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

‘progressive’ or ‘intelligent’ trigger the alarm bells: when an underground scene starts talking this talk, it’s usually a sign that it’s gearing up to play the media game as a prequel to buying into the trad music industry structure of auteur-stars, concept albums and long-term careers. Above all, it’s a sign of impending musical debility, creeping self-importance and the haemorrhaging away of fun. Hardcore scenes are strongest when they remain remote from all of that, and instead thrive as anonymous collectives, subcultural machines in which ideas circulate back and forth between DJs and producers, and the genre evolves incrementally, week by week.
    What I’m proposing in this book is that music shaped by and for drug experiences (even bad drug experiences) can go further out precisely because it’s not made with enduring ‘art’ status or avant-garde cachet as a goal. Hardcore rave’s dancefloor functionalism and druggy hedonism make it more wildly warped than the output of most self-conscious experimentalists. In Energy Flash , I trace a continuum of hardcore that runs from the most machinic forms of house (jack tracks and acid tracks) through British and European rave styles like bleep-and-bass, breakbeat house, Belgian hardcore, jungle, gabba, big beat and speed garage. A lot of exquisite music was made outside this continuum, and is covered in this book. But I still believe that the essence of rave resides with ‘hardcore pressure’: the rave audience’s demand for a soundtrack to going mental and getting fucked up.
    This begs the question of whether the meaning of rave music is reducible to drugs, or even a single drug, Ecstasy. Does this music only make sense when the listener is under the influence? I don’t believe that for a second; some of the most tripped-out dance music has been made by straight-edge types who rarely if ever touch an illegal substance (4 Hero, Dave Clarke and Josh Wink being only three of the most famous abstainers). At the same time, rave culture as a whole is barely conceivable without drugs, or at least without drug metaphors: by itself, the music drugs the listener.
    Rave is more than music + drugs; it’s a matrix of lifestyle, ritualized behaviour and beliefs. To the participant, it feels like a religion; from the standpoint of the mainstream observer, it looks more like a sinister cult. I think again of that declaration: ‘we must make of joy a crime against the state’. In 1992, two aspects of underground rave that particularly thrilled and enthralled my imagination were literally crimes against the state: pirate radio, and the resurgence of illegal raves instigated by renegade sound-systems like Spiral Tribe.
    What the London pirate stations and the free parties conjured up was the sense of rave as a vision quest. Both transformed mundane Britain, its dreary metropolitan thoroughfares and placid country lanes, into a cartography of adventure and forbidden pleasures. A huge part of the excitement of the rave lifestyle is the nocturnal itineraries that connect favourite clubs. Anyone who’s ever been involved in rave has their own enchanted pathways: for my gang, one was the pilgrimage between two profane shrines, Labrynth and Trade. It was a journey between worlds – Labrynth’s ultra-violet catacombs thronged with working-class East End teenagers, Trade’s gay pleasuredome in the centre of London – but both, in their different ways, were hardcore . It’s in these clubs that I experienced raving in its purest and most deranged form; blissfully ignorant of the DJs’ identities or the tracks’ names, lost in music, out-of-time.
    These kind of experiences, shared by millions, can’t really be documented, although the post-Irvine Welsh mania for ‘rave fiction’ has made an attempt. Most of this writing consists of thinly disguised drug memoirs, and as everybody knows, other people’s drug anecdotes are as boring as their dreams. So how do you write the