Hardcore’s assault on the pop mainstream continued with slightly less intensity right through to the summer of 1992. Every month, the rave audience hurled an anthem or two up into the higher reaches of the chart. The Prodigy’s ‘Everybody In The Place’ reached Number Two in January, and was kept from the top spot only by the re-release of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. SL2’s proto-jungle smash ‘On A Ragga Tip’ got to Number Two, as did Shut Up and Dance’s ‘Raving I’m Raving’. Hits of varying sizes were scored by Kicks Like A Mule, Isotonik, Seduction, Urban Shakedown, Messiah, Utah Saints, Toxic 2, Praga Khan, Liquid, Skin Up, and Altern 8.
Altern 8 were something like the Slade of techno. Both bands had a penchant for deliberately misspelling their song-titles. In Slade’s case, this was to accentuate their hooligan image (‘Cum On Feel the Noize’, ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ et al), whereas Altern 8 merely sustained the visual pun of their name with track titles like ‘Activ-8’, ‘Hypnotic St-8’, ‘Brutal-8-E’, ‘E-Vapor-8’, ad nauseam. Like Slade, they had a wacky look (chemical warfare protection suits, yellow dust-masks and gas-masks, which cleverly managed to turn techno’s ‘faceless anonymity’ into a marketable image), and like Slade, their rabble-rousing sound was a hit with the kids but despised by the crits.
Based in Stafford, Mark Archer and Chris Peat started out as Nexus 21, using a typical home-studio that cost around £1,500 to make Detroit influenced techno for Network. When they shifted their sound to boombastic bass, gimmicky samples and looped breaks, Archer and Peat invented Altern 8 as a jokey alter-ego, in order to keep Nexus 21’s reputation clean of hardcore’s taint. A Top Three hit in November 1991, ‘Activ-8’ featured a sample of their label boss’s five-year-old daughter (aka MC Crazy Claire) saying ‘nice one, top one, get sorted’ – a blatant reference to getting E’d up that completely bypassed the BBC censors. Appearing on Top of the Pops, Altern 8 got the cameraman to zoom in on the jar of Vicks VapoRub they’d put on top of their sampler: the nudge-nudge, wink-wink equivalent of flaunting a bong or coke spoon on prime time TV. ‘E-Vapor-8’ cheekily compacted two drug references into a single word.
By their own admission, Altern 8 were ‘a cheapskate KLF’. The tabloids lapped up their scams and larks, like their plan to drop ‘Brand E’ Christmas puddings from a hot-air balloon as alms for the poor of Stafford. Chris Peat stood for Parliament on the ‘Hardcore – U Know the Score’ ticket; his manifesto called for compulsory raves for all mankind and proposed that teachers should use megaphones during lessons. Their early tracks ‘Infiltrate 202’ and ‘Frequency’ were crudely exciting, in a lumpen, lowest-common-denominator way. But by the time their debut album/greatest-hits-package Full On: Mask Hysteria came out in the last months of 1992, Altern 8 were already forgotten, like so many teenybopper bands before them.
If Altern 8 were like Slade (who had a run of huge hits, but have left barely a singe mark on rock’s official history), The Prodigy were more like The Sweet or T. Rex. Prodigy 1991 chart smashes ‘Charly’ and ‘Everybody In The Place’ are all teenage rampage and sublimely vacant insurgency. Not only have these popkore classics – universally scorned by hipsters at the time – aged extremely well, but the band went on to enjoy an illustrious future as a sort of cyber-rock band, beloved by studenty music-press readers as well as ravers.
Based in Braintree, Essex, The Prodigy was basically Liam Howlett, a twenty-year-old whizzkid producer blessed with a flair for melody (thanks to classical training in piano) and breakbeat-manipulation skills acquired from his days as a British B-boy. Right from the start, however, The Prodigy was presented as a band: on album sleeves, during live performances, and in the videos, the visual slack was taken up by Howlett’s three buddies Leeroy, Maxim Reality and Keith Flint, whose job it was to leap about and yell stuff at the audience. It was the music that counted, though, and this was classic pop juvenilia, kiddy-kartoon zany-mania dedicated to sheer sensation and mindless kicks. Howlett’s forte was dynamics, bridge, breakdowns, the kinaesthetics of tension and release. Years later, Flint described The Prodigy as ‘buzz music’. This was music whose only subject was its own sensations; hence self-reflexive titles like ‘Hyperspeed’, ‘Wind It Up’, ‘Everybody In The Place (Fairground Mix)’, ‘Full Throttle’, ‘G-Force’.
Following three Top Five hits in a little over a year, The Prodigy’s late 1992 debut album Experience was everything that Altern 8’s Full On: Mask Hysteria failed to be: a commercial success, and an album you could listen to all the way through (as opposed to a patchy collection of the hits-so-far). Yet there was no whiff of compromise: Experience offered an only slightly more polished and hookful version of the breakbeat madness percolating in the rave underground. ‘Ruff In The Jungle Bizness’ namechecked the emergent sub-genre of ‘jungalistic ’ardkore’, while ‘Fire’ buried a sniggery E reference deep in the mix: a sample of an uncouth youth blurting ‘and you’re rushing!!!!’
Despite their exhilarating merger of underground energy and pop appeal, The Prodigy were regarded as hopelessly uncool by tastemakers. Leading dance monthly Mixmag accused Liam and Co of destroying the rave scene (which the club oriented Mixmag disdained anyway) with its late 1991 hit single ‘Charly’. Based around samples taken from a public safety commercial of a cartoon cat’s miaow and a little boy’s voice going ‘Charly says, “always tell your mummy before you go off somewhere” ’, this fabulous track inspired the craze for ‘toytown tekno’: a spate of tracks that sampled kid’s TV themes and combined nostalgic infantilism with cheesy drug innuendos. An early imitator was Shaft’s ‘Roobarb and Custard’, based on the seventies animation series of the same name; ‘rhubarb and custard’ just happened to be a pink-and-yellow brand of E. But the fad really escalated in July 1992. Urban Hype’s ‘A Trip to Trumpton’ (featuring the famous ‘Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb’ sample from a ‘Watch With Mother’ sixties TV programme) got to Number Six, while Smart E’s ‘Sesame’s Treet’ (schoolkids chorusing the ‘Sesame’s Street’ theme, dodgy E-as-candy puns) reached Number 2. By this point, many within the hardcore underground shared Mixmag’s disgust, and the leading labels and producers began to push the music in an anti-commercial direction.
So maybe The Prodigy did kill rave. Certainly, ‘Trumpton’ and ‘Sesame’s’ were the last hardcore hits. In August 1992, Acen’s brilliant ‘Trip II The Moon’ peaked at Number Thirty-eight, while 2 Bad Mice’s ‘Hold It Down/Waremouse’ stumbled just outside the Top Forty. It would be two years before hardcore’s next real hit, when the rereleased ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ by Baby D, would be carried all the way to Number One by a powerful current of rave nostalgia. In the meantime, The Shamen’s own Number One ‘Ebeneezer Goode’ confirmed the sense that rave had turned into a joke. A giant piss-take, the song anthropomorphized Ecstasy as a Dickensian scoundrel who always livens up the party. Despite a chorus of ‘ ’eezer Goode, ’eezer Good’ that sounded suspiciously like advocacy (‘E’s are good’), and a cheeky reference to ‘Vera’s’ (rhyming slang for ‘skins’ or rolling papers, via WW2 singer Vera Lynn), the Shamen disingenuously insisted that the song wasn’t about drugs at all. What else could they say?
Speed Freaks
‘Too much speed is comparable to too much light . . . we see nothing.’
– Paul Virilio, Pure War
During rave’s 1991 – 2 crossover chart explosion, a new form of hardcore was hatching in the underground. Based around hectic breakbeats, dub-reggae bass and sped-up vocal samples, the new style was a hyperkinetic update of the Shut Up And Dance sound, but with a drug-crazed delirium and polyrhythmic density that SUAD never approached.
Urban Shakedown’s ‘Some Justice’, a Top Thirty hit in June 1992, is a classic example: chopped-up, ricochetting breaks, a seismic undertow of sinewave bass, and a monster-riff pulsating in a Morse Code pattern. In 1992, it seemed like there were thousands of underground anthems based around the Morse Code oscillator-riff: DJs Unite’s ‘DJs Unite’, Kaotic Chemistry�
��s ‘Space Cakes’, Weekend Rush’s ‘Desire’, Timelapse’s ‘Sued For A Sample’, Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era’s ‘Peace and Loveism’, to name but a handful. Fusing the staccato aggression of the mentasm stab and the tremulous euphoria of the octave-skipping piano-vamp, the oscillator-riff literally electrifies the listener. Plugged into the music’s alternating current of E-lectricity, you feel like you’re being shocked alive. As 1992 progressed, the Morse Code riff got ever more jittery and convulsive, matching the spastic intricacy of the semaphore patterns carved in the air by speedfreak ravers.
’Ardkore’s oscillator-riff is like the aural equivalent of the strobe’s stop-gap photography effect. Both zap the raver with a series of ultra-intense NOW!s. A staple of the rave lightshow, the strobe’s flicker can trigger epileptic fits in the susceptible. In fact, the ‘disturbed electrical rhythms’ and ‘clouded consciousness’ that characterize epilepsy could be a description of ’ardkore itself! Just before an attack, epileptics are said to feel ‘a special state of happiness, a juvenile exhilaration’ – which sounds just like the MDMA experience. ‘Sublime’ wrote Dostoevsky, a sufferer. ‘For that moment you’d give your whole life . . . At that moment I understood the meaning of that singular expression: there will no longer be time.’ This is the feeling The KLF captured with the title ‘3 AM Eternal’. Indeed the Greeks regarded epilepsy as a sacred malady.
But two terms related to epilepsy are probably closer to rave’s essence. The first is ‘nympholepsy’: an ecstastic frenzy caused by desire of the unattainable. The second is ‘picnolepsy’, theorist Paul Virilio’s term for frequent, incredibly brief ruptures in consciousness, a series of micro-orgasms or ‘tiny deaths’ (as opposed to the ‘little death’ caused by a grand mal seizure). Speed – in the vehicular sense – is the central concept of Virilio’s thought. But you could just as easily read ‘speed’ in his books like The Aesthetics of Disappearance as referring both to amphetamine and to ’ardkore’s ever-escalating tempos.
In 1992, ’ardkore was just one strand of a picnoleptic ‘rush culture’ based around the cult of velocity, ranging from Playstation video-games (another hi-tech leisure device known to trigger epileptic attacks) to the nefarious pastime of ‘joyriding’. The latter was the cause of much public concern in the early nineties; teenage tearaways from lawless council estates had taken to stealing cars and, within a few hours, burning out the engines by subjecting them to violent acceleration, U-turns and other forms of stunt-driving. If neighbours complained about the noise and the danger, they risked getting beaten up. The ‘enterprise culture’ variant on the joyride was ram-raiding: driving the hijacked car through a shop’s plate-glass window and looting the premises. Joyriding, Nintendo, roller-coasters, bungee jumping, ’ard- kore, amphetamine: these hyper-hyper activities all offer a peculiar sexless exhilaration, masculine but distinctly prepubescent.
Speed kills, said the hippies. On the back-cover of 4 Hero’s late 1991 EP ‘The Headhunter’, there’s a cartoon, drawn by the band’s Dego McFarlane, that testifies to an anxiety about ‘ ’ardkore’s ever-escalating beats-per-minute. Three mysterious cloaked figures stare aghast at a gang of grotesquely misshapen mutants: 4 Hero themselves, it transpires. ‘Oh my God!’ says the first stranger. ‘What happened to them?’ The second figure explains: ‘In their race to fuse hip hop and house . . . they obviously overlooked the consequences and side effects of their experiments.’ The third stranger elaborates: ‘. . . in the hunt for diverse head banger beats, they must have reached 135 b.p.m.s and at that stage their physical structure becomes misshappen, unnatural deformities occur.’ Several years later, McFarlane explained to me that 4 Hero felt a real ambivalence about where the cult of velocity was taking them. ‘We started off at about 120 b.p.m. and around “Headhunter” it was getting towards 140 b.p.m. Going to that speed was causing deformations in the music.’ The cartoon was a self-mocking scenario of 4 Hero as ‘B-movie scientists . . . The experiments get out of hand, he does some shit, takes the serum or whatever, and messes himself up . . . Even ourselves, we were saying “Bloody hell, it’s getting fast.” And a lot of people were like “It’s too fast, it’s the wrong speed.” ’
This was the main complaint of the anti-hardcore contingent: the music was too fast to dance to, it just didn’t make sense. At the end of 1991, the average rave tune was around 125 b.p.m.; by the last months of 1992, it was reaching speeds of 150 b.p.m. plus. DJs were crankin’ tunes up to +8 using the pitch-adjust control on their turntables; serious speedfreaks went further, doctoring the variable resistor inside the Technics decks which controls the pitch-adjust, thereby enabling the turntable to go to +20 or higher. ’Ardkore was hurtling into the unknown, going faster than anyone had ever gone before, and all because of the malign drug/tech logic of amphetamine and speed-cut E. Using his alter-ego Tek 9, Dego McFarlane released ‘You Got To Slow Down’, a sort of speeding ticket to a scene that was seriously overdoing the stimulants, the song pivoting around a soul-diva sample that leaps up the octaves until it’s a helium-shrill shriek. This ‘repulsive distortion’ (to quote the ‘Headhunter’ cartoon) mirrored the soul-warping effects of amphetamine and too many E’s.
Such sped-up ‘squeaky vocals’ were one of the defining characteristics of 1992 ’ardkore. In order to get their vocal samples to run in synch with the 140 b.p.m. breakbeats, producers started to play the soundbites on a higher octave on their sampling keyboards; this compressed the timespan of the vocal snatch so that it slotted into the frenetic rhythm, but it had the side effect of creating the ‘cartoon chipmunk’ voices that were such an insurmountable irritation-factor for outsiders. Speed grievously unbalanced rave music’s frequency-spectrum; the mid-range dropped right out, leaving just bowel-quaking bass and ultra-shrill treble. The female vocals – sampled from ethereal vocalists like Kate Bush, Liz Frazer, Stevie Nicks, Tasmin Archer, or soul-diva acappellas from classic house tracks – were high-pitched anyway. Modulated on the keyboard, looped into inhuman swoon-machines, these particles of passion hurtled beyond the syntax of desire into a realm of abstract urgency, closer to fireworks than ‘soul’. Moulded like plasma, they became a barrage of intensities without pretext or context, shudders and shivers that were not so much inhuman as infra-human: elf-chatter, astral babytalk, Martian doowop. And these swoony helium-vocals were a huge hit with the punters; not only did they mirror the drugged intensities pulsing inside the raver’s body, they actively triggered and amplified the E-rush.
Inadvertantly avant-garde, the chipmunk voices sounded hysterical, in both the medical (over-excited emotions, uncontrollable impulses) and humorous senses of the word. They brought a cartoony absurdism to techno, puncturing the pompous piety of the Detroit purists. Those who complained that ’ardkore wasn’t ‘proper techno’ had a point; while the purists followed Detroit in fixating on the supposedly more ‘musical’ synthesizer, ’ardkore was sampladelic music, based around a collage mess-thetic. You could see the joins, which was so much more postmodern and exciting. Your typical ’ardkore track was a mish-mash of incongruous textures (spooky ectoplasm rubbing up against gimmicky cartoon gibberish) and incompatible moods (mystic, manic, macabre). By 1992, hardcore was a bizarre composite of rush-activating elements – Beltram stabs, Italo-piano riffs, breakbeats, melodramatic strings, sped-up ultra-melismatic vocals and dub bass. These stylistic fragments shared only one thing: welded together, they enhanced the senti-MENTAL sensation of buzzing on speed-cut Ecstasy, its oxymoronic blend of aggression and open-hearted tenderness. Fusing the urge to surge and the urge to merge, ’ardkore created a raging oceanic feeling.
’Ardkore’s vulgar approach to sampling always makes me think of cargo cults: hallucinating the sublime and otherworldly in all manner of pop-cultural jetsam. I’m thinking of tracks like NRG’s ‘I Need Your Lovin”, which made the hardest of hearts melt to that hideously soppy Korgis’ ballad ‘Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometimes’, or the Payback track that transformed the EastEnders theme into a John Cage ur
ban-gamelan percussion piece, or DJ Seduction’s ‘Sub Dub’, which sampled folk-rock maiden Maddy Prior’s dulcet-toned reverie of walking through ‘rushes and through briars’ to a field where ‘lambs do sport and play’. When it came to making music, ’ardkore youth seemed to have no preconceptions and no discrimination (in the sense of prejudice as much as discernment). If a noise or riff could be made to work in a track, they’d nick it. Listening to the latest torrent of white-labels on the pirate stations, I’d imagine these hyped-up teenagers rifling through their elder brothers’ or parents’ record collection looking for nifty samples.
’Ardkore was avant-lumpen: the subculture’s general impulse towards druggy disorientation required that initially recognizable soundbites be distorted, debased, rendered alien. The sampler worked as an estrangement device, a deracination machine, producing sonorities whose physical origin was increasingly impossible to trace. But unlike the traditional conception of an avant-garde, with its heroic auteurs and lonely pioneers striding out into the unknown, ’ardkore’s creativity operated on the collective, macro-level of the entire genre: a syndrome Brian Eno calls ‘scenius’, as opposed to ‘genius’. When anyone came up with a new idea, it was instantly ripped off a hundred times. Inspired errors and random fucking about produced new riffs and noises, ‘mutations’ that entered the dancefloor eco-system and were then inscribed in the music’s DNA-code.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 19
