Burn This Disco Out:

Stigma Within Dance Music Culture

Nico Rosario

MA Education in Arts and Cultural Settings

King’s College London

27 August 2015

 

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PROLOGUE

Geezers on E and first-timers

Kids on Whizz, darlings on Charlie

All come together for this party

All races, many faces, from places you never heard of

Where ya from, what's ya name and what ya want?

Sing to the words, flex to the fat ones

The tribal drums, the sun's rising

We all smile, we all sing

We were just standin’ there, mindin’ our own

It went on and on (we all smile, we all sing)

The weak become heroes and the stars align

We all sing, we all sing…

– “Weak Become Heroes” by The Streets1

There’s an epic-ness to the story of rave, a deeply embedded mythology that

tends to align itself with the likes of The Odyssey and Ulysses in its grandeur, its

importance, its legacy. In order to fully grasp its history, one needs a world map

to follow its migratory patterns; a thorough understanding of the social, political,

and economic structures of late-century urban decayed America, Thatcher-

scorched England, and the landing pad of restless youth, the Eternal Hip and its

1 Skinner, Mike. (2002). Weak Become Heroes [Recorded by The Streets]. On Original Pirate Material [CD]. London, England: Locked On/679 Recordings.

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equally eternal summer, Ibiza, Spain; and a keen sense of global capitalism,

which spread rave culture like a contagion – one that metastasized into club

culture, and later electronic dance music (EDM) culture.

Some say rave started brewing in ghetto warehouses in Detroit and Chicago in

the mid-80s, others claim its origins are rooted in the glitter-and-funk drenched

disco scene of the decade before, and still others trace its heritage to the free

party and hippie lifestyles of the 1960s (I’ll get to who-said-what later); but what is

certain is that rave is part of a continuum of post-World War II youth

empowerment that has had a 30+ year impact on music, dance, fashion,

literature, and media. It packs a wallop not easily dismissed – and, believe me,

many people have tried – and remains one of the strongholds of pop music

culture, alongside jazz, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll, punk, goth, and hip-hop;

all of which have been institutionalized, commodified, and, in most cases,

canonized.

This paper investigates where rave stands, within and outside, these distinctions

but it also explores the ways in which its marginalization – while perhaps aiding

its continued relevance – also impedes public policy initiatives that could help

preserve it. I will locate rave in its current habitus: the underground dance floor,

the mega-club, the illegal warehouse, and the mainstream festival; I will follow its

aural chart across sound systems and radio waves; and I will monitor the

movement of the DJ from anonymous curator to super star – all in an attempt to

legitimize rave culture (but more broadly, dance music culture in general) and,

hopefully, create a space for meaningful inclusion to the institutions, governments

and communities that can allow for its long-term prosperity.

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METHODOLOGY:

My original project involved creating a case study of the Music Venues Task

Force, a recent public policy initiative by mayor Boris Johnson, the Music Venues

Taskforce, which seeks to discover new ways to embrace the city’s nightlife

culture, citing its local impact on the economy as well as London’s worldwide

cultural impact (Music Venues Trust, 2015). I was keen to see how this new task

force might be useful to dance music venues and the evolving EDM movement in

London in general, which (as the literature review has shown) has undergone a

great deal of scrutiny and moral panic since its inception. I reached out to

members of the Taskforce to learn more about their work and get a clearer idea

of their initiatives and agenda but they were hesitant to correspond. After several

months of spotty contact, I decided to change gears.

While researching the Taskforce, I came across another organization, the Night

Time Industries Association (NTIA), that was also reaching out to policy makers

about a lack of support and an overabundance of regulation that affected the

economic growth of their members. As I read through their report entitled

“Forward Into the Night” (2015), I noticed that the same ailments they were

describing were identical to ones I had seen happen in New York, where I had

also researched night life culture. It occurred to me that an explanatory research

project might be useful to the NTIA as a means to show an emergent pattern of

behaviors that are used to thwart night-life culture. My focus on dance music

cultures is especially relevant to the NTIA because one of their highest-profile

members, Fabric nightclub, was recently on the verge of losing their license due

to exactly these kinds of excessive regulation.

I used the methodology outlined by Lawrence Neuman, who described

explanatory as “building on explanatory and descriptive research and goes on to

identify the reason that something occurs” (2014:40). I used my literature review

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as a means of placing rave within a context of dance music culture and provided

empirical evidence to support my claims. Once I was able to establish a

longstanding history of dance music culture, I could place the concerns of the

NTIA within that history and address them as part of a system in which this

regulation could be critiqued as a complete value, rather than just as anecdotal or

incidental occurrences.

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BRIEF HISTORY OF DANCE MUSIC

JAZZ:

The kids want to dance belly to belly and cheek to

cheek while their elders are supporting legislation that

would prohibit them from dancing closer than 9 inches.

The kids want to Funky Butt and Black Bottom while

their elders prefer the Waltz as a suitable vaccine for

what is now merely a rash. Limbering is the way the

youngsters recreate themselves while their elders

declaim they cease and desist from this lascivious

‘sinful’ Bunny-Hugging, this suggestive bumping and

grinding, this wild abandoned spooning.

(Reed, 1972:21-22)

The history of dance music, especially American, is often mired with racial,

sexual, and hedonistic connotations that devalue its musical credibility. Jazz

music, for instance, is now perfectly acceptable within canonical institutions such

as colleges and conservatories devoted its teaching and understanding (The

Juillard School, Berklee College of Music, Sibelius Academy, The Guildhall

School) and awarding institutions (Grammys, Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame,

National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters) as well as commercial ventures

via the music industry, through heavily promoted and well-attended jazz festivals

(Montreux, Newport, Montreal, Monterey); specialist jazz magazines and journals

(JazzTimes, Jazz Magazine, Journal of Jazz Studies, and Jazz Research

Journal); record labels (Verve, Blue Note, Impulse!); and radio stations that

exclusively program jazz music.

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But before all the accolades, awards, scholarly rhetoric and meticulous

instruction, jazz was also known (and subsequently vilified) for its alleged

prurience, miscegenation, and immorality, in general (Vogel, 2009). According to

cabaret historian Shane Vogel, Post-World War I American attitudes helped

shape these ideas – upon returning home, many black GIs struggled to adjust to

their limited social status in the States and began to actively pursue the lifestyles

they were accustomed to overseas, which included mingling freely with whites at

a level of intimacy that was disturbing for the mostly conservative American

majority.

Intimacy…threatens (promises?) to undo the routines

and routes, the familiar patterns and rote narratives,

that organize psychic and social lives. For those

already excluded from dominant narratives and

normative systems of kinship, family, and social

belonging, the rewards of such risks in forging public

intimacies can be nothing less than a vital mode of

existence. This is not a state-sanctioned, familially

organized, or economically privatized intimacy, but an

intimacy that [literary critic Michael] Cooke defines

more expansively as the ‘acceptance of depth along

with openness of engagement’ (Vogel, 2009:42).

In one historically extreme example, these corruptible forces were so feared that

one of jazz’s hotbeds, New York City, passed citywide legislation in 1926 against

dancing in bars and restaurants without a ‘cabaret’ license. Labeled by the Board

of Alderman of New York City as the antics of the “wild stranger and the foolish

native” who were only interested in speak-easies and dance halls rather than

New York City’s more respectable cultural landmarks, such as museums and

parks, the Aldermen believed that “those ‘wild’ people should not be tumbling out

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of these resorts at six or seven o’clock in the morning to the scandal and

annoyance of decent residents on their way to daily employment” (Quoted in

State of New York v. Geenberg & Slevin, 1958). This restriction severely limited

the places in the city where jazz events could occur (any place where more than

three people were dancing had to have a permit) and gave the city the authority

to shut down sites that did not comply (N.Y. ADC. LAW § 20-359).

However, jazz was still considered a public threat throughout the following

decade, so cabaret laws were further adjusted in 1940 to require individual

performers be licensed with a cabaret card as well, in order to perform in

cabarets and nightclubs. “As an embodiment of the institutional distrust stirred up

by jazz musicians, especially African-Americans,” wrote Nate Chinen in

JazzTimes magazine, “the administration of the card, governed by a mysterious

and often intransigent bureaucracy, more or less imposed the conditions of a

police state in which music-making was cast as a privilege rather than a right.”

(2012:21). A stipulation for obtaining the license required that the performer be of

‘good moral character’ and had to be renewed every two years, was subject to

revocation at any time, and could be denied to anyone who had a criminal record

of any kind. But while the performer’s cabaret card requirement was eventually

overturned in 1967 (Bennett 1967:37), the cabaret license for bars and clubs still

stands in New York City today.

ROCK:

Rock ’n’ roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by

fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and

judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of

unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun,

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vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.

(Marcus, 1975:18

Following jazz – literally and figuratively – rhythm and blues, and its kissing

cousin, rock and roll (originally just one musical styling called ‘race’ music) had a

similar evolution from vice to virtue; race and sex were hindrances-turned-

contributors to their success. It was music dredged up through the black

American experience but that still managed to ring universal for whites (Marcus

1975). It reeked of lust, pain, heartbreak, and true love – a winning combination

that proved irresistible, especially on the dance floor. “The itinerant bluesman met

the cowboy on the streets of the city and black expression was incorporated into

the existential shell of white, urban romanticism.” (Chambers in Hall, 2006:135)

But while the ‘bluesman’ and ‘cowboy’ might have seemed inseparable in the

music, demarcations between the two genres, in the beginning, often hinged on

shades of color rather than beat structures and chord changes. “For the first half

of the 50s, rhythm and blues and rock and roll were the same,” wrote music

scholars Michael Campbell and James Brody in their book, Rock and Roll: An

Introduction.

They began to diverge with the emergence of white

performers working in this new style – artists such as

Bill Haley, Elvis, and Carl Perkins. Still, the main

criterion that distinguished rock and roll from rhythm

and blues was where they charted. If a black act

appeared regularly on the pop charts, then their music

was rock and roll; if their success was limited to the

black audience, like Muddy Waters, then they were

rhythm and blues (2007:98).

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Where jazz was framed and disseminated through post-WWI attitudes, race

music was, in part, a reaction to the changing cultural landscape of post-World

War II – specifically youth culture, which historian James Gilbert described as

having a “vastly different order of social, sexual and cultural practices” than the

previous generation (1986:176), and disenfranchised black Americans

(especially soldiers who had fought for their country in segregated regiments),

who were no longer willing to be considered second-class citizens. The

international community had also started to view the racist policies of segregation

and unequal pay between white and non-white Americans as hypocritical and

problematic, an issue that the federal government could not afford to ignore

(Burns & Novick, 2007). Thus, the Civil Rights movement blossomed over the

decade after the war ended.

“The United States Supreme Court has given a new definition to unAmericanism.

It has ruled that segregated public schools are un-Constitutional and therefore

un-American,” wrote journalist Roscoe Drummond (1954:4) about Brown vs.

Board of Education, a 1954 court ruling that shook the nation and created

mayhem and resistance throughout the American South, whose schools had

been ‘separate but equal’ since 1896 (Vecchione & Else, 1987). At the same time,

race music was consciously uncoupling – rock and roll music becoming a

peephole into black culture and giving white youths a glimpse into their

experiences in an unguarded way.

This did not sit well with Variety’s editor-in-chief, Abel Green, who sounded an

alarm to parents about rock’s “leer-ics,” suggesting that the sexual innuendo

hidden in rhythm and blues was no longer confined to the likes of “out and out

barrelhouses;” it was entering the “general consumption, including consumption

by teenagers” (In Cateforis, 2013:9). Rock and roll had been indicted as an

affront to the public; the music industry, with their minds on dollars instead of

decency, were issued a warning: clean up its act or “have it done for you” (Green

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in Cateforis, 2013:10), implying that censorship might be the next course of

action.

One group of people who took up Green’s battle cry was the segregationist

movement in the south, bent on keeping their schools and the rest of their

communities under Jim Crow laws, and in their view, rock and roll was not just

conjuring up wanton sensuality, it was promoting interracial mingling. According

to civil rights historian Steven Lawson, “the Brown decision and rock 'n' roll were

just two sides of the same integrationist coin and segregationists responded to

both by trying to beat them back” (Lawson, 2003:245).

White supremacist organizations, notably the White Citizens Council, accused

civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People (NAACP) of a conspiracy to help spread rock and roll in order to

contribute to the “moral degradation of children” (Carter quoted in Lawson, 2003:

245). The backlash soon spread nationwide. Youth marketing pioneer, Eugene

Gilbert, suggested that rock and roll connected teenagers to “the nihilism of our

time” (quoted in Gilbert, 1986:210). Senator (and soon-to-be President) John F.

Kennedy, representing Boston – long considered an “anti-rock town” (Kurlansky,

2013:97) – at a congressional hearing, opined that “the designs of broadcasters,

record companies, and music publishers foist decadent music on an

unsuspecting public” (Lawson, 2003:ibid). Black journalists were quick to defend

rock music – as the term soon became a catchall for both rhythm and blues and

rock and roll (Campbell & Brody, 2007) – asserting that much of the criticism

stemmed from an attempt to undermine blacks’ contributions to American popular

culture (Lawson, 2003).

The growing public furor against rock came to a head in 1959 when a disc jockey

convention in Miami in turned into headlines news. The local newspaper ran a

story (sensationally titled “Booze, Broads, and Bribes”) that accused several

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major radio DJs of accepting bribes or ‘payola’ from record labels in exchange for

on-air exposure (Sterling, 2010). The federal government’s Special

Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, led by Representative Oren Harris,

responded with an investigation, targeting one man in particular, rock and roll

‘inventor’ Alan Freed (Broven, 2009).

Freed, a New York-based radio DJ and record producer was known as a

champion of black artists, opting to play their original recordings instead of covers

produced by their white counterparts. “Without specifically saying so, he was

telling his audience that one version had soul and the other was a ‘copy’ lacking

that soul quality,” wrote music historian John Broven. “All this resulted in a

change in the charts and the development of the word ‘crossover,’ that describes

a record that went from the R&B or country charts onto the pop charts” (Broven,

2009:195). Freed, however, was also accepting bribes from record companies –

which he labeled ’consultant fees’ – for playing their music. This was standard

(and legal) practice at the time but Freed’s supporters maintained that he was

different than other DJs in one specific way: he would not promote music that he

was not passionate about. “He wouldn’t play a record unless he liked it. Most of

these other guys would play anything! [Freed] knew a lot about music. He had

great instincts. If there was one disc jockey who was responsible for rock ‘n’ roll,

he was that guy” (Doc Pomus quoted in Broven, 2009:459). It was this conviction

– ethical, not legal – that Freed’s critics would later use to confirm their

suspicions that rock’s ascent into popularity had not happened organically. But

no matter whether he was guilty or simply scapegoated, his defenders felt a

sense of gratitude to the man Jackie Wilson once claimed put “hundreds of

Negro musicians, singers, and arrangers [to work]” (Lawson, 2003:259). Freed

was convicted of 29 counts of bribery and never worked on the radio again. His

main rival, Dick Clark, soon took over rock and roll’s reigns and ushered it into a

new, whiter era (Delmont, 2012), from whence it would never fully recover.

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DISCO:

White kids in Philadelphia could dance, they danced

on American Bandstand, but disco changed the

business of music. There’s a big difference between

people dancing at parties, or in clubs, to becoming an

international explosion.

(Hardison quoted in Robinson, 2010)

With television popularizing the dance hall setting through shows like Dick Clark’s

American Bandstand and the UK’s Top of the Pops, rock became an acceptable

way for young teens to let off steam for most of the 1960s (Delmont, 2012); both

shows spent several seasons on the air. Meanwhile, rock’s old sidekick, rhythm

and blues, might have been out of sight but it was not out of mind. It was deep

underground, brewing up the next big thing in American dance music: disco

(Chambers, 1985).

Before disco bubbled up to the surface, rock and soul were multiplying and

splintering into subgenres as audiences became more specialized. Where soul

music overall kept a similar format – vocal-dominated with jazz-derived backing

arrangements – differentiations tended to branch off by region and the

particularities of the studios housed there (Detroit’s Motown vs. Memphis’s Stax

vs. Alabama’s Muscle Shoals sounds) (Camalier, 2013).

Rock’s strands were less regional and more technical and stylistic (Scheurer,

1989). To use just one U.S. state’s varied musical map as an example: southern

California surf rock was an early adopter of electric bass and organ along with

languid, reverberating guitars, whereas garage rock, also born and bred in SoCal,

was distinctive by its minimalism, fast pace, and common use of a fuzzbox (used

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for distorting electric guitar); in northern California, psychedelic rock, which tried

to replicate the experience of hallucinogenic drugs, shared the San Francisco

Bay with funk rock, which fused horn-accented soul with blues and definitive bass

alongside twangy guitars (Bogdanov, 2002).

Though new rock offshoots popped up with ever-increasing frequency, a

revivalist spirit had also overcome the 1960s; country and blues influenced much

of the pop music of the decade. But music and cinema scholar, Timothy Scheurer,

recalled the early 70s as ripe for a change of pace from rock’s stronghold,

alongside the rise of easy-listening ballads, piano crooners, and concert pop in

the market. “People wanted to move again, and not just listen or at best trance-

dance at rock concerts… people wanted something more contemporary for

dancing, they turned to boogie” (Scheurer, 1989:205).

The general consensus is that disco sprung from the rubble of New York City’s

Stonewall riots (Lawrence 2011, Brewster & Broughton 2000), which had sparked

the LGBTQ liberation movement that began in 1969, partially due to laws that

criminalized sodomy; anal and oral sex were illegal in New York until 1980

(People v. Onofre, 72 A.D.2d). Mixmag editors Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton

posited that “after the Stonewall rebellion, gay Americans felt able to turn up the

volume on their existence and despite the rioting and letdowns of the post-civil

rights period, black people were also enjoying the benefits of greater equality”

(2000:126). Women, whose own liberation movement was well under way, also

shared this new sense of freedom; with birth control pills available in the U.S. in

1960 and legalized abortion by 1973, women now had the same luxury of sex for

pleasure as men. (Poston & Bouvier, 2010).

Like its predecessors, disco started out as music for the marginalized – in this

case, New York City’s black gay underground, whose club culture of nonstop, all-

night dancing meant ‘phasing’ fast-paced soul records in and out to form

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“uninterrupted soundtracks” for the dance floor (Thomas in Creekmur, 1995:439).

Soon, the DJs would truncate these songs down to just their poly-rhythmic

grooves, the essence of the tracks that made them danceable. Wrote cultural

critic and scholar Iain Chambers: “[Disco] pushes the blues, gospel and soul

heritage into an apparently endless cycle where there is no beginning or end, just

an ever-present 'now.' Disco music does not come to a halt… restricted to a

three-minute single, the music would be rendered senseless” (1985:187).

Although the primal days of disco budded in the black gay scene, it would

blossom under the spotlight of the white one (Thomas in Creekmur, 1995). Early

disco pioneer, Francis Grasso (a.k.a DJ Francis) happened to be DJing on

Christopher Street, home of the popular gay nightclub, the Haven, while gay

patrons and police were clashing during a raid on the Stonewall Inn, a few doors

down (Brewster & Broughton 2000). The unexpected violence of the raid shook

the gay community into action, and soon the escapades of Christopher Street

caught the attention of people outside the LGBTQ community – Grasso’s bold

DJing style soon becoming part of the draw. “Other DJs still thought of

themselves as the stand-in for the band. [He] saw that records were the vital

components of his performance. DJ Francis played music, the disc jockeys

before him had just put records on” (Brewster & Broughton, 2000:129).

His growing popularity soon saw him move to more mainstream midtown

Manhattan, where he became the resident DJ at the Sanctuary. White and

straight, DJ Francis brought a more heterogeneous crowd out to boogie under

the shimmery lights of those infamous mirrored balls and he, along with David

Mancuso, whose Loft parties in downtown Soho soon turned legend, became the

toast of New York City nightlife and disco music, its calling card (Lawrence, 2011).

Disco’s escape from New York underground to mainstream America was swift,

but not painless. Finding the music “superficial and lyrically trite,” many rock fans

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either hated it or simply didn’t get it (Reynolds, 2012:375). “The rock generation

saw disco as the antithesis of all that was holy: no visible musicians, no ‘real’

stars, no ‘live’ performances. It was music based wholly on consumption, music

with no aesthetic purpose, indeed with no purpose at all” (Brewster & Broughton,

2000:269).

Others found a new destination to channel their moral outrage at the decline of

civilization. Nona Hendryx remembered the hostility she felt when Labelle’s “Lady

Marmalade” was released in 1975: “Some religious people thought we were the

reincarnation of the devil because of the line ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce

soir?’ [‘Do you want to sleep with me tonight?’] Radio stations wouldn’t play it;

people came to our shows with placards that said, ‘We don’t want this music in

our town’” (quoted in Robinson, 2010:133). Still other declared it to be a fad, “a

waste, a low mark” compared to rock’s lasting tradition (Robert Santelli quoted in

Weinraub, 2002: E1) – which no one seemed to remember was only 20 years old

at the time. But the albatross for disco music lay in the form of a motion picture,

Saturday Night Fever.

“After [the success of the film], we wanted to do a poster, with the three of us in

Rambo’s bodies, with machine guns, and in the background there’d be a body in

a white suit, bullet-ridden, and the mirror ball all shot to pieces,” Maurice Gibb of

the BeeGees said in 1987 (quoted in Robinson, 2010:132). The soundtrack for

the film catapulted disco onto the pop charts, brought nightclub culture into the

daylight and exposed it to America’s heartland, but with a suburban flare. Far

removed from seedy urban gay bars, it was repackaged as a new form of

coupled dancing, akin to swing dancing – complete with instructive books on how

to ‘hustle,’ rather than the freeform, improvisational form of dance practiced in the

nightclub setting (Gilbert & Pearson, 1999).

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Rock musicians soon jumped on the bandwagon, much to the chagrin of their

critics and fans, who desperately wanted it all to go away. But record labels, used

to rock’s huge profits, were undeterred; they smelled success and were

determined to cash in as much as they could. “Music biz moneymen – who’d just

started feeling comfortable in the company of hairy musicians with guitars, and

were unlikely to want to rip their shirts off in a dark loft full of black homos – but

they could still see its potential to become a big fat cash cow” (Brewster &

Broughton, 2000:166-167). Disco’s market saturation would be a significant

factor in its demise.

Disco died (at least symbolically) on July 12, 1979. Disco Demolition Night took

place the Chicago White Sox’s baseball stadium, where an estimated 50,000

people showed up, not to watch the game, but to burn disco records. In fact, the

records more than burned; they were blown up by explosives in the middle of the

field while spectators chanted, ‘Disco sucks’ in the stands (Frank, 2007). The

man behind the attack on disco was Steve Dahl, a rock radio DJ whose Chicago-

based station decided to change formats from rock to disco 4 months after he

took the job. “They closed out their rock 'n' roll tenure with ‘American Pie’ and

kicked off the new format with the Bee Gees' ‘Stayin' Alive.’ I was collateral

damage” (Dahl, 2014). He had not actually been fired, though; Dahl simply did

not want to play disco records for a living and used his stance as a “casualty” of

the rock vs. disco war to build an anti-disco army (ibid.). Soon, he was back on

the air at a new station and plotting his revenge, which culminated in the

explosion at Comiskey Park.

Chicago house music pioneer Vince Lawrence, a fledgling musician at the time,

was working at the stadium that day. For him, the experience seemed more than

just ‘rockist’ – it struck him as racist. “It was more about blowing up all this ‘nigger’

music than, you know, destroying disco… some of those records were just black

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records. And I should’ve taken that as a tone for what the attitudes of these

people were” (quoted in Hindmarch, 2001).

Later in the year, Rolling Stone magazine’s Dave Marsh agreed with Lawrence’s

assessment of the event, which he saw as a radio programming scheme to re-

assert rock dominance into the charts; disco, though ubiquitous on the air waves

and in night clubs, did not actually sell records in the long term. Rock music did.

But there was more to the critique than just a loss of sales.

White males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely

to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks

and Latins, and therefore they're most likely to respond

to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It

goes almost without saying that such appeals are

racist and sexist, but broadcasting has never been an

especially civil-libertarian medium (Marsh, 1979).

35 years on, Dahl himself went on the record to deny any racism or homophobia.

“We were a bunch of disenfranchised 20-something rockers having some laughs

at the expense of older brothers who had the capital and the clothing to hang with

the trendy social elite. We were letting off a little steam. Any statement to the

contrary is just plain wrong” (Dahl, 2014). But fellow Chicagoan, Mark W.

Anderson, an NBC news journalist, remembers the event differently from his own

perspective as a 15-year-old “die-hard Sox fan” who was also a visitor to the park

that day.

I have very vivid memories of the fears my parents and

others had back then that blacks would one day take

over every white neighborhood in existence… It was

part of everyday conversation back then, discussed as

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both fear and surprise that a group of undesirables

could threaten what was seen as a birthright of racial

intolerance and isolation.,. Even though we didn't say it

in these terms, we certainly didn’t want black folks to

take over our rightful place at the top of youth culture,

as expressed in radio airtime, TV specials and

concerts in places like Comiskey Park (2014).

Dance music scholar, Tim Lawrence, also identified the ‘disco sucks’ movement

as more homophobic than Dahl stated. In his view, the terminology used to

criticize disco paralleled gay euphemisms such as “unnatural, trivial, and

decadent” (2006:131) and mirrored the right-wing ideology that seized

government control just as disco’s death knell tolled.

Under [left-wing President Jimmy] Carter, the

argument ran, the United States had become

unprofitable, valueless, sinful, profligate, stagnant,

disorderly, vulgar, inefficient, unscrupulous and lacking

in direction. The proponents of this critique might as

well have been talking about disco and, to their good

fortune, disco – populated as it was by gay men,

African Americans and women – contained

scapegoats galore (ibid.).

But disco was just another form of dance music that ignored its last call. As did

its forebears – jazz, rock, and rhythm and blues – it simply evolved with the times.

“Such global forms as house and techno are really nothing more than disco

continued by other means. Disco simply underwent some cosmetic

enhancements, changed its name a couple times and had its mail forwarded to a

less glitzy neighborhood” (Brewster & Broughton, 2000:270).

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TECHNO AND HOUSE

We're sending out an S.O.S.

And it's not a signal of distress

It stands for "Sounds of Success"

We're sending out an S.O.S.

We're sending it to Y.O.U.

Take it and do what you want to

This code of funk, it's something new

So help us chant this message through

– “S.O.S.” by the S.O.S. Band2

Retreating from the glare of the limelight (and the recent spark of explosives),

disco found safe harbor in the place where it started and where its popularity had

never waned: the black gay underground. But this time, things were different –

the pulse of the beat was changing. Disco’s plea to save its soul sounded far and

wide and its salvation would come from across the Atlantic; most notably, from

the UK and Spain. But, curiously, its most immediate and lucid response came

from Germany’s krautrock scene (Reynolds, 2012).

In 1983, Juan Atkins, had only one great mission in life: “Take what Kraftwerk,

the German [krautrock] group, was doing, but make it funky,” wrote music

journalist Michaelangelo Matos. “But not just funky in the way …[Kraftwerk’s]

Trans-Europe Express could keep a dance floor going – but funky in a way that

the rest of the world could hear” (2015: 1). Atkins and his childhood friends

Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson (‘The Belleville Three,’ named for the

2 S.O.S. Band, Sigidi (1980). S.O.S (Dit Dit Dit Dash Dash Dash Dit Dit Dit) [Recorded by The S.O.S. Band]. On S.O.S [LP]. Atlanta, Georgia: Tabu.

21

suburban Detroit town where they grew up) went on to become the undisputed

originators of techno music (Matos, 2015; Reynolds, 2012; Collin & Godfrey,

1998) – the fulfillment of Atkins’ pipe dream. But unlike disco, this sound was not

cultivated in the club.

As teenagers tucked away in a sleepy bedroom community, the trio had no first-

hand experience of nightclubbing. Their journeys into sound were mostly a

guided meditation led by local radio personality, the Electrifyin’ Mojo, “[who] put

music on the air in a way that had never been heard before in the city: It was Jimi

Hendrix plus Phillip Glass, Kraftwerk plus Rick James and The B-52s on a

spaceship,” described National Public Radio’s Wills Glasspeigel (2011). Hosted

on the city’s first black FM station, WGPR, “The Midnight Funk Association” was

nothing short of revelatory for these young black men, who’d never heard

anything like it before. They were enthralled by this form of sonic education,

which would lend itself to their musicianship later on. “We’d sit back with the

lights off and listen to records by Kraftwerk and Funkadelic and Parliament and

Bootsy and Yellow Magic Orchestra and try to actually understand what they

were thinking about when they made it. We never took it as entertainment, we

took it as a serious philosophy,” May recalled (Reynolds, 2012: 4). Their

increasingly eclectic tastes in music – not limited to krautrock and funk but also

European electro-pop and American new wave – were all part of a sonic palette

that the three utilized to create a wholly new form of music.

Not yet ready to make their own tracks, Atkins and May started out the way many

electronic producers do: by DJing. Borrowing from the disco days of yore, they

used a turntable and a tape deck to edit and remix songs and gigs for local high

school social clubs shaped up their performance skills and gave them an idea

about what would drive people to the dance floor (ibid.). Atkins’s first production

work was as part of an electronic group called Cybotron. Their single, “Alley of

the Mind,” with its futuristic synthesizers and drum machines coupled with their

22

own ‘technospeak’ language (named The Grid), made its debut on The Electrifyin’

Mojo’s radio program in 1981 and was a smash hit, garnering enough national

interest to attract a record deal with California-based label, Fantasy (ibid.); those

early Cybotron tracks are considered to be prototypes for the first techno

recordings (Glasspiegel, 2011). However, Atkins soon split from Cybotron, citing

creative differences, and started his own record label, Metroplex. He was later

joined by May and Saunderson, each with his own label, housed in Detroit’s

Eastern Market district, and the future sound of Detroit was born. (Brewster &

Broughton, 2000)

It was Derrick May that introduced the trio to the Chicago house music scene.

While in the city visiting his mother, May stumbled across a section of records

titled ‘House Music’ in a local music shop. Though the tunes weren’t originals – a

mix of old Philly soul and disco imports – there was an implication that all these

tunes belonged together somehow. He would soon put the songs into context

upon a visit to the Power Plant, a black gay nightclub where ‘house’ music was

the modus operandi of the sound system there; the club’s musical director was

the ‘Godfather of House,’ Frankie Knuckles (Matos, 2015).

Knuckles, a few years older than the Bellville boys, had grown up on a steady

diet of soul and disco in New York City, frequenting Manhattan’s nightclubs and

learning the DJ trade from his best friend, Larry Philpot (later to become Larry

Levan, resident DJ of New York’s Paradise Garage). An opportunity to preside

over his own club took him to Chicago, where he became resident DJ at The

Warehouse (from whence the name ‘house music’ came); his tenure lasted from

1977-1982 (Matos, 2014). During that time, he witnessed disco’s rise and fall and

had to start to rely on re-editing existing tunes in order to refresh his material,

another trick he’d picked up back east – disco releases had all but dried up. “I

got hold of a quarter-inch Pioneer reel-to-reel machine, and that's what I used to

do all my edits,” Knuckles told musicians’ website, Music Radar. “And when I say

23

'edits', I really do mean edits, in the old-fashioned sense: cutting up little bits of

tape and sticking them back together to make a new song” (2012).

By the time Knuckles and May met in 1984, he was anxious to expand what he

could do live during his sets. Luckily, May had a Roland TR-909 drum machine

that he was willing to part with and used it to work his way into Knuckles good

graces and extend the possibilities for the Bellville Three (now regularly DJing

together as the Deep Space crew in addition to producing music). “[Derrick said, ‘This machine is] going to take us to the future. It will be the foundation of music

for the next 10 years…' He was right. It did point to the future… Every record I

played [after] that night had a 909 running underneath it” (ibid.). And May

became Knuckles’ protégé.

Unlike Detroit, where there were very few nightclubs to play and no real dance

music scene, Chicago had several clubs and a popular dance mix radio show,

WBMX’s “The Hot Mix 5” (Hindmarch, 2001). Needless to say, competition was

fierce and originality essential to keeping a step above the rivals. DJs throughout

the city very quickly took a cue from Knuckles and started using drum machines

during their sets (Collin, 1997); a ‘sound’ began to emerge from the city that was

being chronicled via reel-to-reels, and later on vinyl, as local record labels, Trax

and DJ International, cropped up to distribute ‘Chicago house’ outside the city

(ibid.). “Love Can’t Turn Around” was the first Chicago house track to chart in the

Top Ten in the UK in 1986 and house anthem “Jack Your Body” made it all the

way to Number One the following year (Hindmarch 2001).

Early house music producers claimed that what they were doing was simply an

extension of disco but there was a spirit of creativity coming out of the house and

techno scenes that disco never really had. “This was a do-it-yourself music

anyone could join,” former i-D editor Matthew Collin explained. “You didn't need a

diva’s vocal chords or a Salsoul orchestra; you could just fire up your box and go.

New technology had thrown open the creative process to all” (1997: 21). More

24

importantly, it was vital in order to keep the dance community going. No one else

was making this kind of music; house tracks, wrote music journalist Simon

Reynolds, made “’dead’ music come alive” (2012: 16). And once techno, house,

and their hybrid genre, acid house (named for the track ‘Acid Trax’ by Phuture,

which seemed outside of both musical realms but somehow still connected), hit

the shores of Ibiza, Spain, this music would come alive again during what is now

remembered as the Second Summer of Love.

25

ACID PARTIES AND RAVE

The Second Summer of Love is widely credited as the birth of the rave movement

(Davies, 2006; Bainbridge, 2008), though, like many legendary events, the details

are somewhat spotty. First of all, it wasn’t a summer at all; the period started

somewhere between 1988 and 1989, depending on who you ask (ibid.). But it

also wasn’t the proper birth of the rave music scene in the UK, as house music

had been slowly making its way to Europe through Chicago’s dance imprints

since the early 1980s (Hindmarch, 2001). But one of the undisputed facts about

rave was that the sound had taken hold in one music enclave by 1986 when a

few of DJ International’s native sons wound up on tour in the UK: their first stop

was in Manchester.

“When The Hacienda started playing records from Detroit and Chicago, it wasn’t

that different, maybe, to what DJs had done a generation before,” said one the

club’s original DJs, Dave Haslam (ibid.). The Northern soul movement had been

a mainstay of Manchester’s nightlife culture since the 1970s; working-class,

American-soul-music-obsessed Manchurians would stay up all night dancing to

music, as part of a new consciousness for living for the weekend. “You’ve got

one night a week and you’re gonna just do everything that you wanted to do all

week in that one night” (Maycock, 2014). With its adherence to obscure upbeat

dance music, wild abandon on the dance floor, and a taste for amphetamines

(Wilson, 2007), it provided rave with an “almost complete blueprint” (Brewster &

Broughton, 2000:77). Frankie Knuckles and label mates, including Marshall

Jefferson and Joe Smooth felt right at home.

It took a bit longer for London to accept house music, mostly due to its gay club

origins. Said Mark Moore from S’Express: “I think a lot of hip-hop kids thought it

was faggy. They didn’t get it and, in fact, most people didn’t get it” (Hindmarch,

2001). The Summer of Love helped to change that. It began with four lads on

26

holiday in Ibiza in September 1987. Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway, Johnny

Walker and Paul Oakenfold, music aficionados and budding DJs, first heard

house music at Ibiza City’s Amnesia nightclub, which blended house music with

European pop, disco, and anything else the DJ could find to keep the dance floor

moving. “I had to make dance a bunch of people that were English, German,

French, Spanish, old, young, all different circumstances” resident DJ Alfredo

explained (ibid.). Later dubbed the ‘Balearic beat’, the young Londoners were

inspired to bring this aural experience home with them. “I had a crystal-clear

vision of what I wanted to create back in England, and I'm sure the others both

felt the same” (Rampling in Bainbridge, 2008).

Rampling opened a nightclub called Shoom in London later that fall and the

Balearic beat built a small yet loyal fan base. Oakenfold followed by starting

another club night at Spectrum (later named Heaven) that began drawing crowds

around the block on Monday nights (Bainbridge, 2008). One particular draw to

these dance parties, besides the music, was a new drug called Ecstasy, another

part of the Ibiza experience that had been exported to the UK. “Some people

were saying house music is just not right for London. I remember saying if the

drug of choice changes, people will get into the music, because the drug of

choice then was weed. And people just laughed at me” (Moore in Bainbridge,

2008).

Unlike in the U.S., where many people hear new music over its relatively free,

open-market airwaves, the UK’s radio “was still seen largely as an arm of

government social policy” (Brewster & Broughton, 2000:57). Club culture became

a primary outlet for new music. Since no one was playing house music regularly

on the radio, the popularity of Shoom and Heaven spawned yet another club

night at the Trip – the third one to crop up in central London. But the expanded

crowds at these parties did not go unnoticed; they gained the attention of tabloids

and then the police.

27

At the Trip, people would refuse to go home at the end

of the night. The roads would all be blocked, and

people would be dancing in the fountains at the bottom

of Centrepoint. The police would just be laughing

because they had absolutely no idea what was going

on. They didn't know what ecstasy was at this point, so

they just couldn't understand. They just thought it was

funny, because they could see that no one was hurting

anyone else (Holloway in Bainbridge, 2008).

The tide started to turn as club nights shifted into much larger warehouse parties.

Tabloid newspapers became increasingly panic-stricken. The Sun’s headline in

1989, entitled “Spaced Out,” chronicled the events of a warehouse party in an

abandoned airport hangar; dubbed the “Ecstasy Airport,” the paper published that

“[11,000] drug-crazed kids – some as young as 12 – boogied for eight hours… at

Britain’s biggest ever Ecstasy bash” (Kellaway & Hughes, 1989:1). Of course,

instead of deterring the crowds, the headlines only made the raves (then called

‘acid house’ parties) even more desirable.

Rave parties were often huge, loud, imposing events that took place over several

hours, and sometimes several days. Not confined to only isolated warehouses,

many parties took place in open-air public fields and hired farms, and popped out

of nowhere, replete with amusements such as carnival rides, high-voltage strobe

lights and lasers, and 24-hour thumping bass music (McCall, 2001); needless to

say, locals were angered, inconvenienced and often frightened by the sudden

onslaught of young people and the unruliness of the affairs. Also, due to the

many illegalities taking place during the events (drug activity, criminal trespassing,

non-licensure, and noise aggravations, to name a few), they quickly drew the

attention and scrutiny of police and other law enforcement agencies. (Collin &

28

Godfrey, 1998). Unfortunately, this further added to their mystique – ‘ravers’ had

to find the parties, which were shrouded in secrecy and often involved scavenger

hunt-type operatives in order to keep the party from being shut down (Tremayne,

1988).

For many early participants, rave was a renewal of the British free festival

movement of the 1970s – one-off events like Windsor or Stonehenge – where

you had to be there in order to really experience it; admission was often free or

low-cost, the DJs, equipment and sometimes even the land for the event, were

volunteered or donated. “It wasn’t about visiting some purpose-built venue, it was

about creating somewhere new; it was about building a city for night… While

Margaret Thatcher claimed, ‘There is no such thing as society,’ in her face were

thousands of people making alternative one-night communities” (Brewster &

Broughton, 2000:370).

Thatcher’s reign from 1979-1990 has been categorized as a decade of greed,

decadence, and individualism above the collective good – which only an elite few

could benefit from – and disengagement from working-class youth was at an all-

time time low. “It felt like nothing was ever going to change,” remembered Sheryl

Garratt, former editor of The Face. “We had the Iron Lady in charge, who was not

for turning, who was never going to change her mind about anything’ (Davies,

2006). Early rave practitioners saw the community as anathema to this kind of

capitalized commodification. Almost by default, rave events democratized music

culture by replacing the ‘rock star’ with the DJ, who played music by anonymous

producers and “centered on the dance and the communal vibe” (Goffman & Joy,

2004:353).

Although rave was being touted as “ anti-elitist, anti-cool, pro-inclusivity, pro-

abandon” (Reynolds 2012:422), this did not necessarily mean that all rave parties

were run as non-profit charities or that idolatry and stratification did not persist.

29

Superstar DJs cropped up almost immediately and as soon as the culture began

to generate interest outside of the core participants, it created plenty of

opportunities for black-market economies such as drug trafficking, unauthorized

land-use rental, cash (and therefore untaxed) labor markets, et cetera (Collin &

Godfrey, 1998).

Cultural critic Stuart Hall suggested a more common ground existed between

rave culture and Thatcherism than many of its acolytes were willing to admit. In

comparison to older subcultural models of specialized cliques such as mods, teds,

skinheads, and rudeboys:

[Rave] epitomized a [post-subcultural shift]: the

absorption of subcultural ‘movements’ into a more

heterogeneous, socially- and gender-mixed, diverse

‘youth culture’, dominated by music, dance, drugs, sex

and the search for pleasure … and where a temporary,

contingent, trance-like ‘togetherness’ [was] more part of

the new individualism than the old collectivity [that]

prevailed for a time as the dominant ethos (Hall,

2006:xxix).

In the view of Hall and other subcultural theorists (Chambers in Hall, 2006;

Russell in Redhead; 1993), rave was a rarified commodity that seemed

paradoxical to Thatcherism, “echoing its ethos of choice and market freedom, yet

expressing desires for a collective experience that Thatcher rejected and

consumerism could not provide” (Collin & Godfrey, 1998:7).

30

PROBLEMS:

Upon being thrust into the limelight, mostly through depictions in the media, rave

began to occupy the same moral panics as its antecedents throughout the recent

history of dance music, beginning with its nomenclature. Initially

misunderstanding the term ‘acid house’ to mean drugs instead of a nod to 1960s

acid rock, a media frenzy ensued to have rave music banned from the BBC;

while some songs were indeed banned for use of the word ‘acid’ (including D-

Mob’s “We Call It Acieed” and The Shamen’s “Ebenezer Goode”), the BBC never

outright banned the music. However, this fact did not stop tabloid media such as

the Daily Mirror and The Sun, for continuing to report otherwise. (Tremayne,

1988).

Once it was determined that Ecstasy was ravers’ drug of choice, rather than LSD,

which the news media had already spent significant time implored against, ‘acid

house’ parties became ‘raves.’ And as in the past, and likely not by coincidence,

the connotations of the word – “delirium, madness, frenzied behavior, extreme

enthusiasm, the black British idea of letting off steam at the weekend” (Reynolds

2012: 65) – suggested sexuality, hedonism, and blackness. Thereafter, the threat

to public decency and safety shifted to Ecstasy (which has been illegal in the UK

since 1977); an all-out assault against rave was launched by both the media and

the government.

Sun medical correspondent Vernon Coleman warned:

“You will hallucinate. For example, if you don't like

spiders, you’ll start seeing giant ones… Hallucinations

can last up to 12 hours… There's a good chance you'll

end up in a mental hospital for life… If you're young

enough there’s a good chance you’ll be sexually

assaulted while under the influence. You may not even

31

know until days or weeks later.” (quoted in Collin &

Godfrey 1998:77)

The death of an 18 year-old girl, Leah Betts, from Ecstasy poisoning also had a

sobering effect on the rave scene. As the first overdose from what had been

fervently defended as a harmless recreational drug, Betts presented a serious

counterpoint that could not be ignored. Betts’ parents publicly pleaded with young

people not to take any chances: "This verdict is a clear cut message... Nobody

knows how this drug is going to affect you" (quoted in Jury, 1996:1).

The problem was, no one knew enough about Ecstasy to confirm whether any of

these stories and statistics were true. “[There were] rumors about ecstasy

causing Parkinson's disease or draining spinal fluid” (Collin & Godfrey 1998:78)

that began to circulate as a fact, even though it was completely false. And

according to current affairs show, World In Action, who interviewed Derek Todd,

Head of the Metropolitan Police’s Drug Squad in 1988, the media coverage of

Ecstasy abuse was overblown, as the amount of Ecstasy drug cases they were

seeing were negligible compared to other drugs such as cocaine and heroin:

Our laboratory, for example, up until the end of

August of this year had seen approximately 600

cases of cocaine, 600 cases of amphetamines, and

700 cases, I think it was, of heroin. Those sorts of

figures. And up to October of this year, they’d only

seen 51 cases of Ecstasy. And because of the special

attention that we’d been having, I looked at those 51

cases personally, and many of them were just single

tablets, sometimes half a tablet. (Quoted in Tremayne,

1988).

32

The bad press did not end with the drugs. Soon, the whole act of raving itself was

under indictment. “Music for dancing to – to which does not claim to be much

else, which has a beat but no lyrics – constitutes a threat to the central values of

western culture,” wrote music scholars Jeremy Gilbert & Ewan Pearson

(1999:39). By adhering to rules based on pleasure and physical stimulation,

instead of aspirational values such as artistry and functionality, raves

represented something fundamentally wrong with the current youth’s social

mores. It was a rejection of the standardized entertainments on offer to young

people at the time and “promoted all night youth entertainment which was not

being catered for in the UK” (Russell in Redhead, 1993:142). Simon Reynolds felt

that the public response was more due to an inherently British intolerance to

anything other than the status quo. “Underneath the bigotry lurked an

undercurrent of resentment felt by many law-abiding norm-obeying types… The

fact that these anarcho-mystic dropouts chose to reject society, rather than

simply being ejected from it like your regular ne’er-do-well, simply added insult to

injury” (2012:148).

All the negative press simply propelled the proponents of rave forward. Music,

dance culture, and style magazines gleefully watched as the mass media painted

them as deviants, increasing what sociologist Sarah Thornton referred to as their

subcultural capital. “What could be a better badge of rebellion? Mass media

misunderstanding is often a goal, not just an effect, of youth’s cultural pursuits.

As a result, ‘moral panic’ has become a routine way of marketing popular music

to youth” (1996:120). But it was also this deviance that forced the government to

publicly condemn rave with new and improved law enforcements.

Harold Becker defines deviance as “the result of enterprise” (Becker 1963:162). It

is neither automatic, nor a given. In order for an act to be considered deviant, a

rule must be created, if only to be broken. The Metropolitan Police were happy to

oblige and the department’s Pay Party Unit was created especially to combat

33

rave organizers. Using everything from phone taps to helicopter surveillance,

they chronicled the movements of the scene and made it as difficult as they could

to conduct the parties. “The strategy of the Pay Party Unit was attrition: wear

down the spirits of the ravers, make them so sick of the wild goose chase and the

bitter anti-climactic disappointment when event was quashed that they return to

the guaranteed pleasures of licensed clubs” (Reynolds, 2012: 67).

Criminalization of rave events began in the UK in 1990 with the Entertainment

(Increased Penalties) Act 1990 (later referred to as the ‘Bright Bill,’ named for Sir

Graham Bright, the MP who sponsored the bill.) The act strengthened existing

licensing laws and increased fines from £2000 to £20,000, if breached, and

introduced jail time (with sentence recommendations of up to 6 months) for

organizing unlicensed parties. (John, 2004)

Four years later, a more targeted piece of legislation was enacted to thwart rave

events specifically. What is often referred to as the ‘Criminal Justice Bill,’ the

Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, Section 63: Powers in relation to

raves, was an extensive law which made raves illegal and defined them as

““gatherings on land in the open air of 100 or more persons at which amplified

music is played during the night… [and whereby] ‘music’ includes sounds wholly

or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive

beats” (Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994). This was the first time in

UK history that a music culture had been criminalized (Brewster & Broughton

2000).

But all was not lost in the fight against rave. While the new legislation made it

harder to produce massive parties, the government did realize that it would have

to concede to a need for late night entertainment. Licensing hours were relaxed,

which allowed for legal ways to permit all-night dancing throughout the country.

But more importantly, rave culture turned from menace to society to a “highly

34

organized leisure system and an enormously lucrative economic infrastructure.

Still underground, in terms of its atmosphere, it was at the same time the norm:

what Everykid did, every weekend” (Reynolds 2012: 66-68).

35

INTRODUCTION TO THEORY

In analyzing the event of the rave, different

representations have appeared. Depending on the

context and the discourses employed which asked

“what is it?”, a different answer could be posited; the

‘establishment’ installed a ‘scapegoat’ in order to

define social norms, art historians found a (sub)cultural

event, some observers noticed a ‘disappearance’ and

participants indulged in a ‘dream’ of hope and

happiness. (Hillegonda Rietveld in Redhead, 1993:68)

Music scholar Hillegonda Rietveld’s segmentation of rave is a good starting point

for analysis. It is my goal to update the discussion of rave and give the topic a

fresh set of eyes, as most of the literature written about the subject is at least a

decade old; in fact, many sources listed in my bibliography appear to be more

current than they actually are. Some books were reprinted with new introductions

or updates to the text (i.e. Resistance Through Ritual and Energy Flash) which

attempt to reignite some of the debates prompted by the original pressings but

these are simply addendums to much older work.

For the most part, I am left to discuss the texts are they were originally and seek

out whether the arguments presented still apply. In many ways, they do, because

while rave culture has been validated in many ways by the status quo (in terms of

participation and acceptance), underground dance culture still deals with issues

of stigmatization and criminalization that, in my view, are outmoded and in some

cases were never warranted in the first place (Chatterton & Hollands, 2003; Night

Time Industries Association, 2015).

36

I have broken down the discussion in parts that (mostly) follow the parameters

set by Rietveld. Rave as social problem, as subcultural paradox (where I believe

the idea of ‘disappearance’ also resides), and as utopian fantasy are all areas

that I investigate and illustrate through my review of the literature. But these

headings are incomplete. What Rietveld neglects to mention, or perhaps does

not make explicit, is how issues of race and prolonged stigma further

problematize the politics of rave (Bennett, 2004; Frith, 1981; Goffman, 1963).

PROLONGED STIGMA

The past has different shapes which ordinary people produce, as historians, etc.,

with both the notion of different temporalities and the questions of memory and

forgetting” said Arul Appadurai (quoted in Bell, 1999:25). When we look over the

history of rave, we must view it from within a context of dance music. How does it

relate to its ancestors? What legacy does it leave to its descendants?

Even though this essay started with the Jazz Age, rave has followed a trajectory

that predates jazz – that, in fact, goes all the way back to ancient Greece – and is

still fighting for legitimacy in terms of social and even canonical acceptance.

Stuart Hall defines culture as:

The way, the forms, in which groups ‘handle’ the raw

material of their social and material existence… the

distinctive shapes in which this material and social

organization of life expresses itself… the way the

social relations of a group are structured and shaped:

but it is also the way those shapes are experienced,

understood and interpreted (2006:4).

37

This means that culture is determined and generated as a collective – all reading

the same materials, some of them coming to similar conclusions, and the shapes

that overlap the most – or as Robert Redfield intimates, “the extent to which the

conventionalized behavior of members of the society is for all the same” (quoted

in Becker, 1963:80) – create the ‘culture.’ They become the dominant shapes

from whence all others are viewed and judged against – they become the

“hegemony” (Hall, 2006:5-6), the mainstream, the status quo.

Youth culture is often defined by its relationship to the status quo, as it is usually

considered an oppositional one. “[It] is present only when its presence is a

problem or is regarded as a problem” (Hebdige, 1988:18). As noted in a recent

report by the Night Life Industries Association (NTIA), many legal activities that

are associated with youth culture are also associated with anti-social behavior.

The consumers of night time leisure are

disproportionately young; consequently, they are

typically boisterous and their behavior sometimes

tests the limits of prevailing conventions. Their

conduct is unpredictable and sometimes unruly.

Members of the older generation are often at a loss to

understand the language, music, and social practices

of the youth. Often, this incomprehension towards

new and unfamiliar practices provokes a defensive

and insecure response. Instead of engaging with night

time culture, those in authority sometimes give way to

the impulse to monitor and regulate and police. (NTIA,

2015:10)

In the case of rave, however, while it was considered adversarial from the start

and remained that way even after aspects of the practice were legitimized and

38

commodified by the status quo, a quarter century later, many rave participants

are adults in their 30s and 40s who grew up with the scene and never really left it

behind. (Goulding & Shankar, 2004). Therefore, can rave still be considered a

‘youth’ movement?

Goulding and Shankar also note that rave has evolved into a ‘weekend culture,’

that conforms to standardized frames of work-life balances. “Many have jobs in

technological fields like computer programming. Many are college students.

Raving is not an all the time culture as the hippy movement was and is. Rather

raving is a temporary activity separate from the daily lives of the individuals”

(Goulding, et al. 2002). Yet, as a recent article published in Russia Today entitled

“Drug use among middle-aged Brits rising as ‘rave’ generation keeps old habits”

(2015) shows, some media still imply that rave is a deviant influence on dominant

culture. In this case, the news outlet even used a recent Home Office report on

drug usage in the UK as proof to suggest that since raves began at the age that

40-59 year-olds were teenagers, it had a correlated effect. The report itself made

no claims in regards to raves and drug usage at all (Home Office, 2015).

Rave, and its associated behaviors – clubbing, drug usage, unemployment and

other indicators of societal disengagement – do not reflect the ways in which

ravers behave today. In fact, ‘raver’ is an antiquated term; no longer the

subcultural identifier that it once was, club culture has been the primary, legal

conduit for rave practice for almost two decades. So why does the stigma of the

raver still persist?

As Howard Becker has noted, deviance need not be illegal in order to be

considered ‘outsider’ behavior. “Though their activities are formally within the law,

their culture and way of life [might be] sufficiently bizarre and unconventional for

them to be labeled as outsiders by more conventional members of the community

(Becker 1963:79). When this occurs, the culture might undergo what Steven

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Tepper calls a “quiet regulation’ (2009), in which the outsider is not legally

disallowed from deviant activities but the attempts are made so onerous that the

outsider loses interest or becomes too frustrated to continue. It is this kind of

tedious regulation that the NTIA complained about in their report, citing such

determents as disproportionate alcohol taxes, licensing and zoning restrictions as

stifling the night-time economy, which contributes 6% to the nation’s gross

domestic product (GDP) (NTIA, 2015).

Often with moral panics, such as the one rave underwent in the 1990s, there is

little justifiable proof to sustain the hysteria being generated (Hall, 1978). But

even when the statistics prove to be overblown, it is often too late to control the

damage. In a recent example, Fabric nightclub’s license was put on review after

reports of several drug-related deaths in the past three years; in a last ditch deal,

Fabric was able to stay afloat by agreeing to implement a host of safety

measures, including increased CCTV surveillance, ID scanners, and drug-sniffing

dogs on the premise; all this despite the fact that in 6 million visitors to the club

over its 15-year history, they’ve only had four deaths (Morgan, 2014). If these

conditions are indeed enforced (Fabric is currently appealing the actions), it

would be the first club in the country to employ sniffer dogs. This kind of highly

visible spectacle presents to the public that these kinds of places are dangerous;

if one needs to go through airport-style security just for an evening of dancing,

not only does it turn some customers off, it suggests to borough councils and

other bureaucrats that these spaces should be condemned (Tepper, 2009).

Part of the problem with rave was that it did not subscribe to notions to

‘Englishness.’ To return to the definition of culture for a moment – James Donald

reflected on the idea of “national culture,” as “what is at stake in the phrases

belonging to or in a place, being at home in a place” (Donald, 1988:32). What

exactly did it mean to be English in the 1990s? A large part of it, according to

writer Michael Bracewell, demanded an acquiescence of rebellion. Arcadian

40

Englishness, “the idealized past” (1998:5), presented itself as the aspirational, if

not the actual national culture; as a result, the status quo became increasingly

attached to notions of innocence and idyll.

Rave arrived at a time when social orders were shifting away from nostalgia and

youth was concerned with the very real results of conservatism, staidness, and

disconnection. And not only the working-class were dissatisfied. “Middle-class

groups, with their public disaffiliation, their ideological attack on ‘straight society’,

their relentless search for pleasure and gratification, etc., were interpreted as

action, more consciously and deliberately, to undermine social and moral

stability: youth, now, as the active agents of social breakdown” (Hall 2006:57).

This critique has carried over to today’s clubbers, who often feel criminalized and

under scrutiny every time they go out (Sullivan, 2015).

PLEASURE AVERSENESS

Dance music is often accused of being meaningless. As was the case with disco,

for instance, there were sharp divisions between the rock and dance

communities that were inherently linked to the value of the music. But how

exactly is this measured?

Gilbert and Pearson identified our current system as part of a long history of

denying pleasure, which begins with the ascetic principles of Plato and Socrates

– whose philosophies helped to shape much of western civilization, including its

music gradation.

The functionalist interpretation of dance culture is in

thrall to a ‘rationalist’ imperative, which requires the

postulation of a function or purpose beyond the zone

of immediate bodily pleasure. Pleasure must relieve a

41

social burden, sublimate a libidinal desire, facilitate a

communal or ritual function, and either subvert or

reinforce a social structure – it cannot (and the

implication is, must not) merely be sought in and for

itself. (Gilbert & Pearson 1999:16)

There are two different types of effects which music can have: one that

possesses or produces meaning or one that produces affects, which cannot be

explained in terms of meanings. Meaning was evoked by lyrics, which Socrates

also privileged over “beat and tune” (ibid.:39). Language was key; it provided

order to what would otherwise be “dangerous and uncontrollable” (Frede,

1985:151). And this trajectory of pleasure averseness continued throughout the

Enlightenment period, until the late 18th/early 19th century, when German

philosophers, such as Schopenhauer “radically reconsidered” the status of music,

privileging the composer as harnessing the “essence of the world”

(Schopenhauer quoted in Gilbert and Pearson 1993:43).

But even with a new value placed on instrumentation, basic western philosophy

still did not change; “fundamental shifts in the structure, composition, and

consumption of music” (ibid.) changed in order to comply with traditional terms.

An experience of concentrated listening (via concert hall, etc.) was viewed as

superior to dancing to it in a ballroom. This positioning gradually led to a shift

away from dance-related forms and dance became an “increasingly devalued

activity” during this period (ibid.).

However music is experienced – whether through the body or through the brain –

it is felt through its vibration. Dancing is a direct bodily response, yet this

conditioned response to music’s physicality “has led [music scholars] to barely

even acknowledge an important relationship between music and dance, let alone

to give that relationship serious consideration even though It is the case that the

42

relationship has existed for as long as human beings have ‘produced’ music”

(Gilbert and Pearson, 1993:47).

Part of the response of the canon and its shunning of dance music lies in the idea

that its value is unquantifiable. It is simply a seduction to pleasure that does not

require anything more. Not necessarily striving to be art; its only aim is

“outward towards difference and alterity… its ability to seduce one into the loss of

one’s own identity or selfhood,” wrote Thomas Docherty (1990:20). Where

lyricism and musicianship are scalable (which is not to say that dance music is

not), there is not an emphasis on technicality of the music, only a feeling that

produced in the individual who is physically moved by it.

For Simon Frith, being moved was enough. He argued that there is value in

entertainment, that leisure is an ”implicit critique of work” and that pleasure “it is

defined against different situations of displeasure/ pain/reality” (Frith, 1981:265).

In the case of rave, part of its deviance lay in the fact that pleasure became the

sole pursuit, without even a pretense of balance. The project of rave in and of

itself was escapism, the state of bliss, and “losing the self in the ‘anonymity’ of

fellow ravers and in the ‘blinding’ music that made everything worthwhile”

(Rietveld in Redhead, 1993:69). Rave represented movement as an expressive

form of music appreciation.

Though the canon has assigned a somewhat arbitrary set of priorities that

continue to privilege lyricism, and rock is the accepted norm, it is worth recalling

that rock was once a dance music, too. In fact, it would be somewhat

disingenuous to suggest that there is a huge divide between the two, as Neil

Nehring has argued. “Dance and rock music… have continually been interwoven

in actual musical performance since the immediate post-punk developments of

the early 1980s, when a number of punk artists seeking new directions turned to

disco and other forms of dance music” (2007:3). Indeed, rock music now includes

43

DJs, electronic beats, and other rave elements on a regular basis but I would

argue that the old measurements of value still persist, as attested mostly by an

insistence that dance music be compared in relationship to rock – rather than on

its own merit – in the way that hip-hop and jazz are allowed to be autonomous

from rock.

RACISM

The very nature of cultural formation cannot be

understood within racialized societies such as Britain,

America and Canada without an account of how those

processes of racialization mediate taste cultures, give

value to certain styles above others, and how those are

often used to maintain and occasionally challenge

social hierarchies (Carrington & Wilson in Bennett,

2004:71).

As Gilbert & Pearson (1999) noted, there lay a pattern of behavior in the ways in

which subcultural products were assigned social outrage. In their example, acid

house followed the UK subcultural lineage of rock, mod, punk, and Northern soul,

whereas I placed rave music in a historically black American context. While this

might be more an issue of national culture bias rather than a direct critique, I

would suggest that my framing is actually not in conflict with theirs, as all of these

genres embed black cultural forms (Hebdige, 1979). The cross-Atlantic

connections between the U.S. and the UK has always been visible through music,

especially white working-class Brits and black Americans. “Perhaps the

connection is work, perhaps it’s the refusal to defer pleasure,” posited Brewster &

Broughton. “If you were black and America and you sang about payday, you

44

waited for the eagle on your dollar to fly. If you were British and working class,

you just said Ready Steady Go, your weekend starts here (2000:72).”

In their critique of the canon as it related specifically to British culture, Carrington

& Wilson (2004) reasserted my earlier claim that rave defied notions of

Englishness, concluding that racist undertones largely accounted for rave’s

exclusion. Noting the immediate default to 1990s Britpop, rather than dance

music produced by both black dance music pioneers as well as Asian and multi-

ethnic groups, represent subtle forms of racism that the rave scene was trying to

subvert.

The failure to theorize processes of racialization and

to account for the diversity of those black and Asian

dance music forms that operate outside of the more

commercialized aspects of club culture dominated by

the likes of Ministry of Sound and guest spots on BBC

Radio One means that a racialized account of dance

music ‘s apolitical significance is produced, within

which social distinctions let alone divisions, disappear.

(ibid., 2004:75)

Erving Goffman (1963) defined this as a ‘stigma-theory,’ in which the status quo

constructed a system of exclusion or inferiority in order to remain in control or in

stasis. As with quiet regulation, this systemization was made invisible by simply

reaffirming the rules already in play with any critical thought for how the rules

were made (Applebaum, 2008).

Another area of rave that was overlooked was the jungle movement, which many

critics hail as the first indigenous black British music, even though the music was

produced by both blacks and whites. This seemed especially significant in the

45

face of rave’s opponents, who were often skeptical of its integrated communities.

“[It showed] that trans-racial alliance is possible, not just because it makes

‘blackness’ seem cool to white kids, but because there’s a genuine unity of

experience share by black British and white underclass” (Reynolds 2012: 248-

249). Collin and Godfrey, however, simply saw jungle as “another example of

how black youth subcultures are initially feared and demonized before ultimately

being packaged and commercially exploited by the white mainstream (1998:264).

Black music has historically been used as a novelty that allows whites, especially

teenagers, a safe and easy form of rebellion. “In Britain, as in America, black

music, from jazz to reggae, has been the background music of the hippest kids

for at least four generations” (Frith, 1981:19). But this did not remove a stigma of

blackness for the music’s creator. While it may have been good dance music, it

was still held to ascetic/scholarly aspersions which differentiated it from white

music, “[lacking] the reflective qualities needed for genuine artistic expression”

(Frith, 1981:21)

Because the white working-class outranked its black counterpart for decades, a

continuum of white supremacy allowed them to re-define formerly black

commodities such as rock, disco, and now rave music. As criticisms about racism,

sexism, and homophobia have plagued dance culture recently (Beaumont-

Thomas, 2015), it becomes increasingly important to recognize its legacy and

cultural heritage. “It is white imitators who reap the glamour and publicity – and

the money,” wrote Iain Chamberlain. “Black musicians are confined to the ghetto

party, the small nightclub, the studio sessions, the endless travelling to one-night

stands at the bottom of the bill” (quoted in Hall, 2006:135).

46

CONCLUSION

Dance music culture has caused a myriad of problems over the course of its

existence, a fraction of which I’ve attempted to cover here. While it is often a

magnet for moral ambiguity, spoiled identity, and incertitude, it also creates a

space for survival, exploration, and escape. It addresses the needs of each

person differently, on her own terms, by her own beat.

Music plays in integral role in the every day lives of most people. Stigmatization

of these expressive forms – whether they be through regulation, erasure, public

ridicule, or moral panic – creates unnecessary division and perpetuates

stereotypes and animosity. I have explored the ways in which pleasure, intimacy,

race, and sexuality all create deviant narratives that continue to stalk dance

music through its many elaborate and ever-evolving forms. And I have addressed

the ongoing regulation of dance music culture that is intrinsic to its past, in hopes

that highlighting it will help prevent its continuation.

Looking over the history of dance music, I can’t help but feel that the ways in

which we discuss culture, especially those that fall into the margins, is

inadequate. It illuminates the ways in which we have simply failed to recognize

how we, as a society, hold on to bad ideas (ones we pretend to have eradicated),

without question. My hope with this work is continue the conversation, to provide

a framework to challenge these bad ideas, and to generate new, sustainable

public policy that allows all forms of culture to flourish and procreate.

The next version of dance music is on its way – it may already be here – and we

are perfectly poised not to repeat this part of history again.

47

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