Excessive, routinized use combines with Ecstasy’s diminishing-returns syndrome to form a vicious circle, a negative synergy. The individual’s experience of Ecstasy is degraded; on the collective level, Ecstasy scenes lose their idyllic lustre and become a soul-destroying grind. This utopian/dystopian dialectic intrinsic to rave culture demands the coining of some new quasi-pharmacological terms: vitalyst (‘vitalize’ + ‘catalyst’) and obliviate (oblivion + opiate). These terms describe drug experiences, rather than intrinsic and immutable properties of the drugs themselves; the same drug, abused, can cross the line between positive and negative. Ecstasy starts out as a ‘vitalyst’: you feel more alive, more sensitized, more human; on the macro-level, rave scenes in their early days buzz with creativity and we’re-gonna-change-the-world idealism. But with regular, rampant use, Ecstasy can become just another ‘obliviate’, like alcohol and narcotics: something that numbs the soul and transforms rave scenes into retreats from reality. This utopian/dystopian shift from ‘paradise-regained’ to ‘pleasure-prison’ is a recurring narrative experienced by successive Ecstasy generations all across the world. For seemingly programmed into the chemical structure of MDMA is the instruction: use me, don’t abuse me.
ONE
A TALE OF THREE CITIES
DETROIT TECHNO,
CHICAGO HOUSE
AND NEW YORK
GARAGE
‘Kraftwerk was always very culty, but it was very Detroit too because of the industry in Detroit, and because of the mentality. That music automatically appeals to the people like a tribal calling . . . It sounded like somebody making music with hammers and nails.’
– Derrick May, 1992
To promote Kraftwerk’s 1991 remixed ‘greatest hits’ compilation, The Mix, the group’s American label Elektra came up with an amusing advert: the famous one-and-only photo of blues pioneer Robert Johnson, but with his suit filled by a robot’s body. The visual pun was witty and eyecatching, but most importantly, it was accurate. Just as Johnson was the godfather of rock’s gritty authenticity and wracked catharsis, Kraftwerk invented the pristine, post-human pop phuture we now inhabit. The story of techno begins not in early eighties Detroit, as is so often claimed, but in early seventies Dusseldorf, where Kraftwerk built their KlingKlang sound-factory and churned out pioneering synth-and-drum-machine tracks like ‘Autobahn’, ‘Trans-Europe Express’ and ‘The Man-Machine’.
In one of those weird pop-historical loops, Kraftwerk were themselves influenced by Detroit – by the adrenalinized insurgency of the MC5 and The Stooges (whose noise, Iggy Pop has said, was partly inspired by the pounding clangour of the Motor City’s auto factories). Like the other Krautrock bands – Can, Faust, Neu! – Kraftwerk were also inspired by the mantric minimalism and non-R & B rhythms of the Velvet Underground (whose John Cale produced the first Stooges album). Replacing guitars and drums with synthesizer pulses and programmed beats, Kraftwerk sublimated the Velvets’ white light/ white heat speed-rush into the cruise-control serenity of motorik, a metronomic, regular-as-carburettor rhythm that was at once post-rock and proto-techno. ‘Autobahn’ – a 24-minute hymn to the exhilaration of gliding down the freeway that sounded like a cyborg Beach Boys – was (in abbreviated form) a chart smash throughout the world in 1975. Two years later on the Trans-Europe Express album, the title track – all indefatigable girder-beats and arching, Doppler Effect synths – segues into ‘Metal On Metal’, a funky iron foundry that sounded like a Luigi Russolo Art of Noises megamix for a Futurist discotheque.
‘They were so stiff, they were funky,’ techno pioneer Carl Craig has said of Kraftwerk. This paradox – which effectively translates as ‘they were so white, they were black’ – is as close as anyone has got to explaining the mystery of why Kraftwerk’s music (and above all ‘Trans-Europe Express’, their most dispassionately metronomic and Teutonic track) had such a massive impact on black American youth. In New York, Kraftwerk almost single-handedly sired the electro movement. Africa Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force’s 1982 smash ‘Planet Rock’ stole its doomy melody from ‘Trans-Europe’ and its beatbox rhythm from Kraftwerk’s 1981 track ‘Numbers’.
But while the body-popping, electric boogaloo era passed quickly (with New York hip hop pursuing a grittier, Seventies funk direction), Kraftwerk had a more enduring impact in Detroit, where the band’s music plugged into the Europhile tastes of arty, middle-class blacks. From Cybotron’s 1982 ‘Cosmic Cars’ to Carl Craig’s 1995 ‘Autobahn’ homage Landcruising, Detroit techno still fits Derrick May’s famous description: ‘like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator with nothing but a sequencer to keep them occupied.’
The Techno Rebels
‘When I first heard synthesizers dropped on records it was great . . . like UFOs landing on records, so I got one,’ Juan Atkins has said. ‘It wasn’t any one particular group that turned me on to synthesizers. But “Flashlight” [Parliament’s Number One R & B hit from early 1978] was the first record I heard where maybe 75 per cent of the production was electronic – the bassline was electronic, and it was mostly synthesizers.’
Atkins was then a sixteen-year-old living in Belleville, a small town thirty miles from Detroit, and playing bass, drums and ‘a little bit of lead guitar’ in various garage funk bands. Three years earlier, he had befriended two kids in the year below him at junior high school: Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. ‘In Belleville,’ remembers Saunderson, ‘it was pretty racial still at that time, ’cos it was a decent area. You had to have a little bit of money, the houses were off lakes, and there wasn’t a lot of black people there. So we three kind of gelled right away.’
Atkins became May’s musical mentor, hipping him to all kinds of weird shit, from Parliament-Funkadelic to Kraftwerk. Says May, ‘I’m telling you, man: Juan was the most important person in my life, other than my mother. If it wasn’t for Juan I would never have heard any of this shit, I don’t know where I’d be if it wasn’t for him.’
Although the music they were into was all dancefloor oriented, the Belleville Three brought an art-rock seriousness to bear on what rock fans then dissed as mere ‘disco’.
‘For us, it was always a dedication,’ says May. ‘We use to sit back and philosophize on what these people thought about when they made their music, and how they felt the next phase of the music would go. And you know, half the shit we thought about the artist never even fucking thought about! . . . Because Belleville was a rural town, we perceived the music a little bit different than you would if you encountered it in nightclubs or through watching other people dance. 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 just took it as entertainment, we took it as a serious philosophy.’
Through Atkins, May and Saunderson were exposed to all manner of post-Kraftwerk European electropop (Gary Numan, Giorgio Moroder’s E = MC2), alongside quirky American New Wave like the B52’s. Why did this cold, funkless European music strike a chord with black youth from Detroit and Chicago? Atkins attributes it to ‘something about industry and the Midwest. When you read the history books of America, they tell you that when the UAW – the United Auto Workers – formed, this was the first time that white people and black people came together on an equal footing, fighting for the same thing: better wages, better working conditions.’
Atkins, May and Saunderson belonged to a new generation of Detroit area black youth who grew up accustomed to affluence. ‘My grandfather worked at Ford for twenty years, he was like a career auto worker,’ says Atkins. ‘A lot of the kids and the grand-kids that came up after this integration, they got used to a better way of living. It’s funny that Detroit is now one of the most depressed cities in America, but it’s still the city that has the most affluent blacks in the country. If you had a job at the plant at this time, you were making bucks. And it wasn’t like the white guy standing nex
t to you is getting five or ten dollars an hour more than you. Everybody was equal. So what happened is that you’ve got this environment with these kids that come up somewhat snobby, ’cos hey, their parents are making money working at Ford or General Motors or Chrysler, been elevated to a foreman, or even elevated to get a white collar job.’ The Europhilia of these middle-class black youths, says Atkins, was part of their attempt ‘to distance themselves from the kids that were coming up in the projects, in the ghetto.’
Eddie Fowlkes – soon to become the fourth member of the Belleville clique, despite being from a rougher area of Detroit – remembers that kids from the posher West Side of Detroit ‘were more into slick clothes and cars, ’cos the West Side kids had more money than the kids on the East Side. They had more opportunity to travel, get books, and get things. They were into stuff like Cartier and all the shit they read about in GQ. So you had black kids on the West Side dressing like GQ, and it all kind of snowballed into a scene, a culture.’ According to Jeff Mills – a ruling DJ – producer in the nineties, but then in his last year of high school – American Gigolo was a hugely influential movie on these Euro-fashion-obsessed black youth, just for the chic lifestyle of Richard Gere’s lead character, his massive wardrobe of scores of shirts and shoes.
One expression of this upwardly mobile subculture was clubs and dance music. But these weren’t nightclubs but high-school social clubs with names like Snobs, Brats, Ciabattino, Rafael, Charivari; the latter was named after a New York clothing store, and is alleged to have made the first Detroit techno track, titled ‘Charivari’. These clubs would hire spaces and throw parties. ‘They were obsessed with being GQ down, and with Italian “progressive” music – Italian disco, basically,’ says Carl Craig, another early acolyte of May and Atkins. Dubbed ‘progressive’ because their music stemmed from Giorgio Moroder’s synth-and-drum-machine-based Eurodisco, rather than the symphonic Philly sound, Italian artists like Alexander Robotnik, Klein and MBO and Capricorn filled the gap left by the death of disco in America. On the Detroit dance party circuit, you would also hear electro-funk from New York, labels like West End and Prelude, artists like Sharon Redd, Taana Gardner, the Peech Boys and Was (Not Was); English New Romantic and European synth-pop artists like Visage, Yello, Telex, Yazoo, Ultravox; and American New Wave from The B52’s, Devo and Talking Heads. ‘Man, I don’t know if this could happen nowhere else in the country but Detroit,’ laughs Atkins. ‘Can you imagine three or four hundred black kids dancing to “Rock Lobster”? That shit actually happened in Detroit!’
Another factor that shaped Detroit youth’s Europhile tastes was the influential radio DJ Charles Johnson, ‘the Electrifyin’ Mojo’, whose show ‘The Midnight Funk Association’ aired every night on WGPR (the first black FM station in the city) through the late seventies and early eighties. Alongside P-Funk and synth-driven tracks by Prince like ‘Controversy’, Mojo would play Kraftwerk’s ‘Tour De France’ and other Euro electro-pop. Every night, Mojo would do his Mothership spiel, encouraging listeners to flash their headlights or bedroom lamp so that the intergalactic craft would know where to touchdown. ‘He had the most magnanimous voice you ever heard,’ remembers Derrick May. ‘This guy would just overpower you with his imagination. You became entranced by the radio. Which is something I have not heard since, and will probably never hear again.’
Around 1980, Atkins and May started making tentative steps towards becoming DJs themselves. ‘Juan and I started messing around with our idea of doing our own personal remixes, as a joke, using a pause button, tape deck, and a basic turntable. Just taking a record and pausing it up, doing edits with the pause button. We got damn good at it. That led to constant experimentation, constantly freaking out, trying all kinds of crazy shit. And Juan thought, “Damn, man, let’s go to the next level, let’s start up our own DJ company.” We found a guy who owned a music studio, a sort of rental place, hiring out gear. And he was nice enough to give us a room in back and set up a pair of turntables and speakers, and let us just have hours. Didn’t charge us a dime! In that room, Juan would teach me how to mix. I remember the two records I learned how to mix with: David Bowie’s “Fashion”, and Edwin Birdsong’s “Rapper Dapper Snapper”. I had to mix those records for weeks, with Juan, like, in my ass, every time I fucked up!’
Calling themselves Deep Space Soundworks, Atkins and May played their first DJ engagement in 1981, at a party thrown by a friend of Derrick’s, as warm-up for Detroit’s most famous DJ, Ken Collier. ‘It was packed, but nobody was dancing,’ remembers May. ‘We were spinning 45s [7-inches] and we didn’t even have slipmatts on the turntable. Collier took over, and man, the dancefloor filled in 2.2 seconds. It was the most embarrassing, humbling experience of our lives!’
In the early eighties, Detroit had a huge circuit of parties, and the competition amongst the forty or fifty DJs in town was fierce. Every weekend, there were several parties, often organized around concepts (for instance, everyone wearing the same colour).
‘Everywhere you went you had to be on your shit, because Detroit crowds were so particular, and if you really weren’t throwing down or you had a fucked-up mix, people would look at you and just walk off the dancefloor. And that’s how we developed our skills, ’cos we had no room for error. These people wouldn’t accept it. In Detroit, a party was the main event. People would go out and get new clothes for this shit.’ May and Atkins applied the same kind of theoretical intensity to the art of mixing and set-building that they’d once invested in listening to records. ‘We built a philosophy behind spinning records. We’d sit and think what the guy who made the record was thinking about, and find a record that would fit with it, so that the people on the dancefloor would comprehend the concept. When I think about all the brainpower that went into it! We’d sit up the whole night before the party, think about what we’d play the following night, the people who’d be at the party, the concept of the clientele. It was insane!’
Eventually Deep Space got into throwing their own parties. ‘We’d rent, like, a pub, and turn the pub into a club,’ remembers Eddie Fowlkes, by then a member of the DJ team. ‘The first place we threw a party was, I think, Roskos, which was like a pinball joint. What you tried to do is bring the people into a different place, where they couldn’t even imagine somebody having a party. And when we started doing that, everybody in Detroit started doing offbeat shit. It was like “damn, I used to eat lunch here with my Mom and now I’m partying here!”’
Eventually, the social club party scene got so successful that the GQ kids found that an undesirable element began to turn up: the very ghetto youth from the projects that they’d put so much energy into defining themselves against. That was when the clubs started putting the phrase ‘no jits’ on the flyers: ‘jit’ being short for ‘jitterbug’, Detroit slang for ruffian or gangsta.
‘They would put “no jits allowed”’, says May, ‘but how you gonna tell some 250 pound ruffneck, standing about six foot four, “you’re not coming to my party” – when you’re some little five foot two pretty boy? I don’t think so! He’s coming in! It was a hope that they wouldn’t come! It was to make them feel unwanted. And that was when the scene started to self-destruct. West Side kids and the whole élite high school scene, the elitist people that lived in certain areas, they just wanted to keep this shit to themselves. Then other people said “I like that too, I wanna come” and those elitists decided they didn’t want’em there, and that was wrong. It was the beginning of the end. That’s when the guns started popping up at the parties, and fights started happening. By ’86, it was over.’
Prior to forming Deep Space, Juan Atkins had already started making music as one half of Cybotron. Studying music and media courses at Washtenaw Community College in Ypsilanti, Michigan, he befriended a fellow student called Rick Davis. Quite a bit older than Atkins, Davis was an eccentric figure with a past: in 1968, he’d been shipped out to Vietnam just in time to experience the Tet offensive.
‘Once you g
ot to know Rick, he was like a big teddy bear,’ remembers Atkins. ‘But if you didn’t know him, he could come off somewhat foreboding. Rick was a Viet vet. He was there, man – in the jungle. He told me stories where he’s been in situations where he saw his best mate get ate by a tiger, or where he was going through the bush, shots rang out, and everybody in the platoon got wiped out but him. That’s got to do something to you, mentally.’ Davis and Atkins discovered they had interests in common – science fiction, futurologists like Alvin Toffler, and electronic music. Prior to Cybotron, Davis had done experimental tracks on his own, like ‘The Methane Sea’. But like a lot of Viet vets, Davis also had a heavy acid rock background; he was a huge fan of Hendrix.
Although both Atkins and Davis shared instrumental duties and contributed lyrics and concepts, Atkins’ focus was on ‘putting the records together’, making Cybotron music work as dance tracks. Davis handled a lot of the ‘philosophical aspects’ of what was a highly conceptual project. He’d cobbled together a strange personal creed out of Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave and Zohar, the ‘Bible’ of classical Jewish Kabbalah. The gist of it was that, through ‘interfacing the spirituality of human beings into the cybernetic matrix’, you could transform yourself into an supra-human entity.
In line with Zoharian numerology, Davis changed his name to 3070; when a third member, guitarist John Howesley joined Cybotron, he was designated John 5. Atkins and Davis devised their own technospeak dictionary, The Grid. ‘This was a time when the video-game phenomenon was coming in,’ remembers Atkins. ‘We used a lot of video terms to refer to real-life situations. We conceived of the streets or the environment as being like the Game Grid. And Cybotron was considered a “super-sprite”. Certain images in a video programme are referred to as “sprites”, and a super sprite had certain powers on the game-grid that a regular sprite didn’t have.’
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 4
