamski
Adam X
Adeva
Adonis and the Endless Poker
Adorno, Theodor
Adrenalin
Adult.
Advance
Advance Party
Adventures Beyond the Underworld Aesthetics of Disappearance
A Feather on the Breath of Go
d: Sequences and Hymns by the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen
Afrika Bambaataa
After Hours
AFX. See also James, Richard
Against Nature
Age of Love
A Guy Called Gerald. See also Simpson, Gerald
Air
Aisha
AK47
Aka-Darbari-Java/Magic Realism
Albini, Steve
Alec Empire
Alexandra Palace (London)
Alice Cooper
Alice’s House (Los Angeles)
Alien
Alien Underground
Alig, Michael
Allen, Evenson
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 69