Although artists like Demon Boyz, Rebel MC, and Blapps Posse/ Dynamic Guvnors all played a part in forging the UK hip-house hybrid, the key figures in the rise of breakbeat house were PJ and Smiley, two black British youths from Stoke Newington in North East London. Using the name Shut Up And Dance, they operated as a band, a production team and a label. In the mid-eighties, they’d started out on the sound-system Heatwave, where they took Def Jam tracks and sped the breaks up from 100 b.p.m. to 130 b.p.m., then chanted MC-style over the top. They also put out a few Brit-rap tracks as Private Party, including ‘My Tennants’, an Anglicized rebuke to Run DMC’s sponsorship-rap ‘My Adidas’. Like Warp, they began Shut Up and Dance in 1989 as a white label operation, selling tracks direct to dance stores from their car boot, and servicing the burgeoning pirate-radio stations. The duo’s pro-pirate stance – ‘once a station goes legal it’s shit,’ they declared to Melody Maker – was given anthem-form in a track by SUAD act Rum and Black, ‘**** The Legal Stations’: a grainy slice of breakbeat-and-bass minimalism pivoting around a soundbite that complains ‘turn off that muthafuckin’ radio’ and a looped squeal of guitar-feedback sampled from Prince’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy’.
Based on the flagrant theft of highly recognizable chunks from mainstream pop records by the likes of Suzanne Vega and The Eurythmics, SUAD cut-and-paste tracks seemed like sonic documents of hardcore rave’s black economy: uncleared samples, dodgy warehouse raves, pirate radio, drug dealing, bootleg tracks and no-permission, no-royalty mix-tapes. It sounded like fast money music, the perfect soundtrack for an underground/underworld geared to the blag and the scam.
But Shut Up and Dance saw themselves as young black entrepreneurs engaged in bettering themselves and giving back something to their disenfranchised community. They had a conscience: at heart, they were disenchanted hip hoppers, inspired by Public Enemy’s righteous politics but bored by their increasingly staid production. ‘We’re not a rave group, we’re a fast hip hop group,’ they told Melody Maker. ‘We’ve moved hip hop on in a way that people like Public Enemy haven’t dared to.’ On tracks like ‘Rest In Peace (Rap Will Never)’ and ‘Here Comes A Different Type Of Rap Track Not The Usual 4 Bar Loop Crap’, they pledged allegiance to rap even as they berated it for its sonic stasis quo.
But SUAD’s early output didn’t galvanize the moribund Britrap scene. Instead their tracks found favour with the hardcore house audience, despite the fact that SUAD specialized in a kind of social realism that foregrounded not just the grim realities that rave aimed to evade, but many of the squalid, exploitative aspects of the rave scene itself. Alongside anti-racism polemic (‘White White World’), urban vigilante rage (‘This Town Needs A Sheriff’) and survivalist determination (‘Derek Went Mad’, with its ghostly sample of a fragile male voice whispering ‘but I’ll return a stronger man’), there were tracks like ‘£10 To Get In’, a jibe at rip-off raves. The remix sequel ‘£20 To Get In’ begins with a white cockney punter ringing up a phone-line for instructions on how to get to a warehouse party, only to be horrified by the extortionate entrance fee. ‘I thought it was £10!!’. ‘No, mate,’ says the black promoter in a deadpan, take-it-or-leave-it voice, ‘it’s ’ad a remix.’
Shut Up And Dance were at pains to distance themselves from drug culture. They bemoaned London’s escalating crack problem on their Top Fifty hit ‘Autobiography of a Crackhead’ and its flipside ‘The Green Man’, a stirring, string-swept instrumental named after a Hackney pub notorious for its open drug-dealing. And their biggest hit, ‘Raving I’m Raving’, targeted Ecstasy. If you actually listen to the lyrics, ‘Raving’ isn’t a celebratory anthem but a withering probe into the void at the heart of the rave dream. The track is based almost entirely on Marc Cohn’s AOR ballad hit single of late 1991, ‘Walking In Memphis’. Retaining the song’s heartbusting piano chords but tweaking the words slightly, PJ and Smiley created a raver’s anthem with a booby-trap lyric. ‘Bought myself a first-class ticket,’ gushes singer Peter Bouncer, referring to a tab of Ecstasy, before rapturously evoking his touchdown in a loved-up wonderland. ‘Everybody was happy / Ecstasy shining down on me . . . I’m raving I’m raving / But do I really feel the way I feel?’ At this fissure of doubt, a foreboding bassline kicks in, followed by a loop of anguished female vocal.
For most of the 50,000 ravers who bought the track, ‘Raving I’m Raving’ was doubtless received as an irony-free affirmation of the rave dream-state, a glorious hymn to MDMA. Going straight into the national pop chart at Number Two on its first week of release, the booby-trap concealed in ‘Raving I’m Raving’ promptly blew up in PJ and Smiley’s face. Within two weeks of its release, the track had to be withdrawn after protests from Marc Cohn and his record company. Cohn insisted that no more pressings be made and all profits be donated to charity. SUAD went into liquidation, with PJ and Smiley railing against an alleged record industry conspiracy to put young black entrepreneurs out of business. When they returned to the fray in 1994 – bitter, battle-scarred and desperately plugging their ‘Phuck the Biz’ EP – SUAD were still harping on the same theme, telling all who would listen that SUAD could have been another Motown.
With their looped-breaks-and-uncleared-samples aesthetic, their roots in hip hop and reggae’s sound-system culture, their ambivalence about Ecstasy, and their street survivalist politics (on the cover of their debut album, Dance Before The Police Come!, they struck kung fu poses, barechested, oiled and musclebound), Shut Up And Dance laid the groundwork for jungle, the subculture that would evolve out of breakbeat hardcore. Other acts on SUAD anticipated crucial strands of the jungalistic sound-spectrum. Rum and Black’s ‘Bogeyman’, with its scared-out-of-her-wits woman’s whimper of ‘oh no, don’t go in there’ and distorted blurts of jazz trumpet, was 1993-style darkside hardcore avant la lettre. On tracks like ‘Illegal Gunshot’, ‘Hooligan 69’, ‘Spliff-head’, ‘Wipe The Needle’, and the awesome ‘Mixed Truth’, The Ragga Twins mashed up ruff B-boy breaks, uproarious dancehall reggae chatter and Euro-techno terror-riffs with results that uncannily prophesized the ragga-influenced jungle sound of 1994. And the bittersweet breakbeat-driven torch songs of sultry chanteuse Nicolette on Now Is Early looked ahead to the jazz-tinged directions that jungle would explore in 1995 – 6. All in all, Shut Up And Dance left a major legacy.
Mentasm Madness
‘I’m sure the constant exposure to amplifiers and electric guitars . . . has altered my body chemistry . . . It is the proximity of the electric hum in the background and just the tremendous feeling of buoyancy and power . . . I was really determined to use the noises on myself, as if I were a scientist experimenting on himself, like Dr Jekyll . . .’
– Iggy Pop, anticipating hardcore in his memoir I Need More
Across the English Channel, another version of hardcore was hatching: hard as fuck, whiter-than-white, based around riffs rather than bleeps and distorted noise rather than clean lines. Believe it or not, for about eighteen months Belgium ruled the world of techno. Groups as geographically distant as Detroit’s Underground Resistance and Dollis Hill’s Manix paid tribute to the mysterious Lowlands nation: UR put out the ‘Belgian Resistance’ single, Manix recorded the track ‘Never Been To Belgium’.
The seeds of the new sound, however, germinated somewhere between Belgium and Brooklyn, New York, where DJ – producers like Lenny Dee, Mundo Muzique and Joey Beltram were pushing rave music in a harder and faster direction. Beltram revolutionized techno twice before he reached the age of twenty-one. First, with 1990’s ‘Energy Flash’, which gets my vote as the greatest techno track of all time. With its radioactive bass-glow and pulsing loop-riff, ‘Energy Flash’ sucks you into a miasmic maelstrom like nothing since the first acid house tracks. An insinuating whisper murmurs ‘acid, ecstasy’, like a dealer in the murk, or the voice-of-craving inside an addict’s head. The track really does sound like the speedfreak’s drug ‘flash’, like being plugged into an electric mains (no wonder amphetamine-aficionados talk of being �
�wired’).
Years later, I realized ‘Energy Flash’ thrills me for exactly the same reasons as Stooges songs like ‘Loose’ and ‘Raw Power’. Proto-punk and hardcore techno are both an intransitive surge of object-less aggression: ‘raw power got no place to go . . . it don’t wanna know’, as Iggy sang. Instead of being a form of self-expression, this is music as forcefield, in which the individual is suspended and subjective consciousness is wiped clean away. The title of Beltram’s second genre-revolutionizing classic, 1991’s ‘Mentasm’, could be a synonym for another Iggy trope: the ‘O-mind’, a paradoxical state of hyper-alert oblivion in which self-aggrandizement and self-annihilation fuse. Produced in collaboration with Mundo Muzique and released under the name Second Phase, ‘Mentasm’ was even more influential than ‘Energy Flash’. The monstrous ‘mentasm’ sound – a swarming killer-bee drone derived from the Roland Juno Alpha synthesizer, a writhing, seething cyclone-hiss that sends ripples of shivery, shuddery rapture over your entire body-surface – spread through rave culture like a virus, infecting everyone from the Belgian, Dutch and German hardcore crews to British breakbeat artists like 4 Hero, Doc Scott and Rufige Cru. The ‘mentasm stab’ – which took the sound and gave it a convulsive riff-pattern – was hardcore’s great unifier, guaranteed to activate your E-rush.
The ‘Mentasm’ noise has a similar manic-yet-dirge-like quality to the down-tuned guitar sound used by Black Sabbath and their doom-metal ilk. That’s no coincidence: Beltram was consciously aiming to recreate the vibe of Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. ‘I like evil, dark-sounding music and I guess it’s because I grew up listening to heavy metal,’ he told Melody Maker. ‘I like the mood it creates. It’s very psychedelic, but not in the bell-bottom, flower power way.’ On the Beltram/Program 2 collaboration ‘The Omen (Psycho Mix)’, he actually sampled Robert Plant’s languishing screams and orgasmic whimpers from the weird ‘ambient’ mid-section of ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
Beltram has said that ‘Energy Flash’ and ‘Mentasm’ were deliberate attempts to ‘make the music go faster, ’cos as a DJ I like to play records faster’. Techno responded to his challenge, much to the consternation of Detroit purists. Initially, Beltram found his greatest reception in Belgium. Speaking to iD in 1991, he enthused: ‘The Belgians were the first people who could relate to me. Belgium was very, very advanced.’ Indeed, the first real Euro-hardcore track, Rhythm Device’s ‘Acid Rock’, saw producer Frank De Wulf independently hit upon the same techno-as-heavy-metal idea as Beltram: the track imitated Deep Purple’s monster-riffing dirge ‘Smoke On the Water’.
Belgium’s pop music inferiority-complex had ended at the end of the eighties with the New Beat craze, which stormed the country’s pop charts and briefly looked like it was gonna be Britain’s Next Big Thing after acid house. ‘Before New Beat, there was no chance for Belgians to break records into our own chart, it was totally dominated by Anglo-American music,’ said Renaat Van DePapeliere of R & S, the label that released ‘Mentasm’ and ‘Energy Flash’. New Beat began when DJs started to spin gay Hi-NRG records at 33 r.p.m. rather than the correct 45 r.p.m., creating an eerie, viscous, trance-dance groove. At the height of the craze, Renaat recalled, the Ghent club Boccaccio ‘was like a temple. Everyone was dressed in black and white, dancing this weird, robotic dance.’ Groups like Lords of Acid and A Split Second started to make records with the same uncanny, slow-mo feel.
As the nineties progressed, the b.p.m. returned to normal, then accelerated, as DJs started playing techno with their turntables set to +8. A native hardcore was born, with labels like Hithouse, Big Time International, Who’s That Beat, Beat Box and Music Man, and groups like Set Up System, Cubic 22, T99, 80 Aum, Incubus, Holy Noise and Meng Syndicate. All peddled a distinctively Belgian brand of industrial-tinged techno where melody was displaced by noise. Set Up System’s ‘Fairy Dust’ (the title probably refers to amphetamine) featured a fingernails-on-a-blackboard scree-riff that sounded like a brain-eraser wiping the slate of consciousness clean. On T99’s ‘Anasthasia’, the ‘Mentasm’ stab mutated into what some called the ‘Belgian hoover’ effect: bombastic blasts of ungodly dissonance that sounded like Carmina Burana sung by a choir of satan-worshipping cyborgs.
As Belgian hardcore swamped Europe, dominating the underground rave circuit and penetrating the pop charts, the techno cognoscenti blanched in horror at the new style’s brutalism. With its corrugated, rock-like riffs and stomping beats, tracks like Cubic 22’s ‘Night In Motion’ seemed to sever house’s familial ties to disco and black R & B. Belgian and German hardcore was heavily influenced by the late eighties school of Euro Body Music (EBM), with its stiff, regimented rhythms and aerobic triumphalism. EBM bands like Front 242 flirted with Constructivist and fascist imagery in songs like ‘Masterhit’, and something of that musclebound, man-of-steel aura carried through to Euro-hardcore. LA Style’s massive hit ‘James Brown Is Dead’ seemed like a gloating celebration of hardcore’s Teutonic funklessness; the track’s Sturm und Drang fanfares and cavernous production (geared for massive raves in industrial hangars) imparted an unnervingly Nuremberg-like vibe.
Many anti-hardcore hipsters attributed the new style’s megalomaniacal aggression and high tempo to a decline in the quality of Ecstasy, which they believed was heavily cut with amphetamine. House’s trippy vibe had degenerated into a manic power-trippiness. Hence Ravesignal’s ‘Mindwar’ and ‘Horsepower’, the awesome creations of R & S producer CJ Bolland. With its Doppler-effect speed-rush and revving-engine pulse-rhythms, ‘Horsepower’ is Giorgio Moroder’s Eurodisco souped up on steroids and testosterone. Imagine ‘I Feel Love’ if Giorgio had made it with Arnold Schwarzenegger in mind, not Donna Summer. In the film Pumping Iron, Arnie talked about how the feeling of flexing his muscles was akin to orgasm, ‘so I’m coming all the time’; the parallels between this and the ‘arrested orgasm’ sensation created by Ecstasy and amphetamine are striking.
That’s very much the vibe exuded by Human Resource’s Euro-hardcore classic ‘Dominator’, on which the rapper’s boasts of ruffer-than-ruff invincibility climax with the Lacanian epiphany: ‘In other words, sucker, there is no Other / I wanna kiss myself.’ Taking the mentasmic drone to its nether limit, ‘Dominator’ is simultaneously sluggish and palsied; you feel like your nerve-endings have gone dead, but beneath the armature of numbed flesh, your heart’s beating furiously. And this was a pretty accurate reflection of the insensate, punch-drunk state many hardcore ravers were in by the end of the night, after necking several pills of dubious composition, topped off by a gram of sulphate and a couple of acid blotters.
Midway through ‘Dominator’, a startlingly realistic alarm-bell lets rip, cueing the Pavlovian response to flee. Hardcore was full of similar sound-effects – sirens, church bells – that created a sense of emergency and insurgency. This was the panic-rush, as celebrated in tracks like Praga Khan’s ‘Rave Alarm’, HHFD’s ‘Start The Panic’, John +Julie’s ‘Red Alert’ and Force Mass Motion’s ‘Feel The Panic’; an edgy, jittery exhilaration caused by the metabolic acceleration and paranoiac side-effects of doing too much Ecstasy and amphetamine. The original Greek panic, the ‘panic fear’ of the horned god Pan, was a transport of ecstasy-beyond-terror. Activating the brain’s ‘flight-or-fight’ response speed floods the body with the adrenalin-like neurotransmitter norephinephrine. In a panic state, perceptions are heightened, sense-impressions are more vivid, because you’re on red alert. As with a soldier in a combat situation, such a drastic intensification of the immediate present can be a Dionysian thrill. But the side effects of too much speed (hypertension, paranoia, heart arrythmia) are unpleasant, while the attrition wreaked by long-term abuse leads to a kind of physical and spiritual battle-fatigue. By late 1991, you could see the walking wounded on the dancefloor.
For veteran ravers who remembered happier days, the experience now offered by British hardcore clubs like Wasp, Factory, Crazy Club, Eclipse, In-Ter-Dance and Storm seemed closer to an assault course than a fun nig
ht out. European raving was, if anything, even more of an endurance test. Renaat Van DePapeliere raved about a club in Cologne where temperatures would reach tropical levels and DJs wore oxygen masks. Berlin had The Bunker (a warren of pitch-black and strobe-strafed catacombs), E-Werk (a disused electrical power-plant), and, most famously Tresor – once the vaulted subterranean safe of a 1920s department store, now a sweat-bath, sardine-crammed with ravers garbed in paramilitary camouflage gear (a fashion started by hardcore warrior DJ Tanith). East Berlin, with its deserted Communist Party premises and derelict warehouses, was infested with illegal parties. Frankfurt, meanwhile, had the Omen and Dorian Gray clubs, and had spawned a distinctive German hardcore sound via labels like PCP (Planet Core Productions) and Force Inc.
I never made it to any of these heavenly hell-holes of Euro-hardcore, but I caught something of the vibe at a regular Saturday night event in Central London called the Breakfast Club. Run by an organization with the vividly evocative name Slime Time (and whose slogan was: ‘fuck off nutty tunes for fuck off nutty ravers’), the Breakfast Club began at 5 a.m. and went on until 11 a.m. Sunday. The atmosphere on the floor was somewhere between a National Front rally and a soccer match. The music was an ambush of sound and fury, cyber-Wagner fanfares, subsonic bass-quake and blaring samples. Juddering, staccato rhythms enforced a new kind of dancing, all twitches and jerks, like disciplined epilepsy. Close-cropped boys danced like they were shadow boxing; some moulded their hands into the shape of cocked pistols and let rip. No wonder the other big hardcore club in the centre of London was called Rage.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 17
