Reynolds Energy Flash

A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28914-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 816 Seiten

Twenty-five years since acid house and Ecstasy revolutionized pop culture, Simon Reynolds's landmark rave history Energy Flash has been expanded and updated to cover twenty-first-century developments like dubstep and EDM's recent takeover of America. Author of the acclaimed postpunk history Rip It Up and Start Again, Reynolds became a rave convert in the early nineties. He experienced first-hand the scene's drug-fuelled rollercoaster of euphoria and darkness. He danced at Castlemorton, the illegal 1992 mega-rave that sent spasms of anxiety through the Establishment and resulted in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill. Mixing personal reminiscence with interviews and ultra-vivid description of the underground's ever-changing sounds as they mutated under the influence of MDMA and other drugs, Energy Flash is the definitive chronicle of electronic dance culture. From rave's origins in Chicago house and Detroit techno, through Ibiza, Madchester and the anarchic free-party scene, to the pirate-radio underworld of jungle and UK garage, and then onto 2000s-shaping genres such as grime and electro, Reynolds documents with authority, insight and infectious enthusiasm the tracks, DJs, producers and promoters that soundtracked a generation. A substantial final section, added for this new Faber edition, brings the book right up to date, covering dubstep's explosive rise to mass popularity and America's recent but ardent embrace of rave. Packed with interviews with participants and charismatic innovators like Derrick May, Goldie and Aphex Twin, Energy Flash is an infinitely entertaining and essential history of dance music.

Simon Reynolds is the author of Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellions and Rock and Roll (co-written with Joy Press), Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978 - 1984 and, most recently, Bring the Noise: Twenty Years of Hip Hop and Hip Rock.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Reynolds, Simon

Leseproben

INTRO

I’m lucky enough to have gotten into music at the precise moment – punk’s immediate aftermath – when it was generally believed that ‘the way forward’ for rock involved borrowing ideas from dance music. ‘Lucky’, in that I arrived too late to get brainwashed with the ‘disco sucks’ worldview. My first albums were all post-punk forays into funk and dub terrain: Public Image Ltd’s , The Slits’ , Talking Heads’ . Any mercifully brief fantasies of playing in a band involved being a bassist, like Jah Wobble; I learned to play air guitar only much later.

In the early eighties, it didn’t seem aberrant to be as excited by the electro-funk coming out of New York on labels like Prelude as I was by The Fall or The Birthday Party. As much time and money went into hunter-gathering second-hand disco singles and Donna Summer albums as sixties garage-punk compilations or records by The Byrds. Starting out as a music journalist in the late eighties, most of my rhetorical energy was devoted to crusading for a resurgent neo-psychedelic rock. But I still had plenty of spare passion for hip-hop and proto-house artists like Schoolly D, Mantronix, Public Enemy, Arthur Russell and Nitro Deluxe. In early 1988, I even wrote one of the first features on acid house.

That said, my take on dance music was fundamentally rockist, in so far as I had never really engaged with the milieu in which the music came into its own: clubs. This was perhaps forgivable, given that eighties ‘style culture’ dominated London clubland. Its posing and door policies, go-go imports and vintage funk obscurities, were anathema to my vision of a resurrected psychedelia, a Dionysian cult of oblivion. Little did I realize that just around the corner loomed a culture; that the instruments and time–space co-ordinates of the neo-psychedelic resurgence would not be wah-wah pedals and Detroit 1969, but Roland 303 bass-machines and Detroit/Chicago 1987.

My take on dance was rockist because, barely aquainted with how the music functioned in its ‘proper’ context, I tended to fixate on singular artists. This is how rock critics still tend to engage with dance music: they look for the auteur-geniuses who seem most promising in terms of long-term, album-based careers. But dance scenes simply don’t work like this: the 12-inch single is what counts, there’s little brand loyalty to artists, and DJs are more of a focal point for fans than the faceless, anonymous producers. In the three years before I engaged with rave culture on its own terrain and terms, I accordingly celebrated groups like 808 State, The Orb, The Shamen, Ultramarine, on the grounds that they were making music that made sense at home and at album-length. Today I cringe to remember that, reviewing the second Bomb the Bass LP, I proposed the term ‘progressive dance’ to describe this new breed of album-oriented artist. Cringe, because this divide between so-called ‘progressive’ electronica and mere ‘rave fodder’ has since become for me the very definition of ‘getting it completely wrong’.

I finally got it ‘right’ in 1991, as one drop in the demographic deluge that was 1991–2’s Second Wave of Rave, carried along by the tide of formerly indie-rock friends who’d turned on, tuned in and freaked out. It was some revelation to experience this music in its proper context – as a component in a system. It was an entirely different and un-rock way of using music: the anthemic track rather than the album, the total flow of the DJ’s mix, the alternative media of pirate radio and specialist record stores, music as a synergistic partner with drugs, and the whole magic/tragic cycle of living for the weekend and paying for it with the midweek comedown. There was a liberating joy in surrendering to the radical anonymity of the music, in not caring about the names of tracks or artists. The ‘meaning’ of the music pertained to the macro level of the entire culture, and it was so much huger than the sum of its parts.

‘What we must lose now is this insidious, corrosive knowingness, this need to collect and contain. We must open our brains that have been stopped and plugged with random information, and once again must our limbs carve in air the patterns of their desire – not the calibrated measures and slick syncopation of jazz-funk but a carnal music of total release. We must make of joy once more a crime against the state.’ This single paragraph by writer Barney Hoskyns, written about The Birthday Party in 1981, changed all my ideas about music. It set me on a quest for the kind of Dionysian spirit that Hoskyns located in The Birthday Party. As a fan I found it in Hendrix and The Stooges, as a critic in bands like The Young Gods, Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, to name just a few. But apart from the odd bare-chested maniac or bloody-shirted mosher, I’d never witnessed the kind of physical abandon imagined by Hoskyns on any mass level.

The last place I’d expected to find a modern Dionysian tumult was in the cool-crippled context of dance music. But that’s what I saw in 1991 at Progeny, one of a series of DJ-and-multi-band extravaganzas organized by The Shamen. The latter were pretty good, and Orbital’s live improvisation around their spine-tingling classic ‘Chime’ was thrilling. But what really blew my mind were the DJs whipping up a with the -gone-Cubist bombast of hardcore techno, the light-beams intersecting to conjure frescoes in the air, and, above all, the crowd: nubile boys, stripped to the waist and iridescent with sweat, bobbing and weaving as though practising some arcane martial art; blissed girls, eyes closed, carving strange hieroglyphic patterns in the air. This was the Dionysian paroxysm programmed and looped for eternity.

My second, fatally addictive rave-alation occurred a few months later at a quadruple bill of top 1991 rave acts – N-Joi, K-Klass, Bassheads and M-People. This time, fully E’d up, I finally grasped in a visceral sense why the music was made the way it was: how certain tingly textures goosepimpled your skin and particular oscillator riffs triggered the E-rush, the way the gaseous diva vocals mirrored your own gushing emotions. Finally, I understood ecstasy as a science. And it became even more crystal clear that the audience was the star: that bloke over there doing fishy-finger dancing was as much a part of the entertainment, the tableau, as the DJs or bands. Dance moves spread through the crowd like superfast viruses. I was instantly entrained in a new kind of dancing – tics and spasms, twitches and jerks, the agitation of bodies broken down into separate components, then reintegrated at the level of the dancefloor . Each sub-individual part (a limb, a hand cocked like a pistol) was a cog in a collective ‘desiring machine’, interlocking with the sound system’s bass-throbs and sequencer riffs. Unity and self-expression fused in a forcefield of pulsating, undulating euphoria.

Getting into the raving aspect of house and techno somewhat late had a peculiar effect: I found myself, as fan and critic, on the wrong side of the tracks. In class and age terms (as a middle-class 28-year-old), I should logically have gravitated towards ‘progressive house’ and ‘intelligent techno’, then being vaunted as the only alternative to the degenerate excesses of hardcore rave. But, partly because I was a neophyte still in the honeymoon phase of raving, and partly because of a bias towards extremity in music, I found myself drawn ever deeper into hardcore. Confronted by the condescension of the cognoscenti, I developed my own counter-prejudice, which informs this entire book: the conviction that hardcore scenes in dance culture are the real creative motor of the music, and that self-proclaimed progressive initiatives usually involve a backing away from the edge, a reversion to more traditional ideas of ‘musicality’. is that nexus where a number of attitudes and energies mesh: druggy hedonism, an instinctively avant-garde surrender to the ‘will’ of technology, a ‘fuck art, let’s dance’ DJ-oriented funktionalism, a smidgeon of underclass rage. Hardcore refers to different sounds in different countries and at different times, but the word generally guarantees a stance of subcultural intransigence, a refusal to be co-opted or cop out.

In London circa 1991–2, hardcore referred to ultra-fast, breakbeat-driven drug-noise, and it was abhorred by all right-thinking techno hipsters. To me it was patently the most exhilaratingly strange and deranged music of the nineties, a mad end-of-millennium channelling of the spirit of punk (in the sixties garage and seventies Stooges/Pistols senses) into the body of hip hop (breakbeats and bass). There’s been no small glee, let me tell you, in watching hardcore evolve into jungle and drum and bass, and thereby win universal acclaim as the leading edge of contemporary music.

But the experience of being in the ‘wrong’ place at the right time has instilled a useful Pavlovian response: whenever I hear the word ‘hardcore’ (or synonyms like ‘dark’, ‘ruffneck’, ‘cheesy’) used to malign a scene or sound, my ears prick up. Conversely, terms like ‘progressive’ or...