All this sounded very like my favourite club, the Labrynth, with its multiple levels and winding staircases, its corridors decorated with psychotropic UV imagery, its convulsive, hyper-syncopated breakbeat rhythms. As for the ‘hierophants’ with their intoxicating poisons, this could be the nineteen-year-old dealers with their E’s and trips. The Labrynth parallel appeals to me because this working-class club in East London fitted Moore’s blueprint perfectly, yet its highly ritualized activities had none of the techno-pagan, neo-tribal trappings of more bohemian rave scenes.
Moore’s description of the peak of Mystery rites sounds very like the effect of MDMA: ‘. . . the initiate becomes androgynous, unconcerned with the artificial distinctions of gender . . . Encountering total saturation, individuals transcend their ego boundaries and their mortality in successive waves of ecstasy.’ Even the socially benign after-effects – Moore quotes R. Gordon Wasson’s description of ‘an indissoluble bond [that] unites you with the others who have shared with you in the sacred agape . . . a tie . . . with their companions of that night of nights that will last as long as they live’ – is something any raver would instantly recognize. It’s the reason why the rave lifestyle can become a monomania, such that ‘all existence became structured around the limitless vision quests which began on the sacred nights’.
Hardly surprising, then, that organized religion has noticed the way rave culture provides ‘the youth of today’ with an experience of collective communion and transcendence. Just as the early Church co-opted heathen rituals, there have been attempts to literally rejuvenate Christianity by incorporating elements of the rave experience: dancing, lights, mass fervour, demonstrative and emotional behaviour. Most (in)famous of these was the Nine O’Clock Service in Sheffield, the brainchild of ‘rave vicar’ Chris Brain, whose innovations were greeted with keen interest and approval on the part of the Anglican hierarchy, until it was discovered that the reverend was loving some of his female parishioners in a rather too literal sense.
Despite this embarrassment, rave-style worship has spread to other cities in the UK like Gloucester and Bradford (where the Cathedral holds services called Eternity). There have also been a number of attempts to lure lost and confused youth into the Christian fold via drug-and-alcohol-free rave nights: Club X in Bath (organized by Billy Graham’s Youth For Christ), and Bliss (a Bournemouth night started by the Pioneer Network). These evangelists are sometimes disarmingly frank about their ulterior motives: Andy Hawthorne, a techno musician and member of the Christian youth group Message To Schools, told Muzik: ‘Dance music is the music of the kids in Manchester. The fact that we love it as much as they do is almost beside the point. We think of ourselves as missionaries. Most kids in Manchester are pagans because they don’t know the basic information about the Christian faith.’
None of these quasi-rave clubs administer Ecstasy as a holy sacrament. But perhaps they should, for if any drug induces a state-of-soul that approximates to the Christian ideal – overflowing with trust and goodwill to all men – then surely it’s MDMA. While rave behaviour is a little outré for the staid Church of England, it chimes in nicely with the more ecstatic and gesturally demonstrative strains of Christianity – from the dance-crazy Shakers to Black American gospel and Pentecostalism. Some have argued that trance-dance is a state of grace, while Moby, techno’s most visible and outspoken Christian, claimed that ‘The first rave was when the Ark of the Covenant was brought into Jerusalem, and King David went out and danced like crazy, and tore off all his clothes.’ But the rave experience probably has more in common with the goals and techniques of Zen Buddhism: the emptying out of meaning via mantric repetition; nirvana as the paradox of the ‘full void’. Nicholas Saunders’ E For Ecstasy quotes a Rinzai Zen monk who approves of raving as a form of active meditation that allows you to become ‘truly in the moment and not in your head’. Later in Saunders’s book, there’s an extract from an Ecstasy memoir in which the anonymous author describes the peculiar, depthless quality of the MDMA experience: ‘there’s no inside’, ‘I was empty. I seemed to have become pure presence’. While many become garrulous on E, for others the experience is a sublime vacancy, the weightless bliss of not having a thought in your head, a dazzling, denuded clarity in which your brain feels like crisp, freshly ironed sheets. At its most intense, the Ecstasy rush resembles the kundalini energy that yoga seeks to awaken: ‘liquid fire’ that infuses the nervous system and leaves the consciousness ‘aglow with light’.
Androgyny in the UK
What makes rave culture so ripe for religiosity is the ‘spirituality’ of the Ecstasy experience: its quality of gnosis, of access to a wonderful secret which can only be understood by direct, unmediated experience; the way it releases an out-flow of all-embracing but peculiarly asexual love. Clearly the most interesting and ‘subversive’ attributes of the MDMA experience, these aspects are also what makes rave fraught with a latent nihilism. If one word crystallizes this ambivalence at the heart of rave experience, it’s ‘intransitive’ – in so far as the music and the culture lacks an objective or object (‘rave’ is literally an intransitive verb). Rave culture has no goal beyond its own propagation; it is about the celebration of celebration, about an intensity without pretext or context.
Ecstasy has been celebrated as the flow drug, for the way it melts bodily and psychological rigidities, enabling the dancer to move with greater fluency and ‘lock’ into the groove. The energy currents that MDMA releases in a flood through the nervous system could be compared to the notion of a life-force promulgated by various ‘vitalist’ philosophers, mystics, poets and physicians from the eighteenth century to the present: Mesmer’s ‘magnetic fluid, Whitman’s ‘body electric’, Reich’s orgone. These simultaneously spiritual and materialist theories of an élan vital (élan coming from eslan, an archaic French word for ‘rush’) may actually all be talking about the same neurological ‘joy-juice’ (as one Prozac expert described serotonin). The freeflowing energy without referent unleashed by MDMA also recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s famous concept of ‘the body-without-organs’. The opposite of the organism – which is oriented around survival and reproduction – the body-without-organs is composed out of all the potentials in the human nervous system for pleasure and sensation without purpose: the sterile bliss of perverse sexuality, drug experiences, play, dancing, and so forth. Just as a rave is made up of ravers, the human components of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘desiring machine’ are bodies-without-organs. Plugged into the sound-system, charged up on E, the raver’s body-without-organs simply buzzes, bloated with unemployable energy: a sensation of ‘arrested orgasm’ expressed in pirate MC ejaculations like ‘oooh gosh!’.
Described by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities [that] avoids any orientation towards a culmination,’ the body-without-organs is an update of Freud’s notion of polymorphous perversity: a diffuse eroticism that’s connected to the non-genital, non-orgasmic sensuality of the pre-Oedipal infant. The body-without-organs also echoes age-old mystical goals: Zen’s Uncarved Block, a blissful, inchoate flux preceding individuation and gender; the ‘translucent’ or ‘subtle body’, angelic and androgynous, whose resurrection was sought by the Gnostics and alchemists.
In Omens of Millennium – a book about the contemporary resurgence of Gnostic preoccupations with angels and near-death experiences – Harold Bloom argues: ‘To be drugged by the embrace of nature into what we call most natural in us, our sleepiness and our sexual desires, is at once a pleasant and an unhappy fate, since what remains immortal in us is both androgynous and sleepless.’ MDMA, an ‘unnatural’ designer drug whose effects are anti-aphrodisiac and insomniac, might be a synthetic short cut to recovering our angelhood. My own experiences with Ecstasy substantiate these parallels. I remember one time enjoying a radical sensation of being without gender, a feeling of docility and angelic gentleness so novel and exquisite I could only express it clumsily: ‘I feel really effeminate’.
Such sensations of sexual indifference have everything to do with MDMA’s removal of aggression, especially sexual aggression. E’s reputation as the ‘love drug’ has more to do with cuddles than copulation, sentimentality rather than secretions. E is notorious for making erection difficult and male orgasm virtually impossible; women fare rather better, although one female therapist suggests that on Ecstasy ‘the particular organization and particular focusing of the body and the psychic energy necessary to achieve orgasm [is] . . . very difficult’. For many men, MDMA is literally a dick-shriveller; it also gets rid of the thinks-with-his-dick mentality, turning raves into a space where girls can feel free to be friendly with strange men, even kiss them, without fear of sexual consequences. Despite this, MDMA still has a reputation as an aphrodisiac – partly because it enhances touch, and partly because affection, intimacy and physical tenderness are, for many people, inextricably entangled and conflated with sexual desire.
Unaware of Ecstasy’s effects, many early commentators were quick to ascribe the curiously chaste vibe at raves to a post-AIDS retreat from adult sexuality. But one of the most radically novel and arguably subversive aspects of rave culture is precisely that it’s the first youth subculture that’s not based on the notion that sex is transgressive. Rejecting all that tired sixties rhetoric of sexual liberation, and recoiling from our sex-saturated pop culture, rave locates jouissance in prepubescent childhood. Hence the garish colours and baggy clothing, the backpacks and satchels, the lollipops and dummies and teddy bears – even the fairground side-shows at raves. It’s intriguing that a drug originally designed as an appetite suppressant should have this effect. Anorexia has long been diagnosed as a refusal of adult sexual maturity and all its accompanying hassles. Ecstasy doesn’t negate the body, it intensifies the pleasure of physical expression while completely emptying out the sexual content of dance. For men, the drug/music interface acts to dephallicize the body and open it up to enraptured, abandoned, ‘effeminate’ gestures. But removing the heterosexist impulse can mean that women are rendered dispensable. As with that earlier speed-freak scene, the mods (who dressed sharp and posed to impress their mates, not to lure a mate), there’s a homosocial aura to many rave and club scenes. Hence the autoerotic/autistic quality to rave dance. There’s a sense in which E, by feminizing the man, allows him to access jouissance independently rather than seek it through women. Recent converts to raving often express the sentiment: ‘it’s better than sex’.
The samples that feature in much rave music – orgasmic whimpers and sighs, soul-diva beseechings – induce a feverish state of intransitive amorousness. The ecstatic female vocals don’t signify a desirable/ desirous woman, but (as in gay disco) a hypergasmic rapture that the male identifies with, and aspires towards. (In that sense, rave is a culture of clitoris envy.) The ‘you’ in vocal samples like ‘you make me feel so good’ refers not to a person but a sensation. In truth, these are love-songs to the drug, or to the synergistic interaction of drug/music/ lights/people that constitutes the rave experience. With E, the full-on raver lifestyle means literally falling in love every weekend, then (with the inevitable mid-week crash) having your heart broken. Millions of kids across the globe are riding this emotional roller-coaster. Always looking ahead to their next tryst with E, addicted to love, dying to gush.
Amongst all its other effects, E incites a sort of free-floating fervour, a will-to-belief – which is why, under the influence, the most inane oscillator synth-riff can seem so numinously radiant with MEANING. But at the end of an exhilarating night out, as ‘the visions we had’ start to fade away (to misquote Noel Gallagher’s lyrics for The Chemical Brothers’ ‘Setting Sun’), dawn can bring a disenchanting sense of futility: all that energy and idealism mobilized to no end. Such post-rave tristesse is brilliantly captured in Pulp’s 1995 single ‘Sorted For E’s & Whizz’, a flashback to Jarvis Cocker’s experiences at the huge outdoor raves of 1989. ‘Oh is this the way the future’s meant to feel? / Or just 20,000 people standing in a field . . .’ muses Cocker disconsolately – before making his way home alone, having lost his friends at the rave and been refused lifts by the very strangers with whom he’d bonded hours earlier in the throes of MDMA-induced bonhomie. In the single’s sleeve note, he summarizes rave culture in four words of perfectly poised ambiguity: ‘IT DIDN’T MEAN NOTHING’.
Nowhere People
In her memoir Nobody Nowhere, the autistic Donna Williams describes how as a child she would withdraw from a threatening reality into a private pre-verbal dream-space of ultra-vivid colour and rhythmic pulsations; she could be transfixed for hours by iridescent motes in the air that only she could perceive. With its dazzling psychotropic lights, its sonic pulses, rave culture is arguably a form of collective autism. The rave is utopia in its original etymological sense: a nowhere/nowhen wonderland, where time is abolished, where the self evanesces through merging with an anonymous multitude and drowning in a bliss-blitz of light and noise. It’s a regressive womb-space or clandestine kindergarten; a kingdom of We ‘where nobody is but everybody belongs’ (Antonio Melechi).
Rave’s relentlessly utopian imagery – events called Living Dream, Fantazia, Rezerection – often seems like the return of sixties psychedelia. Back then, the counter-culture was engaged in an attempt to reverse, en masse, the Oedipus Complex (the trauma that breaks the infants’ paradaisical symbiosis with the mother, and teaches it to live with lack, to settle for less). While the bourgeois-bohemian strand of rave culture takes the late sixties as its model, the working-class sector is closer in spirit to disco. Rave is where psychedelia’s transcendentalism meets disco’s pleasure-factory: the result is what Simon Frith calls ‘routinized transcendence’.
So perhaps the best classification for Ecstasy is ‘utopiate’, theorist R. Blum’s term for LSD. The Ecstasy experience can be like heaven-on-Earth, and from there it’s but a short step to the old counter-cultural slogan ‘reality’s a substitute for utopia’. Because it’s not a hallucinogen but a sensation-intensifier, MDMA actually makes the world seem realer; the drug also feels like it’s bringing out the ‘real you’, freed from all the neurosis instilled by a sick society. But ‘utopiate’ contains the world ‘opiate’, as in ‘religion is the opiate of the people’. A sacrament in that secular religion called ‘rave’, MDMA can just as easily be a counter-revolutionary force as it can fuel a hunger for change. For it’s too tempting to take the easy option: simply repeating the experience, installing yourself permanently in rave’s virtual reality pleasuredome. And the longer you stay there, the more likely it is that Ecstasy will degenerate into a dead(ening) end.
EIGHTEEN
OUTRO
NINETIES HOUSE,
SPEED GARAGE AND
BIG BEAT
Although its technophobe foes still insist that ‘it all sounds the same’, electronic dance music has long since ceased to be a monolith. Rather, it’s a fractious confederacy of genres and sub-genres, metropolitan cliques and provincial populisms, purisms and hybrids. Post-rave culture encompasses a huge span of divergent and often opposed attitudes to aesthetics, technology, drugs, plus wildly different estimations of how much it all matters.
In a sense, you could say that rave culture is a victim of its own success. Like a political party that’s won an election landslide and enjoys a huge majority, rave could afford to fall out with itself, to succumb to in-fighting. Just as the Woodstock convergence of the late sixties gave way to the fragmented drift of seventies rock, just as the class of 1977 split into factions over what punk ‘was all about’, rave’s Ecstasy-sponsored unity inevitably re-fractured and stratified along class, race and regional lines. As early as 1991, the divisions that rave once magically dissolved reasserted themselves.
Partly this disunity is down to the nature of Ecstasy. One of the secrets of the drug’s success is its context-dependent adaptability. MDMA provides a profound but curiously ‘meaningless’ experience. You have to supply the meaning. The overpow
ering feelings, sensations and idealism generated by the drug demand some kind of articulation, but the terms used are conditioned by a complex mesh of parameters – class, race, gender, nationality, ideology. Hence the huge range of ‘Ecstasy talk’, from the hardcore hedonism of working-class weekenders to the cyberdelic utopianism of San Francisco and the neo-paganism of the Spiral Tribe. ‘Mental’, ‘mystical’, ‘avant-garde’: these may be simply different ways of exalting the same experience, people using the kind of lingo they’re most comfortable with. But the terms used to describe an experience ultimately determine its implications.
On a purely musical level, house and techno mutated as the musics were warped to fit the desires and purposes of different social strata, different races and regions. Once started, the process of subdivision appears to be irreversible, so that the ‘we’ that each post-rave fragment addresses can only get smaller and smaller. Often, the cutting-edge of each style is precisely what cuts it off from universal appeal.
For the newcomer to electronic dance music, this profusion of rave sub-genres can seem at best bewildering, at worst wilful obfuscation. Partly, this is a trick of perspective: kids who’ve grown up with techno feel it’s rock that ‘all sounds the same’. The urgent distinctions rockers take for granted – that Pantera, Pearl Jam, and Pavement operate in separate aesthetic universes – only make sense if you’re already a participant in the ongoing rock discourse. The same applies to dance music; step inside, and the genre-itis begins to make sense. Like sections in a record store, the categories are useful. But they’re also a way of talking about the music, of arguing about what it’s for and where it should go. In that sense, the post-rave diaspora is a sign of health, proof that people still care enough to disagree violently about this music, that the stakes are still high.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 54
