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

history of a culture that is fundamentally amnesiac and non-verbal? Unlike rock music, rave isn’t oriented around lyrics; for the critic, this requires a shift of emphasis, so that you no longer ask what the music ‘means’ but how it works . What is the affective charge of a certain kind of bass sound, or particular rhythm? Rave music represents a fundamental break with rock, or at least the dominant English Lit and social realist paradigms of rock criticism, which focus on songs and storytelling. Where rock relates an experience (autobiographical or imaginary), rave constructs an experience. Bypassing interpretation, the listener is hurled into a vortex of heightened sensations, abstract emotions and artificial energies.
    For some, this makes the idea of ‘rave culture’ a contradiction in terms. One might define ‘culture’ as something that tells you where you came from and where you’re going, something that nourishes the spirit, imparts life-wisdom, and generally makes life habitable. Rave provokes the question: is it possible to base a culture around sensations rather than truths, fascination rather than meaning?
    For all my believer’s ardour, there’s a thread of doubt running through this book. As an adult with Left-liberal allegiances, I worry sometimes whether recreational drug use is any kind of adequate basis for a culture, let alone a counterculture. Is rave simply about the dissipation of utopian energies into the void, or does the idealism it catalyses spill over into and transform ordinary life? Can the oceanic, ‘only connect!’ feelings experienced on the dancefloor be integrated into everyday struggles to be ‘better at being human’? Learning to ‘lose your self’ can be an enlightenment, but it can also be strangely selfish: a greed for intense, ravishing experiences.
    Dance culture has long been home to two radically opposed versions of what rave is ‘all about’. On one side, the transcendentalist, neo-psychedelic discourse of higher planes of consciousness and oceanic merger with Humanity/Gaia/the Cosmos. On the other, Ecstasy and rave music slot into an emergent ‘rush culture’ of teenage kicks and cheap thrills: video-games; skateboarding, snow-boarding, bunjee jumping and other ‘extreme sports’; blockbuster movies whose narratives are merely flimsy frameworks for the display of spectacular special effects.
    For all my reservations about the spiritually corrupting and politically retreatist ramifications of rave culture, my own experience is different. Even as I cherish its power to empty my head, I’ve found this ‘mindless’ music endlessly thought-provoking. And despite its ostensibly escapist nature, rave has actually politicized me, made me think harder about questions of class, race, gender, technology. Mostly devoid of lyrics and almost never overtly political, rave music – like dub reggae and hip hop – uses sound and rhythm to construct psychic landscapes of exile and utopia. One of this book’s themes is the utopian/dystopian dialectic running through Ecstasy culture, the way the hunger for heaven-on-earth almost always leads on to a ‘darkside’ phase of drug excess and paranoia.
    Energy Flash strives to combine the thoughtless immediacy of my experiences in the thick of the scene, with the ‘thinking around the subject’ that ensued after the heat of the moment. As a history, it’s an attempt to chronicle how this extraordinary culture coalesced into being, and to track how those strands have subsequently unravelled to form the current post-rave diaspora. But pulsing inside the text, its raison d’être , is the incandescent memory of amnesiac moments, dance-floor frenzies that propelled me outside time and history. Bliss on.

PROLOGUE
     
    EVERYTHING STARTS WITH AN E
     
    ECSTASY AND
RAVE MUSIC
     
    The Oxford Dictionary defines ecstasy as ‘an overwhelming feeling of joy or rapture,’ and ‘an emotional or religious frenzy or trance-like