Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Read Free

what really blew my mind were the DJs whipping up a Sturm und Drang with the Carmina-Burana -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 sonic 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 re-integrated at the level of the dancefloor as a whole . 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’. Hardcore 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