ESLJ Volume 1 Number 3 Reviews
Once in a Lifetime: The Crazy Days of Acid House and Afterwards, by Jane Bussmann.
London: Virgin, 1998. Pp.184, £9.99 (pb), ISBN 0 7535 0260 7.
Nightfever: Club Writing in the Face 1980-1997, by Richard Benson (ed.).
London: Boxtree, 1997. Pp.156, £9.99 (pb), ISBN 0 7522 2214 7.
The Manual: The who, the where, the why of Clubland, by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton.
London: Headline, 1998. Pp.735, £10.99 (pb), ISBN 0 802 13688 5.
Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, by Mathew Collin.
London: Serpents Tail, 1998. Pp.256, £6.99 (pb), ISBN 1 8524 2604 7.
Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture, by Sheryl Garratt.
London: Headline, 1998. Pp.346 £7.99 (pb), ISBN 0 7472 5846 5.
Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound, by Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson.
London: Routledge, 1999. Pp.208, £14.99 (pb), ISBN 0 415 17033 8.
Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from House to Home, by Maria Pini.
London: Palgrave, 2001. Pp.216, £45.00 (hb), ISBN 0 333 94606 5.
Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality, by Ben Malbon.
London: Routledge, 1999. Pp.256, £20.99 (pb), ISBN 0 415 20214 0.
DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain, by George McKay (ed.).
London: Verso, 1998. Pp.316, £12.00 (pb), ISBN 1 859 84260 7.
This is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and Technologies, by Hillegonda Rietveld.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. Pp.280, £43.00 (hb), ISBN 1 8574 2242 2.
Energy Flash, by Simon Reynolds.
London: Picador, 1998. Pp.512, £12.99 (pb), ISBN 0 330 35056 0.
Reviewed by:
Dr. Rupa Huq
Senior Lecturer in Law
Kingston University.
'The hypnotic rhythm and wild gestures have a maddening effect on a rhythm loving age group and a result is a relaxing of all self-control.'
The Bishop of Woolwich on rock'n'roll, The Times, 13 September 1956.
'The trouble with rave is that it has no articulated ideology, no sense of purpose and after a long night's raving, the brains of a deckchair.'
Adam Sweeting, Guardian, 7 November 1992.
Now that the dust has well and truly settled on events surrounding the advent of what was once called 'rave', a number of histories of dance culture are now in circulation spanning the academic, quasi-academic and popular spheres. The youth cult that burst onto the sub-cultural landscape in the guise of acid house, with its Dionysian musical pleasures and drug of choice, ecstasy, has inevitably enough come of age. The titles dealt with in this review largely appeared at a time that coincided with the ten year passing of the 'second summer of love'. To mark this anniversary it would appear that rave is coming off the dance-floors and onto the bookshelves with a clutch of books now out to mark a decade of dance culture. This review looks at some of the central claims of these texts. It examines a number of questions, including whether insider accounts can ever achieve objectivity, the connections that can be drawn between these volumes and whether we can see a blurring of boundaries between academia and journalistic approaches.
Gilbert and Pearson attest that 'the ten-year delay in producing the histories of acid house marked an awareness that too many rash promises had been made and too many hopes invested in the sweat-soaked and serotonin-washed moments of 1988-92' (p.4). Of course the obvious occupational hazard of writing about a dynamic, living, breathing entity such as electronic dance music is the way that whatever is written about it becomes inevitably outdated the moment it appears. Indeed, Reynolds's claim, that 'only a handful of tomes have addressed the dance-and-drug culture despite the fact that in Europe it's been the dominant form of pop music for nearly a decade', already seems strangely outmoded. One of the most pertinent related questions in considering these volumes must be how this resolutely intellectual musically based culture can be intellectualised. It is something of which the authors here are sometimes acutely aware. Rietveld asserts by way of apologia, 'I do hope this book has not strayed too much towards the death principle, in other words killing a culture by pinning it down in a static and non-contradictory manner' (p.276).
Of course the answer is that not everybody here is trying to offer serious academic treatment of their subject. The journalists Benson and Bussmann offer anthology-type volumes. Whilst Benson's is a chronologically arranged selection of club-writing from the Face, which he has edited, Bussman's coffee table layout is more akin to a rave scrapbook compiled in scattergun style. These books all scream out for attention with blurbs and accompanying press releases protesting definitiveness. Fluorescent colours and endorsements from rave's self-appointed rent-a-quote Irvine Welsh dominate the book jackets. Simon Reynolds's Energy Flash also helpfully includes a 12-track techno CD attached to it. All the reader requires is a spooky lightshow and a couple of Es to create a simulated rave in the comfort of their own home. Many of these books seem to be founded on the underlying premise that 'it's not as good as it used to be', expressed in terms of commercialisation, drug purity and music. Of course nostalgia is enduring. I remember flyers in 1992 promising parties that would capture the spirit of 1989. As the past catches up with us at an ever-accelerating rate, rave for all its technological forwardness is all about 'back to the future'.
Simon Reynolds meanwhile comes over as the most well-read of the non academic rave chroniclers here, with his quasi-cultural studies prose and a bibliography that includes social theorists such as Theodor Adorno and the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari - hip names to drop on the academic circuit - in the bibliography. Sheryl Garratt and Mathew Collin, respectively ex Face and ID editors, are noticeably graduates of the cod-ethnography style-mag school of journalism. Maria Pini and Ben Malbon, meanwhile, go for more recognisably academic anthropological endeavours. The Manual, with its neat graphics and colour spreads, is the most aesthetically pleasing final product. The authors' names do not appear anywhere on the cover, although the words 'Ministry of Sound' are omnipresent. One gets the impression that Jane Bussmann, with her infectious enthusiasm, is a genuine fan who has been let loose with a whole book.
Setting up a binary between the academic and non-academic is misleading and could be seen to be creating a false dichotomy. There are a variety of approaches here. Within the academic efforts alone, Gilbert and Pearson are from a cultural studies perspective, Rietveld was in a department of law, Malbon is a geographer turned advertising executive, and McKay is based in English and American studies, whilst the contributors to his book are a mix of academics and those from outside who appear to hail from all over the place. The methodologies too are mixed. Some plump for participant observation-type study. For example, Rietveld's treatment of the house music phenomenon situates herself at the centre of her endeavour. We begin with the author onstage at a club playing keyboards to an adoring audience as part of a 1980s pop band. Her closing remarks are on a methodological note in which she confesses that as a house DJ, alongside her studies, 'My approach seems to have worked. I have had excellent reactions and was tempted to become a professional DJ' (p.276). Malbon was more involved as audience member - although the blurring of boundaries between producer and consumer in dance music is one of the subjects that most of these authors deal with. Nonetheless Malbon details the rituals of clubbing from getting ready to the post-club 'afterglow' with lots of rich ethnographic data. His anxieties as he nears the front of the queue and finds himself in front of steely-eyed bouncers is particularly vivid. Like Malbon, Pini includes rich qualitative data with transcript excerpts in her text. Gilbert and Pearson offer more straight textual analysis and the application of various cultural theorists and philosophers. The theoretical diversity here ranges from postmodernism and Baudrillard (Rietveld) to Goffman on identity (Malbon).
In spelling out the defining features of rave, The Manual, issued by the Ministry of Sound, lists ecstasy, mobile phones, Rizla and Lucozade amongst its choice in a rather 1992-type itinerary. This slickly produced book, in coffee table friendly format, is both cause and effect of current rave culture, exemplifying the rise of the superclub, complete with clothing ranges, record labels and, now too, book publishing arms. One suspects that if McKay were coming up with a list pertaining to the free party scene which he deals with in his volume a different set of objets de rave may emerge. In the 'come as you are' free party scene, dogs on strings accompany their masters, and a caravan cum cafe where you can buy beer, herbal tea and vegetarian fare is usually a fixture. This renders no archetypal rave objects possible as they change so fast and rave is so highly differentiated. Pini (p.9) offers by way of definition, 'club cultures can be seen to inscribe themselves in terms of vinyl, in architectural, technological or chemical terms, in terms of the event flier, the 12-inch "white label" or the "panic" press report'. All are here in these titles.
Rave's advent signalled at once continuity and rupture with the past. A conscious identification with the 1960s was visible in the dubbing of 1988 as 'the second summer of love', but elsewhere punk is invoked as a precursor for its spirit if not sound. Along with the essential element of enthusiasm, a pair of decks and pile of sample-able records is substituted for a guitar in the equation of 'all you need' to do it. Disco is taken as the starting point in Garratt's meticulously researched account of 1970s US dancefloor developments. American-based Reynolds takes up the story of the stateside scene's development. Acid house has also repeatedly been linked to Mediterranean holiday resort dancefloors, fittingly for a generation for whom jumbo jet tourism has been normalised and even banalised. 'Ibiza, Majorca and Benidorm too, I've searched all these places but I've never found you', wryly intoned Bernard Sumner of dour Manchester indie miserablists-turned E-heads New Order on the band's 1989 single, 'Fine Time'. In terms of international scope most of these books are explicitly or implicitly based in London, with some variation, for example Garratt's chapter on Manchester, entitled 'Northern Exposure', and Rietveld on the Dutch house scene, in a chapter called 'Cyber clogs'. The free party ravers discovered other paradises such as that great student year-off location Goa: present in rave cartography as a result of the spread of slacker culture (tertiary education + labour market instability). The resulting techno-pagan mix presents a paradox. Nonetheless all of rave's geographical bases have given rise to their own musical genres: Balaeric beats, Goa trance, Chicago house.
Pini's work, drawing on Angela McRobbie and Donna Haraway, takes gender as its cornerstone, and her study of women ravers is a welcome counterbalance to the old studies of women situated within the contexts and confines of 'bedroom culture'. Although Gilbert and Pearson come up with a sophisticated chapter on dance music, gender and sexuality weaving together feminist and queer theory, interestingly early moral panic over acid house seemed to be about drugs and rock and roll but not sex. Reynolds links this to the pharmacological properties of ecstasy. Drugs accordingly loom large in most analyses. Leah Betts, the country's most celebrated E casualty, has a starring role.
Umbilically linked to this is the part played by the simultaneously horrified and fascinated tabloid press as harbingers of acid house and ecstasy, which only served to give it an increased sphere of influence. Bussmann has assembled a particularly choice selection of Fleet Street shock horror headlines. Unlike Sarah Thornton's almost bashful passage describing her own E-taking experience without detailing any of the effects, the authors of these books are not shy of sharing their own drug stories. Simon Reynolds, an indie convert explains, 'fully E'd up I finally grasped ... why the music was made like it was: how certain tingly textures goosepimpled your skin and particularly oscillated the E-rush, the way the gaseous diva vocals mirrored your own gushing emotions'. Collin is another E-vangelical, 'An overwhelmingly powerful charge surged through my body, rising through my body, rushing through the veins and the arteries and the bones and the teeth ... fuuuuck.' Malbon gets round that uncomfortable moment by explaining that his section 'A night on E: the use of ecstasy (MDMA) in the clubbing experience' is based on his 'shadowing' of 'clubbers who use drugs over the course of a night out' (p.119).
Early rave was seen as ideologically vacuous. Previous predilections for youth culture sloganeering idealism, for example the hippie mantra 'be reasonable, demand the impossible' or the punk war cry 'anarchy in the UK', were replaced by short, sometimes monosyllabic, utterances, 'sorted' and 'safe' - which were often connected to ecstasy, itself abbreviated to E. Garratt remarks, 'At a time when the political ideology was all about the individual, E culture offered a glorious communal experience, an illusion of unity that was exhilarating' (p.258). Of the non-academics Collin is probably best at documenting rave's political involvement, although, oddly enough for an arguably corporate publication, The Manual is also pretty comprehensive here. Needless to say, it is the only account to mention the Ministry of Sound's hard-hitting 'Use Your Vote' campaign to encourage voter registration and turnout, which began as a break-away from the 'Rock the Vote' initiative before taking on a life of its own with cinema and magazine ads done in a brutalist 'fuck you' style. Rave is a priori probably not an oppositional culture, at least not overtly as, say, hippies. Under legislative attack, the clandestine clubbing of forbidden festivals started rave's engagement in the transgressive - a point made among others by Rietveld in her contribution to McKay's collection.
Despite the Independent's early observation that, 'Acid House, whose emblem is a vapid, anonymous smile, is the simplest and gentlest of the Eighties' youth manifestations ? non-aggressive (except in terms of decibels)' (3 March 1990), rave has had multiple brushes with the law: the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act 1990, known colloquially as the 'Bright Bill' after its sponsor Tory MP Graham Bright, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, with its clampdown on the rights of public protest as well as holding parties, and most recently the Public Entertainments Licenses (Drug Misuse) Act, introduced in the dying days of Major's premiership. Whereas the 'Freedom to Party' organisation opposing Bright made a pro-capitalism and anti-state interventionist new right argument, the CJPO protestors subscribed to hippie philosophising harking back to the Albion of old and tribal society. Rave tactics were always imaginative on an organisational level and in pooling creative resources, but with rave under threat from the law, the response of ravers in political strategy as well as party-throwing has had to resort to increasing ingenuity. Early traveller/raver crossover certainly raised (pierced) eyebrows when, as legend has it, curious ravers gatecrashed crusty festivals, sometimes causing friction. The political element of rave was however contested by some. The right to rave, unlike CND (future of the planet) or Vietnam (solidarity with oppressed peoples in a far-off anti-communist war), could be seen as selfish or parochial, although this later broadened out to other struggles. Bussmann mentions road protestors Reclaim the Streets, the subject of a chapter in McKay's book, and she alludes to the antics of late 1990s folk hero Swampy in her trademark soundbite-strewn way, proclaiming, 'in the eighties protest meant wearing t-shirts saying Frankie says Relax. In 1998 you dig a tunnel' (p.161). One might question the absence of consideration given to the Greenham Common protestors or striking miners in making such a statement.
The CJPO's state definition of rave, 'music wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats', drawn attention to in these books, is patently ridiculous. All music is essentially organised sound dependent on repetition. As Debby of ravers' pressure group Advance Party was often heard to remark at the time, 'I guess that's goodbye to Ravel's Bolero then'. The age-old sense of adults legislating against something that they do not understand, youth having more or less harmless fun, was a common motor of the Bright Bill and CJPO campaigns, a sentiment expressed by Bob Dylan back in 1964 when he sang, 'Come mothers and fathers throughout the land/ Don't criticise what you don't understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command', in 'The times they are a changin''. Gilbert and Pearson are also good on this point, tracing back fears of the intoxicated mob to Plato and Shakespeare and looking at how dancing has historically been perceived as an irrational activity.
McKay's collection of essays on what he calls DiY (sic) culture is broad-ranging in content, covering fanzines and video protest as well as repetitive beats and ecstasy culture. The term is defined early on as ' a combination of inspiring action, narcissism, youthful arrogance, principle, ahistoricism, idealism, indulgence, creativity, plagiarism as well as the rejection and embracing alike of technological innovation' (p.2). McKay's thoughtful introduction looks at the contradiction between some of these elements and others, such as the binary opposition between fluffy and spiky which is relatively untouched by the authors of the other books in this review. The contributors to DiY Culture meanwhile are, as noted earlier, a mixed bunch; some academic, some non-academic and some both. The result is a somewhat uneven volume, although one could argue that the polyvocal discourse between the covers captures perfectly the highly diversified nature of DIY culture itself.
A decade after acid house and the 'second summer of love', dance culture, frequently aided and abetted with illegal intoxicants, is still central to UK youth culture. However, noticeable changes have occurred throughout this period. In 1990 the object of official fear in tabloid tales was the stereotypical ecstasy guzzler that tabloid scare stories had created. In 1994 it was the 'crusty', a highly mythologised technopagan/raver/squatter/traveller stereotype with a tendency to throw free parties. Today rave has split off in multiple directions to become a multi-faceted youth culture with a multitude of different musical soundtracks. Reynolds is a particularly keen musicologist, arriving at big beat via happy house, intelligent techno, darkcore, hardstep, jungle, gabba and drum'n'bass. However the innate snobbery of illegal ravers vis-?-vis their legal counterparts, paralleled by that of trendy clubbers vis-?-vis the high street variant, underlines the difficulty of addressing either scene as democratic or inclusive, despite the idea of rave openness that all the writers here testify to. In some ways rave has become the complete antithesis of what it set out to be, with big name star DJs, such as those pictured and profiled in The Manual, cultivating a cult of the personality and contradicting the egalitarian, anti-spectacle, 'faceless techno bollocks' idea.
Once upon a time, rave was a verb not a noun. Rave could be seen as the last subculture; signifying either the 'most recent' or even, as those pronouncing the end of youth culture contend, the final one. The late 1980s contribution to the great British post-war youth culture collection, acid house has mutated into the early twenty-first-century version of the same, scooping up a bewildering array of musics and raising questions of politics, drugs and currents in youth culture. Both rave and the politics of its defence are as much about the essential continuities of oppositional youth culture as they are about any sort of rupture. In the 'seen it all before' 1990s, much youth culture is coloured by a sense of d?j? vu for anyone old enough to remember (or care). The use of relevant historical antecedents, done equally by Britpop, is perhaps a conscious mining of the past mirroring the heritage-obsessed times that we live in, but it underlines that pop now has a past.
I have used the word 'rave' in this review, although the term itself is now in danger of appearing to be quaintly anachronistic. Perhaps 'electronic dance music scene' is more accurate. Nonetheless, even if the label 'rave' is no longer widely in application, its ideas live on. The coming of crusty, combining punk and hippie elements of sartorial and political style and philosophy to a soundtrack of repetitive beats, shows that rave did not kill punk, which in turn did not kill hippie. 1990s youth cultures are cumulative rather than successive, constructed of a panoply of influences. The rave has its roots in town (high street club, orbital warehouse party) and country (open air festival). It displays traits of Euro-centricism (Mediterranean holiday dancefloors) and anti-Western values (Goa spiritualism). As Garratt reminds us rave is importantly far from a homogeneous entity: 'Club culture is restless, fluid, constantly changing and feeding off itself' (p.11). Rave is certainly going to be more than just a footnote in the history of British post-war youth culture, as these books prove. Meanwhile Reynolds declares, 'The vitality of a pop genre is in inverse proportion to the number of books written about it.' This remains to be seen but so far one could assemble a pretty good case to the contrary.
The changing nature of dance music culture in the past decade contains manifestations unseen before in post-war youth culture as well as retreads of the past. The Bishop of Woolwich's remarks of four decades ago could have just as easily slipped out of the mouth of Mary Whitehouse or any other contemporaneous 'moral majority'-type commentator on the subject of rave. As Gilbert and Pearson point out, 'British dance culture could be dated as beginning at just about any time. "Ravers" did not invent the practice of dancing all night with the aid of illegal stimulants' (p.72). Raving, despite attempts to legislate it out of existence, has remained an important point of reference for youth at both under- and overground gatherings.
At the start of the 1990s a sense of crisis seemed to prevail in the circles of popular culture commentary as it was argued that youth culture and pop music had simply run their course and imploded under the combined menace of computer games, Australian soap opera and the internet. A decade on, such fears have been proved unfounded. Where youth culture will go next is pretty much anybody's guess. In the meantime it seems apt to close with the title of the Happy Monday's hit from 1989: 'Rave On'.
This is a set of book reviews published online on March 6th 2005.
Citation: Huq, Rupa, 'Rave New World', Entertainment and Sports Law Journal (ESLJ) Volume 1, Number 3 <http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/eslj/issues/volume1/number3/reviews/huq/>
