Most of the time, though, gabba ignites a firestorm of belligerence with no specific target. Despite an emotional spectrum ranging from hostility to paranoia (song titles like ‘I’m the Fuck You Man’, ‘Mad As Hell’, ‘I’ll Show You My Gun’), there’s rarely any tension or fights at Dutch or Scottish raves. Instead, gabba kids direct their aggression at their own bodies, punishing their nervous systems with noise and drugs. In the early days of gabba, the big buzzword was ‘hakke’ – pronouced ‘hack-uh’, it sounds like ‘hardcore’ but means to strike someone with an axe. Echoing British rave slang like ‘sledgehammered’ and ‘caned’, ‘hakke’ captures the concussive nature of gabba’s quest for oblivion.
What redeems gabba is its playful sense of humour. The logo of the K. N. O. R. label is a horned demon in nappies, while Babyboom’s mascot is a nappy-clad infant giving you the finger: both images nicely blend rave’s regression with heavy metal’s puerility. Funniest of all are the series of T-shirts put out by the Forz label: a teddy bear with a submachine gun, a teddy wielding the sort of Christmas pudding bomb clutched by nineteenth-century anarchists, and most tasteless of the lot, one where Teddy’s blown his head clean off with a pistol. Stuffing, rather than blood, is spattered on the floor, while the slogan reads ‘Game Over’.
As well as Nintendo, gabba always makes me think of Bill Buford’s book on football hooliganism, Among the Thugs, and specifically that moment he describes when the mob becomes conscious of its collective power, and wills itself over the brink between normality and running amok. Gabba is arrested at just that brink of adrenalinized pandemonium. The missing link between thrash metal and gay Hi-NRG disco, gabba is the ultimate masculinist music. A transsexual once said that when she started taking testosterone, ‘it felt like mainlining rock ’n’ roll’. Suffice to say that if she’d doubled the dose, the sensation would be like gabba.
The ugly side of the music’s sado-masochismo is audible later on at Nightmare when technical difficulties led to the bizarre spectacle of Gabba Unplugged. As technicians fiddle beneath the DJ’s decks, the burglar-masked MC leads the crowd in a chant: ‘Happy / Is For Homos’. This is a reference to the poppy, sentimental strain of ‘happy gabba’ or ‘fun-core’ which has recently taken the Dutch charts by storm, and even scored a Top Ten smash in Britain with Technohead’s irresistibly zany pro-marijuana anthem ‘I Wanna Be A Hippy’. The chant also seems like a diss to a DJ who performed earlier tonight, Paul Elstak – the Rotterdam producer who invented gabba but who has recently disgusted the scene’s diehards by going cheesy and chuneful with hits like ‘Rainbow in the Sky’ and ‘Life Is Like A Dance’.
Backstage, Elstak shrugs off the anti-happy backlash, which has resulted in answer songs like ‘Paul Elstak, We Love You No More’ (a dig at his soppy chart smash ‘Luv U More’). The way he explains it, gabba had to mellow out at some point. ‘By 1994, the music was too hard, too fast. Fewer girls were dancing, and we lost the party atmosphere. And kids were taking too many drugs to keep up with the speed.’ Elstak and producers like Darkraver and Gizmo picked up on the lighter, less frenetic hardcore sound invented by Scottish producer Scott Brown, and kickstarted the happy-gabba explosion.
‘Happy’ was also a bid for respectability, after drug-related deaths had thrown the scene into disrepute. In Rotterdam, says Elstak, ‘one party was cancelled ’cos the authorities saw the flyer for the event and it was very aggressive, lots of blood and guts’. One reason Nightmare has gone on the road to towns like Arnhem is that raves are being refused licences in Rotterdam at the moment. And then there’s the Church, whose animosity is directed not just at gabba but all forms of rave music. According to Technohead’s Michael Wells, the Church ‘feels threatened because it used to be where people turned for meaning and a sense of belonging’. For European youth, rave has usurped that role.
Bounce to the Beat
‘I lost my religion the day I discovered raving.’ So says Chris, a nineteen-year-old lapsed Catholic and confirmed hardcore disciple. We’re hanging out in the chill-out zone of Rezerection, Scotland’s biggest rave, and – chiming in with the Christian theme – it’s 3 a.m. on Easter Sunday morning.
Chris, his fair hair cropped in the Caesar-cut that UK hardcore boys favour, tells me that rave is ‘a way of life, a culture’. It’s a way-of-life that demands sacrifices; when he was working, he spent £3,000 in one year on tickets, drugs, transport, and now that he’s on the dole, events like Rez require weeks of planning and scrimping. And drugs are an inseparable part of that way of life. ‘They help you forget all your problems for one night,’ says Chris. I’m told that some of the kids at Rez take an E every hour, sometimes as many as twelve a night. Chris says he’s been on a few benders, and once necked ten pills. ‘But that way you end up dancing yourself into an early grave,’ he adds. This idea sometimes surfaces in the music itself, in sick-humorous song titles like ‘Friday Night Can Kill You’, ‘I Died In My Teens’ and ‘I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight’ (which samples the soppy AOR hit of the same title by Cutting Crew). Tonight, though, Chris is accentuating the positive, telling me ‘I class everybody at a rave as a friend,’ with a believer’s gleam in his eye.
Although Chris says that ‘Rotterdam died when Elstak started to go cheesy,’ Rezerection is full of testaments to the peculiar Scottish cult of all things Dutch. Everywhere there are T-shirts bearing the logos of the top Netherlands gabba labels – K. N. O. R., Ruffneck, Mokum, Dwarf, Terror Traxx, Babyboom. A few kids even sport Feynoord team-colours. The music, though, is not the kind of ‘kill-your-mother’ gabba played at Nightmare, but the fun-core strain that so aggravates the diehards. The big buzzwords in Scotland are ‘bouncy’ (one of Chris’s friends says, ‘I’m just off for a wee bounce’) and ‘cheesy’ (like gabba, an insult transformed into a positive term). With its rinky-dink keyboard refrains, spine-tingly riffs and anthemic choruses, happy-core is almost disturbingly fixated. A lot of tunes recall oom-pah music or Jewish klezmer (in fact there’s actually a gabba version of the wedding jig ‘Havanagila’); others have carousel-like fairground melodies. That sense of kiddy-kartoon frolic is completed by the whirligig, funhouse hall-of-mirrors and fruit machines in the chill-out zone.
In its own senti-MENTAL way, fun-core is just as extreme as the more sadistic kinds of gabba. And the Scottish kids certainly match the Dutch for sheer mania. Stripped to the waist, tattooed and sweaty, the lads gurn like heavy metal bands posing for a photo shoot. Wee lassies twitch ’n’ twirl like clockwork toys wound up too fast, their hands inscribing semaphore patterns at hyperspeed. Everywhere the trappings of UK rave’s golden era circa 1991 – 2 are visible – gas masks, white gloves, floppy hats and jester caps, baby’s dummies, fluorescent light-sticks (which cost two quid each and last a mere six hours). And the golden age’s infectious bonhomie is still alive and kickin’: total strangers come up and shake my hand, sharing your soft drink or water is de rigeur.
By 5 a.m., though, the euphoria is giving way to battle-fatigue. And you start to notice the kids who look fed up because they can’t afford another pill, or have simply caned the E so hard for so long that the chemical’s lovey-dovey effect has worn off. It’s then that you become alert to the dark side of E culture. In the chill-out room, there’s a booth offering Lifeline’s drug education leaflets, chirpy comics that try to engage the kids on their own level, with cartoons about Temazepam Tom, a cat with a wooden leg (he got gangrene from melting the sleeping pill, popularly known as ‘jellies’, and injecting it), and Peanut Pete comics that illustrate the dangers of paranoia and overheating. In the paramedic support room, kids suffering the effects of ‘snidey E’s’ or over-indulgence huddle wrapped in blankets with plastic puke pots on their laps. Despite the fig-leaf of intensive drug searches on entrance, big-scale raves like Rez are highly organized spaces designed for kids to freak out, with safety nets provided if they take it too far.
As in Holland, Scotland’s spate of E-related deaths gave hardcore a disreputable imag
e and prompted a clampdown by the authorities. According to Jamie Raeburn of Scottish rave mag Clubscene, ‘Hardcore clubbing is now almost dead.’ There’s the Metro in Ayr, Nosebleed in Fyfe, and in Stirling, the Fubar (it stands for ‘Fucked Up Beyond All Repair’). But all the other Scottish clubs are pushing the mellow, upmarket sound of house, because they associate hardcore with ‘schemie’ hooligans, i.e., kids from deprived housing schemes. The big raves, like Rezerection, keep faith with the hardcore massive. ‘People come to see bands like Ultra-Sonic, Q-Tex, Q-FX, ’cos they associate them with doing their first E’s!’ says Raeburn.
Beneath Scottish techno’s bouncy, fun-core aura, there’s an undercurrent of punk rage. Take ‘No D. S. Allowed’ by The Rhythmic State, a tirade against the Drug Squad, who have maintained an intimidating presence at raves ever since the wave of drug deaths at Hangar 13 in 1994. (A common paranoid delusion of wired-and-tired Scottish ravers is that the guy next to them is an undercover DS agent.) “No D. S.” is the ultimate two-finger-salute,’ says Raeburn. ‘You can’t blame the kids, really. Most of their clubs are being closed down, the police harass them, pull them out of clubs for having half an E on their person, really abuse them. If “they” – DJs, the media, and the authorities – are trying to take your music away, you’re gonna tell ’em to fuck off.’
Only the Happiest of People Need Apply
‘I’m pleased to be uncool and happy. It’s like the white gloves . . . You ever seen a white glove raver start a fight? If you hate people who wear white gloves, then basically you’re saying having a good time is crap.’
– Chris Howell of Kniteforce Records
Despite all the Dutch gabba T-shirts at Rez, Scottish hardcore’s allegiances are shifting; several of the DJs playing tonight are from south of the border, where they’re big names on the English ‘happy hardcore’ scene. The difference between happy hardcore and happy gabba is slight: basically, the English tracks have sped-up breakbeats running alongside the stomping four-to-the-floor kick-drum, and at 170 b.p.m., they’re slightly slower than happy-gabba. But the genealogy of happy hardcore is quite different: the scene began as an offshoot of jungle.
Back in 1993, when hardcore plunged into the ‘darkside’, a breakaway faction of DJ – producers like Seduction, Vibes and Slipmatt continued to make celebratory, upful tunes based around hectic breakbeats. By the end of 1994, happy hardcore had coalesced into a scene that operated in parallel with its estranged cousin, jungle, but had its own network of labels, its own hierarchy of DJs, its own circuit of clubs. Labels like Kniteforce, Impact, Remix, Hectic, Slammin’, SMD, Asylum and Universal; DJ – producers like Dougal, Brisk, Sy and Unknown, Force and Styles, Hixxy, DJ Ham, Ramos and Supreme; venues like The Rhythm Station in Aldershot, Die Hard in Leicester, Club Kinetic in Stoke-On-Trent, and Labrynth in East London.
Happy hardcore takes all the elements that jungle purged as too ‘cheesy quaver’ – synth stab-patterns, Italo-house piano vamps, shrieking divas, anthemic choruses – and cubes their epileptic intensity. The euphoria of the original 1992 ’ardkore was tinged with bittersweet poignancy; happy hardcore, by comparison, is relentlessly and ruthlessly upful, with every last hint of ‘darkness’ or ambivalence banished from the music. The atmosphere at predominantly happy-core oriented events like Dreamscape, Hysteria, Helter Skelter and Pandemonium, is akin to a Butlin’s holiday camp: a pleasure prison of enforced jollity.
Ignored by the dance press until 1997, happy hardcore developed its own media. Like their Scottish counterpart M8, these glossy mags – Eternity, Dream and To The Core – have distilled rave ideology down to its populist and democratic essence. Although they contain record reviews and interviews with artists, the bulk of the mags consists of lengthy, relentlessly positive reports on raves and clubs. As well as praising the DJs’ performances, the reviewers compliment the MCs, the scantily clad girl-dancers, the lights ’n’ lasers, the security staff, the toilet facilities, and above all, the crowd for being so up for it. Occasionally, the reviewer might criticize the poor parking facilities or the long queue for admission or the cloakrooms, but only in a goodnatured, apologetic way. More important than the text, though, are the photo spreads. Again, rather than the DJs, these depict the ravers: glassy-eyed and gurning boys, shirts off to expose their skinny-ribbed torsos; girls, dazed and sweaty in their unflatteringly clingy lycra leotards; huddles of friends, red-faced and grinning like maniacs, throwing mad-raver shapes for the camera and tooting their air-horns. Where ‘serious’ dance mags like Mixmag and Muzik frame the DJs as auteurs and cult figures, and barely mention the crowd in their live reviews, the rave-mags treat the audience as the star.
Happy hardcore is huge pretty much anywhere the white rave audience predominates, i.e., not London, where the heavy concentration of hip hop, soul and reggae fans means jungle has more appeal. In large part, happy-core was the result of an exodus of white ravers from the jungle scene, in reaction to the influx of black youth and the attendant mood-change from bonhomie to surly attitude. Grant of Slammin’ Vinyl argued that ‘hardcore used to be a multiracial scene. But now jungle is mostly seen as black. A lot of people who used to be into swingbeat and ragga got into jungle in 1994, and they claim “It’s our music.” So the white kids are saying, “Well you can keep it then, we’ll make our own music.” ’ As well as the racial factor, the other crucial difference between jungle and happy hardcore is purely pharmacological. Junglists have mostly given up pills for ganja; happy hardcore, geared towards the perpetual crescendo of the E-rush, is for the younger kids still going through the MDMA honeymoon.
Because of its defiant cheesiness, most junglists dismiss happy hardcore as mere juvenilia for timewarp kids who haven’t realized that rave’s ‘living dream’ is over. With its rictus-like tone of relentless affirmation, its déjà vu piano chords and synth-stabs that all appear to be anagrams of some primordial, rush-inducing riff, happy hardcore is indeed a bit like dance music’s equivalent to a rockabilly revival: nostalgia for something you never actually lived through.
In other respects, happy hardcore is closer to heavy metal. Both are scenes that just won’t die, because they fulfil very basic and enduring needs for provincial youth. Like metal, happy hardcore is all about keeping the faith and unity-as-uniformity: The happy-core raver’s favourite garment – the identikit black flight-jacket – is like the metalkid’s denim jacket, except that logos for labels like Kniteforce and Slammin’ have replaced Iron Maiden and Motorhead patches. Indeed, events like Rezerection, Dreamscape and Desire are highly reminiscent of heavy metal festivals like Castle Donnington. There’s the fetish for video-nasty grotesquerie (the huge inflatable monsters hanging from the hall’s ceiling at Rez), and the overpriced merchandising (T-shirts and hats kids gladly buy to testify to their tribal allegiance). There’s the way hardcore’s obsession with ‘nosebleed’ sub-bass frequencies parallels metal’s love of ‘earbleeding’ decibellage. And the rise of the sleeping pill Temazepam recalls the mandrax and Quaaludes popular with Black Sabbath fans; combined with alcohol, these tranquillizers all induce comatose stupor or mindless violence.
Wargasm
With the English producers restoring the pounding four-beat kick-drum and playing down the breakbeat, by 1996 the stage was set for happy-core’s merger with Scottish ‘bouncy techno’ and Dutch fun-core, to form a single rave-will-never-die sound: in effect, the reintegration of the original pan-European hardcore of 1991, only much faster. But this prospect dismayed a faction of diehard gabba fans for whom hardcore is anti-rave in spirit. This pan-global network of dissidents includes Nasenbluten (German for nosebleed), a terrorcore trio from Newcastle, Northern Australia, who are on a crusade to bring back ‘quality gabba’.
‘It serves Leah Betts right, and Anna Woods too,’ sneers the band’s Mark Newlands, referring to England’s and Australia’s famous Ecstasy fatalities. ‘I never, ever saw hardcore as happy E music. I’m not a happy man, y’know. I’m always grumbling. I’m an absolute
turd . . . The original Rotterdam gabba, stuff by Euromasters and Sperminator, was cold and unpleasant, and it was great. We called our double-EP “100% No Soul Guaranteed” as a riposte to all those people who say gabba is monotonous, inhuman, soul-less. Of course it is! It’s supposed to sound like blast furnaces! In Newcastle, all our relatives work in steel foundries. We’re just trying to reflect our environment.’
Such was Nasenbluten’s sense of betrayal by Paul Elstak’s move towards happy-gabba that the band recorded the infamous ‘Rotterdam Takes It Up The Ass’. The title phrase is sung to the ‘doo-dah, doo-dah’ melody of ‘Camptown Races’, but because the track sampled copyright material by Elstak and turns it against him, Nasenbluten decided not to release it for fear of being sued. ‘We don’t want our label Bloody Fist to go under,’ Mark told me, ‘’cos other Australian hardcore bands depend on us.’ Artists like Embolism, a fourteen-year-old kid with a ‘real chip on his shoulder, you can tell he’s probably gonna grow up to be a serial killer,’ whose ‘This Means Fucking War’ EP was released by Bloody Fist in 1995.
Nasenbluten record their own music in mono on a crap Amiga computer with a puny 8 bit memory. ‘With the Amiga, it’s impossible to get a clean, distortion-free sound,’ Mark enthuses. Typical song titles include ‘Feeling Shit’, ‘Cuntface’, ‘Kill More People’ and ‘Cocksucker’ (which clocks in at a lethal 300 b.p.m.). So what exactly motivated Nasenbluten’s monstrous barrage of puerile vileness, sampled belches, expletives-undeleted abuse and virulent lo-fi noise? Why have they dedicated their lives to this aural atrocity?
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 36
