Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  As jungle bunkered down into a self-sufficient London underground, it developed something of a siege mentality and a sense of persecution. Following the spate of cutesy Prodigy-copyist hits in 1992 based on kids-TV theme tunes (‘Trip To Trumpton’, ‘Sesame’s Treet’ et al), dance-mags like Mixmag had proclaimed the death of rave and cold-shouldered hardcore into a long phase of media black-out. During 1993, jungle sustained itself through its infrastructure of pirate radio small independent labels, dingy, off-the-beaten-track clubs and specialist record shops like Lucky Spin, Blackmarket, Unity and De Underground.

  The result was a renegade underground economy that ran in the face of all the ‘common sense’ business notions adhered to by the music industry in the nineties. In defiance of the hegemony of the CD, jungle was oriented around vinyl. The 12-inch was an end-in-itself, not an advert for the album (which barely existed anyway). 12-inches were bought mostly by DJs, professional and aspiring; fans bought DJ mix-tapes, available at specialist stores, street markets or by mail order, rather than purchase the few shoddy compilations available. Cheaper still, they taped hours of cost-free cut ’n’ mix off the pirate stations.

  The mix-tape and the pirate radio bootleg were so popular because of jungle’s other major break with record biz logic: at any given moment, a huge proportion of the music that’s hot in the clubs cannot be purchased as commercially available vinyl. This is because of the thrall of the dubplate. Producers give influential DJs a pre-release version of a track on DAT, recorded straight from their home studio. The DJ presses up a metal acetate at his own expense (around £30), which lasts about 25 to 40 plays. The dub-plate is a Jamaican idea: seventies sound-systems pressed up their own tracks in order to outdo their rivals. Similarly, jungle’s top DJs are desperate for exclusives to spin, and spend £200 plus a week on dubplates; these might be their own productions, or tracks by other artists who feel an affinity for the DJ’s style. Dubplates are also a way of testing out a new track on a club sound-system, of seeing how the crowd respond and what scope there is for finetuning the record. This sounds ‘democratic’, but unfortunately the net effect of the dubplate system is that fans are tantalized for months (sometimes as long as a year!) until the track’s official release, by which time DJs have stopped playing the tune; some dubplates never get issued at all. Mix-tapes are therefore the only way to get hold of the latest tunes.

  Like hip hop, jungle’s anti-corporate, pro-underground ideology was in no way proto-socialist. Rather, it concerned the struggle of smaller capitalist units (independent labels – often a crew of DJ/ producers surrounding an engineer with a home-studio set-up) to prevent their ‘subcultural capital’ (music) being co-opted by larger capitalist units (the mainstream record industry). What gave the junglistic producers/labels their edge was their ability to respond with greater speed and flexibility to the fluctuating demands of the dance-floor audience than the major labels ever could.

  Situated in the fuzzy interzone between the criminal, the anarcho-capitalist and the anarcho-collectivist, jungle was by early 1994 firmly established as a self-sufficient economy, with no need of the outside world’s support. So when the outside world started paying attention that summer, the junglist community didn’t quite know how to respond. Having built up such an armature of wariness and suspicion, the scene was torn between its desire for recognition and paranoid fears of misrepresentation and co-optation.

  One Sunday in June 1994, just as jungle was beginning to make the national newspapers, I went to a club called Thunder and Joy. At one point, I thought I heard the MC calling out to ‘alla the journalists’. Of course, he really said ‘junglists’, but the aural hallucination was forgivable; only minutes earlier, he’d been railing against ‘saboteurs and perpetrators’. It was the week that the media had gone jungle crazy, and on the pirates, MCs had been simmering with rage about one newspaper’s gross misrepresentation of the scene.

  A month later, and the pirate MCs were dissing The Face for printing General Levy’s boast that ‘I’m runnin’ jungle’. An opportunist interloper from dancehall reggae, Levy provided the vocals to ‘Incredible’, a collaboration with jungle producer M-Beat; the track eventually became jungle’s first (and so far only) Top Ten hit. In response to Levy’s bragging, a cabal of top junglists banded together as The Committee with the intention of ensuring that jungle was covered ‘correctly’. The first step taken by the Committee (aka the Council) was a boycott on ‘Incredible’, which rapidly escalated into further boycotts against DJs who carried on playing the track, promoters who booked Levy to perform PAs, DJs who continued to play for those promoters, and so on, ad absurdum. Legend has it that a posse was also sent out to corner Levy in a nightclub, where some kind of retribution was exacted. True or not, an abject apology from the General soon materialized in the Letters Page of The Face. And guess what? He blamed the media, claiming his quotes had been taken out of context.

  For one brief moment, while the media spotlight focused on the scene and the record companies began to wave chequebooks, every junglist was united in hatred and resentment of General Levy. But almost immediately, jungle’s musical tangle of roots and futurism (to misquote Phuture Assassins’s classic ‘Roots ’N Future’) began to unravel. The scene began to be torn apart by its divided impulses: underground retrenchment versus crossover seduction, ghettocentricity versus gentrification.

  ELEVEN

  MARCHING INTO MADNESS

  GABBA AND HAPPY

  HARDCORE

  Outside a grim hangar on the outskirts of Arnhem, north-east Holland, godfearing Calvinists are handing out leaflets to ravers. They’re on a mission to save young souls. Inside, it’s a hellzone of sound and fury, a Hieronymus Bosch horrorscape of grimacing faces and neo-medieval grotesquerie. Every other T-shirt is emblazoned with imagery that celebrates death, destruction and the dark side: skulls, axe-wielding goblins, slogans like ‘Hades’, ‘Hard As Hell’, ‘Rotterdam Terror Corps’.

  And the music? Imagine death-swarm synthesizers droning ominously like bombers over Dresden. Imagine a jackhammer beat that pounds as hard as a heart overdosing on adrenalin and steroids. This is gabba, the ultra-fast, super-aggressive form of hardcore techno developed by the Dutch in the early nineties, which has since spread as an underground sound throughout the world. Above all, gabba’s berserker frenzy seems to plug into the Viking race-memory of ginger-pubed peoples across Northern Europe, from Scotland and Northern Ireland to Germany, the Netherlands and Austria.

  For hipsters and ‘discerning folk’ of all stripes, gabba is a funkless, frenetic frightmare, the ultimate bastardization of techno. But experience has taught me that when all right-thinking people agree something is beyond the pale, utterly devoid of merit, that’s precisely when you should start paying attention – for it’s usually an indication that something interesting is going on. That’s why I’m in Arnhem for Nightmare, Holland’s ruffest rave.

  The story of gabba begins in 1991 – 2, with Second Phase’s ‘Mentasm’, the ‘Belgian hoover’ tracks by T99, Holy Noise and 80 Aum, and Mescalinum United’s ‘We Have Arrived’. The latter – a stormtrooper stampede with a blaring bass-blast of a riff – was produced by The Mover, the shadowy figure behind Frankfurt’s darker-than-thou PCP label.

  What the Dutch added to the ‘Mentasm’/Mescalinum sound was extra stomp: a distorted Roland 909 kick-drum, running at insanely fast tempos ranging from 180 to 250 b.p.m. When gabba fans chant ‘need a bass!’, they’re really talking about the trampoline-like boing of the distorted kick-drum, the piledriving thud-thud-thud that kickstarts the dance. Pure gabber is totally percussive/concussive. Every musical element functions rhythmically, yet the rhythm is simplistic; we’re talking multiple tiers of four-to-the-floor, as opposed to polyrhythmic interplay. The closer you listen, though, the more you appreciate the degrees of invention within gabba’s almost preposterously narrow sonic and rhythmic spectrum. And the more you thrill to its visceral blast.

  As well as a s
ound, gabba rapidly became a subculture. Pronounced with a guttural, phlegm-rattling ‘gah’, gabba was originally Dutch Yiddish for ‘best mate’. But the word came to mean ‘hooligan’ or ‘ruffneck’ – ‘a guy who is low-class, maybe jobless’, says DJ – producer Darkraver. Rotterdam’s proletarian youth flipped the derogatory term around, transforming it into a badge of pride. Regional antagonism and underclass resentment fused in a fierce but tongue-in-cheek rivalry with Amsterdam, R’dam’s enemies both in football (Feynoord versus Ajax) and in music (Amsterdam’s tasteful house scene versus R’dam’s raucous hardcore). The very first gabba anthem, created by DJ Paul Elstak, was Euromasters’ ‘Where The Fuck Is Amsterdam?’

  Although gabba sounds like the most Aryan music this side of death-metal, in some ways it is Holland’s own equivalent to hip hop. Many of the top producers – Elstak, Darkraver, Robert Meijer of High Energy, Francois Prijt of Chosen Few – started as hip hop DJs. Gabba tracks often use samples from the Def Jam rap/metal crossover era, like Chuck D’s boast/threat ‘my Uzi weighs a ton’.

  Mindwar

  Gabba is music for the sensation-junkie, for kids reared on Nintendo, Hellraiser, Manga comics, and Freddie Krueger. Raves like Nightmare create a sensory overkill that blurs pleasuredome and terrordome, using lasers, intelligent lighting, and mega-bass sound-systems to create a hallucinogenic blitzkrieg of light and noise that recalls the nocturnal, up-river battle scenes in Apocalypse Now. Gabba’s militaristic imagery – band names like Search and Destroy, Annihilator, Strontium 9000, track titles like ‘Iron Man’, ‘Dominator’, ‘The Endzone’, ‘Dark Knight’, compilations like Battlegrounds – recalls heavy metal’s super-speedy, sadomasochistic sub-genres such as thrash, death-metal and grindcore.

  How did gabba’s militant sounds and aggressive attitudes emerge out of hardcore rave’s smiley-faced benevolence and gloriously soppy sentimentality? Ecstasy is the androgynizing drug. But regular and excessive usage causes E to degenerate into little more than amphetamine – not chemically, but in terms of its psychological effect. Revving up motor-activity, amphetamine literally mechanizes and motorizes the human body, resulting in ‘punding’: compulsive, repetitive and stereotyped actions, nervous tics. Amphetamine is a cyborgizing drug: hence speedfreak slang like getting ‘wired’, ‘crank’, ‘motorhead’.

  Amphetamine also has historical connections with warfare, where its adrenalizing, insomniac and hyper-vigilant ‘flight-or-fight’ effects became extremely useful. Millions of pills were given to troops during the Second World War, to fight fatigue, boost morale and promote aggression. After the Second World War, speed was the drug-of-choice for veterans who couldn’t adjust to civilian life (Hell’s Angels, truckers), and for kids who were bored senseless (Mods got ‘blocked’ on purple hearts and black bombers before battling the Rockers on the beaches of Brighton). Today, the bosozoku – Japan’s delinquent ‘speed tribes’ – fuse mod and rocker with their greaser image, their fondness for listening to cassettes of their turbo-charged bikes revving up and for getting wired on injectable methamphetamine.

  As Ecstasy’s androgynizing powers began to fade, so there was a gradual remasculation of rave culture, and a militarization of the music and imagery. In England, ’ardkore turned into jungle; in Scotland and Northern Europe, hardcore turned into gabba. In both cases, the tempo rose dramatically to match the overdriven metabolisms of a new generation of speedfreaks – in gabba’s case, rising to 180, 200, 250, even 300 b.p.m.

  All this goes some way towards explaining gabba’s aura of mass rally and proto-fascistic brotherhood. With its sensations of velocity, fixation and aimless belligerence, gabba offers all the pleasures of war without the consequences; it’s an intransitive war, a ‘Mindwar’ as one track by Annihilator puts it. Bruce Sterling coined the term ‘military/entertainment complex’ to describe the way that technological spin-offs from military research feed into the leisure industry, from video-games to virtual reality. These toys originated in the flight-simulator developed by the military to train jet-fighter pilots. Playstation games like Mortal Kombat and post-rave styles like jungle and gabba are to virtual reality what cocaine is to crack. By stoking an appetite for ever-escalating doses of hyper-stimulation, they recalibrate the nervous system in preparation for insertion into the virtual domain.

  If the crack metaphor seems hyperbolic, consider the way that TV ads for video-games play on the addictive nature of velocity and violence, the two sensations they offer the player. One commercial shows a mother begging her sallow, red-eyed teenage son to ‘please try to go outside today, honey’; with its murky gloom, and its fixated occupants, the living room suddenly takes on the atmosphere of a crackhouse. The game Zoop is advertised as ‘America’s largest killer . . . of time’. The commercial shows a boy doing cold-turkey in a padded cell, twitching and puking. Peering through the peephole, the doctor asks ‘How long’s he been playing?’; the nurse answers ‘Seventeen straight days,’ setting up an association with the speedfreak’s sleep-defying ‘run’. Here is Paul Virilio’s ‘becoming-speed’ or cyber-theorist Arthur Kroker’s ‘speed-flesh’: a sexless euphoria that bypasses the adolescent’s hormonally-troubled body to recover the prepubescent boy’s fantasy world of explosions and pyromania.

  Bald Terror

  Not only is gabba exactly the sort of music that really ought to be playing in the background of all those carnographic video-games, but at Nightmare, I realize that the bombardment of noise and light, the 200 b.p.m. tempos and air-scything lasers, are designed to make the gabba kid feel like he’s actually inside a video-game. And like Nintendo, gabba is a mostly male subculture (an early classic of the genre was Sperminator’s ‘No Woman Allowed’!)

  The classic gabba boy has a small, shaven head with bright pink ears sticking out from the skull, making him look like an alien. His pale, gaunt, speedfreak torso peeks out from an open ‘Aussie’, a gaudily patterned tracksuit top that looks like a tie-dye shell-suit, but which can cost up to £500. The classic gabba girl combines flaxen-haired Dutch cuteness with skinhead menace; a common look is a ponytail dangling over a shaved patch of scalp from the ears right round the back of the head. Some gabba boys go for a similar semi-Mohican effect, sporting Oriental-style topknots and pigtails.

  As for the gabba dance, it’s somewhere between the punk pogo and Morris dancing. At Nightmare, I marvel all night at the kids’ incredibly intricate, absurdly fast footwork, which resembles kickboxing. How do they manage to keep their footing on the sweat and soft-drink soaked floor? Other gabbas prefer to simply rage hard, slicing and dicing the air, growling and grinding their teeth. But the vibe isn’t intimidating, because these kids are self-absorbed almost to the point of autism, lost in music and mayhem. One guy, who’s skip-gliding across the floor in a trance, collides with me and goes haywire like a spinning coin that’s hit a chair leg.

  The strange, almost fey grace of the gabba dance is all down to Ecstasy and amphetamine, which enable dancers to lock into the groove and keep up with gabba’s insane tempo. Everywhere at Nightmare, I can see the symptoms of excessive intake of E’s and whizz – the crazed, blazing impudence in the eyes, facial expressions contorted midway between snarl and smile, tongues jutting out of mouths, and grimacing caused by the jaw-tension that’s a side effect of Ecstasy. One guy’s pulling such monstrous, gargoyle faces, I can almost hear his jaw-bone cracking.

  Sven, an amiable, cleancut fellow, chats me up. Like almost everyone in Holland he speaks fluent English, but he prefers to communicate by writing in my notepad. His friend Wimpi tries to participate, but is so cabbaged on E that he takes several minutes to work out which end of the pen is for writing, then gives up after scrawling an unreadable hieroglyph. Sven tells me he’s very proud of gabba because it’s a uniquely Dutch music. He says he likes ‘relaxing gabba, the kind they’re playing tonight’. This strike me as bizarre, considering that most people, most techno fans even, would be driven screaming out the door within minutes. And Sven admits that, �
��No, the scene would not be the same without the drugs.’

  In the spirit of the occasion, and in order to really feel the music, I score an E for twenty guilder (about £8), gulp it down and wait for the rush. Ecstasy makes you more vulnerable to the music; defences knocked down, you start to merge with the noise instead of resisting it. Above all, E brings your metabolism up to speed, makes your insides buzz as fiercely as the swarming killer-bee riffs. Swept up in gabba’s cyclone of velocity and victim-less ultraviolence, I feel like I’m inside a forcefield, my flesh seared and irradiated with demonic energy.

  Gabba has a terrible reputation. For some, it’s ‘kill your mother’ music, nasty noise for trainee psychopaths. For others, it’s ‘Nazi techno’. When the scene first emerged, many were quick to equate the gabbas’ cropped hair with white-power skinheads, a connection helped by the Feynoord supporters’ unfortunate habit of hurling anti-Semitic chants at their Ajax opponents (a reference to Amsterdam’s historical role as a Jewish merchant centre). In October 1997, the Daily Star somewhat belatedly discovered England’s tiny gabba scene. Grossly exaggerating the threat it posed to British youth, it published an exposé bearing headlines and captions like ‘Bop Till You Drop . . . Dead’, ‘Nazi Gabba Hell’, and ‘Jack Boots and Birds: Nazis have adopted sick Gabber’.

  Gabba’s aggression does seem to hold an attraction for the extreme right; I’ve heard stories of Austrian neo-fascists doing drill to gabba’s regimented rhythms, of jackbooted and swastika-adorned thugs at Italian hardcore events. To counter this, Netherlands labels often print slogans like ‘United Gabbers Against Racism and Fascism’ or ‘Hardcore Against Hate and Violence’ on their record sleeves, while Dutch fans call themselves ‘bald gabbas’ to distinguish themselves from white-power skinheads.