Featured CDs:
History of Dance Culture and Rave Culture
Excerpt of an article by Simon Reynolds
For
that majority of the British population with no direct experience of rave
culture, E stands for "danger". It evokes images of teenagers robbed of
their lives; kids suffering from heatstroke through over-exertion and
dehydration, being rushed to hospital with internal bleeding. Or it
triggers mind's eye scenes of frenzied delirium, deranged dancing,
zombie-like trances and un-English mass hysteria.
But for the several millions of young and
not-so-young people who've passed through the dance-and-drug culture
during rave's ten year lifespan, Ecstasy is normal, as banal and benign as
a pint of lager. For many, E equals predictable, obvious, even slightly
naff; in a word, "safe".
It wasn't always this way. In the late
Eighties, Ecstasy was exalted as "the magic pill," a miraculous agent of
individual and social transformation. It was the sacrament--the communion
wafer, if you will--of a secular religion whose "loved up" adherents
believed that house music and MDMA were set to change the world. At the
height of the Eighties go-for-it, go-it-alone enterprise boom--whose
spirit was encapsulated in Margaret Thatcher's infamous proclamation
"there is no such thing as society"--Ecstasy catalyzed an explosion of
suppressed social energies. Rave's values-- collectivity, spirituality,
the joy of losing yourself in the crowd--were literally counter to the
dominant culture. Ecstasy's empathy and intimacy inducing effects didn't
just offer a timely corrective to Thatcher-sponsored social atomization;
the drug was also the remedy for the English diseases of
class-consciousness, reserve and emotional constipation.
But why did all this happen in the context of
house and techno music? The drug seemed to fit the music like a glove. On
E, its repetitive rhythms induced a blissed trance rather than irritation.
And because MDMA intensifies sensations to the brink of pre-hallucinogenic
synaesthesia, house and techno's ultra-vivid electronic textures became
even more sensuously tactile, so that the music seemed to caress your skin
and surround you like a fluid, immersive environment.
You're probably familiar with the story of how
a bunch of holidaymaking DJs discovered the synergy between house and
Ecstasy in the clubs of Ibiza; how they brought the anything-goes
"Balearic" vibe back to cool-crippled London in late 1987; how by the
summer of '88, the trippy, futuristic sound of Chicago acid house had
spawned the most demonized British subculture since punk, which then
spilled out into the English countryside in '89 as inner city warehouse
parties evolved into massive raves in fields near the M25. It's a tale
that, if not exactly sting-less, is certainly thrice told. But there's a
case for saying that musical revolutions actually have their biggest
impact a few years after their over-mythologized, "official" origins, when
the ideas have filtered from the metropolitan hipster cliques through to
suburbia.
...more... |
