If you simply equate radicalism with the ostentatious absence of use-value, then the dys-funk-tional convolutions of Squarepusher et al are conceivably more ‘advanced’ than most jungle. Actually, technically speaking, nothing these weirdy-beardy types have done with breaks has beaten drum and bass insiders like Dillinja and 4 Hero at their own game. What the post-rave boffins have done is hijack the metaphor of ‘science’ from jungle and hip hop, and transform it into a sampladelic era synonym for old-fashioned ‘virtuosity’. Prog rock style, they take pride in taking dance music and rendering it undanceable. The trouble with real-world science is that for every Onco-mouse with a human ear grafted into its body or groovy new device for mass destruction, there’s a myriad of non-conclusive experiments: fault-ridden machines, test-tubes full of useless precipitates and cloudy suspensions. Much the same applies to the output of sound-laboratories. In the case of breakbeat science, there’s way too many examples of fiddly, funkless, up-its-own-arse programming (although to be fair, many ‘real’ junglists are getting as anal as the drill and bass posse).
The vogue for the word ‘science’ also suggests that a disembodied and dispassionate detachment is the right way to approach music. What the Squarepusher type artists have responded to and exaggerated ad absurdum is only one aspect of jungle: the music’s complexity. They’ve ignored the feelings the music induces, and the subcultural reasons the sound and the scene came into being. As a result, no matter how superficially startling their form-and-norm-bending mischief sounds, their music feels pale and purposeless compared with music created by the jungle fundamentalists. It is vitiated by being divorced from the context that originally imbued those sounds with resonance. Worse, the whiff of stylistic oneupmanship can be offputting. Plug has been celebrated for ‘fucking with sounds that say “Don’t fuck with me.” ’ Exhibiting astonishing temerity and arrogance, Squarepusher’s Tom Jenkinson described his relationship with jungle in terms of the difference between ‘people who pioneer and lead, and people who form groups’. But this is nothing compared with the brinksmanship of Oval, who set themselves above and against all electronic music (yet are dependent on its distribution network and receptive audience).
No amount of wilful eccentricity can impart the lustre of meaning to music; that comes only when a community takes a sound and makes it part of a way of life. So while I marvel at the art-tekno boffins’ efforts, often I feel curiously unmoved, physically or emotionally. Fascinated but uninvolved, I find myself wondering whether anti-purism is just another ghetto, and whether ‘freedom’ is just another word for ‘nothing much at stake’.
SEVENTEEN
IN OUR ANGELHOOD
RAVE CULTURE AS
SPIRITUAL
REVOLUTION
By the late nineties, the British media had woken up to the fact that the nation contained two societies: the traditional leisure culture of alcohol and entertainment (spectactor sports, TV) versus the more participatory, effusive culture of all-night dancing and Ecstasy. The clash between old Britain and young Britain was dramatized to hilarious effect in an episode of Inspector Morse entitled ‘Cherubim and Seraphics’. The plot – basically Morse versus ’ardkore – concerns a series of mysterious teenage deaths which appear to be connected to a new drug called Seraphic. Despite its overt ‘just say no’ slant, the episode mostly works as an exhilarating advert for Ecstasy culture. (Literally, in so far as Morse’s remark to his detective partner – ‘It’s a rave, Lewis!’ – was sampled and used as a soundbite by a pirate station.)
‘What’s the great attraction?’ Morse beseeches the air, as he and Lewis join a convoy of vehicles heading to an illegal rave, their car radio tuned to a pirate station. Yet Morse perceptively notes that hardcore is ‘eclectic, a collage, magpie music’; earlier, listening to a track, the fusty classical buff had been horrified to recognize samples from ‘The Hallelujah Chorus – conducted by Sir Adrian Bolt!’ Old music, the dead wood of English culture, is vitalized by sampling, funked up by programmed rhythm.
This collision of old and new Englands reaches its peak when the detective duo arrive at the stately home where the rave, called Cherub, is taking place. Morse drones on about the noble history of the building; inside, the kids have transformed it into a future wonderland. For a TV programme, the recreation of rave’s sexless bacchanalia is remarkably convincing and intoxicating. Sure, the crooked lab researcher responsible for the Seraphic drug gets his comeuppance; fleeing the rave, he crashes his car into a tree and dies. But the episode ends by allowing the sixteen-year-old girlfriend of one Seraphic casualty to utter a paean to Ecstasy: ‘You love everyone in the world, you want to touch everyone and tell them you love them.’ And the ‘just say no’ message is utterly subverted when it is revealed that the teenagers didn’t kill themselves because the drug unbalanced their minds; rather, having glimpsed heaven-on-earth, they decided that returning to reality would be too much of a comedown. Who wouldn’t want to give E a try after that? And who would possibly side with decrepit Morse, with his booze and classical CDs, against the shiny happy people of Generation E?
The Politics of Ecstasy
This episode of Inspector Morse signalled a dawning awareness in the media that recreational drug culture had become firmly installed in Britain during the early nineties, and was now omnipresent almost to the point of banality. Every weekend, anywhere from half-a-million to two million people under the age of thirty-five were using psychedelics and stimulants. This geographically dispersed but spiritually connected network of Love-Ins, Freak-Outs and All-Night Raves constituted a Woodstock every week (or rather Woodstock-and-Altamont rolled into one, given that Ecstasy’s dark side was starting to reveal itself to ravers). Despite the abiding myth that E isn’t as good as it used to be, anecdotal evidence suggests that Ecstasy pills are stronger than ever, while the UK price of the drug has plummeted from twenty pounds in the late eighties to around ten pounds in 1997. The question, then, is this: has rave proved itself a form of mass bohemia, or is it merely a futuristic update of traditional youth leisure, where the fun-crazed weekend redeems the drudgery of the working week? What are the politics of Ecstasy culture?
When it comes to Ecstasy’s social effects, the most obvious is the way it has utterly transformed youth leisure in Britain and Europe. Because alcohol muddies the MDMA high, rave culture rapidly developed an anti-alcohol taboo. It could be argued that Ecstasy’s net effect has actually been to save lives, by reducing the number of alcohol-fuelled fights and drink-driving fatalities. Some mutter darkly that it’s pressure from the brewing industry, aghast at declining profits, that lurks behind the British government’s anti-rave legislation.
Like alcohol, Ecstasy removes inhibitions. But because it also diminishes aggression (including sexual aggression), E has had the salutary effect of transforming the nightclub from a ‘cattle market’ and combat-zone to a place where women come into their own and men are too busy dancing and bonding with their mates to get into fights. These benign side-effects have spilled outside clubland. As football fans turned on to E and house music, soccer hooliganism in Britain dropped to its lowest level in five years by 1991 – 2 (although some argue that improved intelligence work and tactics by the police also made a hefty contribution to eliminating violence at games). In Northern Ireland, Ecstasy encouraged fraternization across Catholic – Protestant lines, at least at non-sectarian raves and clubs; this may be one reason why the paramilitaries (who control the drug trade) have been cracking down on dealers.
Generally speaking, Ecstasy seems to promote tolerance. One of the delights of the rave scene at its loved-up height was the way it allowed for mingling across class, race and sex-preference lines. MDMA rid club culture of its clique-ishness and stylistic sectarianism; hence sociologist Sheila Henderson’s phrase ‘luvdup and de-élited’. Rave’s explosive impact in the UK, compared with its slower dissemination in America, may have something to do with the fact that Britain remains one of the most rigidly class-s
tratified countries in the Western world. In many ways, MDMA is an antidote to the English disease: reserve, inhibition, emotional constipation, class consciousness. Perhaps the drug simply wasn’t as needed in America as it was in the UK.
Yet for all the rhetoric of spiritual revolution and counter-culture, it remains a moot point whether Ecstasy’s effects have spilled outside the domain of leisure. From early on, commentators noted that the controlled hedonism of the MDMA experience is much more compatible with a basically normal, conformist lifestyle than other drugs. Norman Zinberg called it ‘the yuppie psychedelic’; others have compared it to a ‘mini-vacation’, an intense burst of ‘quality time’. In his essay ‘The Ecstasy of Disappearance’, Antonio Melechi uses the historical origins of rave in Ibiza as the foundation for a theory of rave as a form of internal tourism: a holiday from everyday life and from your everyday self. At the big one-off raves, some kids spend – on drinks, drugs, souvenir merchandise, and getting there – as much as they would on a short vacation. Rejecting the idea that this is simply escapist, a safety valve for the tensions generated by capitalist work-patterns, Melechi argues that rave supersedes the old model of subcultural activity as resistance-through-rituals. Where earlier style terrorist subcultures like mod and punk were exhibitionist, a kick-in-the-eye of straight society, rave is a form of collective disappearance, an investment in pleasure that shouldn’t be written off as mere retreatism or disengagement.
Melechi’s theory of rave – as neither subversive nor conformist but more than both – appeals to the believer in me. From a more detached dispassionate perspective, though, rave appears more like a new twist on a very old idea. There is actually a striking continuity in the work hard/play hard structure of working-class leisure, from the mods’ 60-hour weekends and Northern Soul’s speedfreak stylists, to disco’s Saturday night fever-dreams and jazz-funk’s All-Dayers and Soul Weekends. When I listen to The Easybeats 1967 Aussie-mod anthem ‘Friday On My Mind’, I’m stunned by the way the lyrics – a thrilling anatomy of the working-class weekender life-cycle of drudgery, anticipation and explosive release – still resonate. But what really grabs my ear is the poignancy of the lines, ‘I know of nothing else that bugs me more than working for the rich man / Hey, I’ll change that scene one day.’ Thirty years on, we’re no nearer to overhauling the work/leisure structures of industrial society. Instead, all that rage and frustration is vented through going mental at the weekend (‘Tonight, I’ll spend my bread / Tonight, I’ll lose my head’), helped along by a capsule or three of instant unearned euphoria.
From the Summer of Love rhetoric of the early UK acid house evangelists to San Francisco’s cyberdelic community, from the neo-paganism of Spiral Tribe to the transcendentalism of the Megatripolis/ Goa Trance scene, rave has also been home to another ‘politics of Ecstasy’, one much closer to the original intent behind Timothy Leary’s phrase. Ecstasy has been embraced as one element of a bourgeois-bohemian version of rave, in which the music-drugs-technology nexus is fused with spirituality and vague hippy-punk anarcho-politics to form a nineties would-be counter-culture.
The fact that the same drug can be at the core of two different ‘politics of ecstasy’ – raving as safety-valve versus raving as opting out – can be traced back to the double nature of MDMA as a psychedelic amphetamine. The psychedelic component of the experience lends itself to utopianism and an at least implicit critique of the way-things-are. Amphetamine, though, does not have a reputation as a consciousness-raising chemical. While they popped as many pills as other strata of society, the hippies regarded amphetamine as a straight person’s drug: after all, it was still legal and being prescribed in vast amounts to tired housewives, over-stretched businessmen, slimmers, and students cramming for exams. Amphetamine’s ego-boosting and productivity-raising effects ran totally counter to the psychedelic creed of self-less surrender, indolence and Zen passivity. So when the spread of methamphetamine poisoned Haight-Ashbury’s love-and-peace vibe, the counter-culture responded with the ‘speed kills’ campaign. The hippies’ hostility towards amphetamine is one reason why the punks embraced the chemical, with journalist Julie Burchill hailing sulphate as a true working-class drug that gave you the confidence to challenge your so-called social superiors, and even boosted your IQ several points.
In their 1975 classic The Speed Culture: Amphetamine Use and Abuse in America, Lester Grinspoon and Peter Hedblom draw an invidious comparison between marijuana and amphetamine, arguing that pot-smoking instils values that run counter to capitalist norms, while amphetamine amplifies all the competitive, aggressive and solipsistic tendencies of Western industrial life. Grinspoon and Hedbloom call it a ‘crimogenic’ drug, noting the extreme social instability of speed subcultures, which are characterized by rip-offs and ‘righteous’ retribution, paranoia and hair-trigger explosions of violence. Terence McKenna, an evangelist for Gaia-given plant psychedelics like magic mushrooms, classes amphetamine as one of the ‘dominator drugs’, alongside cocaine and caffeine.
Chemically programmed into MDMA is a sort of less-is-more effect: what starts out as an empathogen degenerates, with repeated use, into little more than amphetamine (in terms of its effect). This is one explanation for a syndrome that recurs in different rave scenes: at a certain point, the subculture’s self-appointed guardians (veterans of its early, golden age) start complaining that speed is killing the original spirit of the scene. Sometimes, there’s a measure of truth behind this scapegoating: when MDMA’s warm glow cools, punters turn to the cheaper, more reliable amphetamine. But often it’s just a question of taking too many E’s.
From all this we might conclude that when the amphetamine component of the MDMA experience comes to the fore, rave culture loses much of its ‘progressive’ edge. At one end of the class spectrum are the working-class weekender scenes, where MDMA is used in tandem with amphetamine, and the subcultural raison d’être is limited and ultimately conformist: stimulants are used to provide energy and delay the need for sleep, to intensify and maximize leisure time. At the other, more bohemian end of rave culture, MDMA is used in tandem with LSD and other consciousness-raising hallucinogens, as part of a subcultural project of turning on, tuning in and dropping out.
The picture is a bit more complicated than this. LSD is widely used in many working-class rave scenes, although arguably in ways that break with the Timothy Leary/Terence McKenna model of enlightenment through altered states. Hallucinogens appeal as another form of teenage kicks, a way of making the world into a cartoon or video-game. (Hence brands of acid blotter like Super Mario and Power Rangers.) And amphetamine, in high doses or with prolonged use, can have its own hallucinatory and delusory effects. Like MDMA, speed makes perceptions more vivid; its effect of hyper-acousia can escalate towards full-blown audio-hallucinations. The sensory flood can seem visionary, pregnant with portent. Serious speedfreaks often have a sense of clairvoyance and gnosis, feel plugged into occult power-sources, believe they alone can perceive secret patterns and conspiracies.
Church of Ecstasy
Nonetheless, there is a tension in rave culture between consciousness raising and consciousness razing, between middle-class techno-pagans for whom MDMA is just one chemical in the pharmacopoeia of a spiritual revolution, and weekenders for whom E is just another tool for ‘obliviating’ the boredom of workaday life. This class-based divide has quite a history. Witness the snobbish dismay of highbrow hallucinogen fiends like R. Gordon Wasson, who wrote about his psilocybin visions for Life magazine in 1957, only to be appalled when thrill-seeking ‘riff-raff ’ promptly descended on the magic mushroom fields of Mexico, or worse, turned to its synthetic equivalent, LSD. Wasson refused to use the pop culture term ‘psychedelic’, preferring the more ungainly and overtly transcendentalist ‘entheogen’ (substances that put you in touch with the divine). Such linguistic games and terminological niceties often seem like the only way that intellectuals can distinguish their ‘discriminating’ use of drugs from the heedless hedonis
m of the masses.
The Road To Eleusis: Unveiling The Secret of the Mysteries, a book co-written by R. Gordon Wasson, is one of the sources for John Moore’s brilliant 1988 monograph Anarchy and Ecstasy: Visions of Halcyon Days. Using shreds of historical evidence, Moore imaginatively reconstructs prehistoric pagan rites dedicated to Gaia-worship; he argues for the contemporary revival of these ‘Eversion Mysteries’, insisting that a ritualized, mystical encounter with Chaos (what he calls ‘bewilderness’) is an essential component of any truly vital anarchistic politics. The alienation, isolation and passivity instilled by spectacular-commodity society must be ‘healed through sharing in rituals of numinous synaesthesia, mutual involvement in multi-sensual actions, an ecstatic katharsis.’
On my first encounter with Anarchy and Ecstasy, I was instantly struck by the way the book, written in the mid-eighties, reads like a prophecy and programme for rave culture. Crucial preparations for the Mystery rites include fasting and sleep-deprivation, in order to break down ‘inner resistances’ and facilitate possession by the ‘sacred wilderness’. The rites themselves consist of mass chanting, dancing (‘enraptured abandonment to a syncopated musical beat’ which ‘flings aside rigidities, be they postural, behavioural or characterological’) and the administering of hallucinogenic drugs, in order that ‘each of the senses and faculties [be] sensitized to fever pitch prior to derangement into a liberatingly integrative synaesthesia’. The worshippers are led into murky, maze-like structures, like caverns, whose darkness is illuminated only by ‘mandalas and visual images’.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 53
