Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  Although I enjoy the semantic struggles over new genre terms (and have coined a few in my time – ambient jungle, artcore, post-rock, gloomcore, neurofunk) even I sometimes wonder if the endless subdivision has got out of hand. Nowhere is the turnover of new sub-styles more rapid than in house music, which is still the mainstream of Ecstasy culture in Britain, the music most clubbers dance and drug to. In 1989, ‘house’ was the all-encompassing general term for rave music. But in the immediately ensuing years, not only was house’s primacy challenged by rival terms like ‘techno’ and ‘hardcore’, but house itself started to splinter, as an endless array of prefixes – ‘tribal’, ‘progressive’, ‘handbag’, and so forth – interposed themselves in front of the word in order to define precise stylistic strands.

  ‘Handbag house’ was initially a disparaging term, coined by condescending cognoscenti vis-à-vis the anthemic, chart-penetrating house tunes that allegedly appealed to women, and above all to the folk-mythic construct of Sharon and Tracy, stereotypes of the undiscrimat-ing working-class party girl. Inevitably, ‘handbag’ – and its slightly tuffer sequel, ‘hardbag’ – became a rallying cry for populists not afraid of ‘cheesy’ emotionalism. While some of the anti-handbag hipsters affiliated themselves with American deep house and garage from New York and Chicago, another faction came up with the dubious concept of ‘progressive house’. Released by labels like Hard Hands, Cowboy, Om and Guerrilla, this was homegrown English house music, trippy and trancey, and distinguished by long tracks, big riffs, mild dub-inflections and multi-tiered percussion. ‘Progressive’ seemed to signify not just its anti-cheese, non-girly credentials but its severing of house’s roots in gay black disco. Out of the 1991 – 3 prog house scene emerged a number of artists who belong to a non-genre that might be dubbed ‘band house’: groups like Leftfield, Lionrock, Underworld, The Aloof and Faithless who sell albums in large amounts and play live.

  Back in America, the equivalents to these big-sellers aren’t bands but auteur producers like Masters At Work, Deep Dish, Armand Van Helden and Murk. US underground house seems to shift back and forth between songs and tracks, soft and hard, big vocals and depersonalized abstraction. Somewhere between these two poles lies the vogue for disco cut-ups: raw-yet-camp tracks, vocal-free but based around looped samples from seventies underground disco classics. Pioneering both the disco cut-up trend and the resurgence of Chicago house were the twin labels Relief and Cajual. Relief is a ‘trackhead’ label: its eerie, unhinged, almost psychotic output, by artists like Green Velvet, Gene Farris, DJ Sneak and DJ Rush, thrillingly revived the spirit if not the sound of acid house.

  Recently, the proliferation of house sub-genres has gone into hyperdrive, with terms like nu-NRG (hard, gay, Euro house) and dream house/epic house (lushly melodic, atmospheric house influenced by trance) achieving fleeting currency. Progressive house has returned (now shorn of any pretensions to innovation and signifying no-nonsense pumping house for regular heterosexual blokes), while the purist sub-genre of tech-house boasts ultra-clean production (sounds so spangly-pristine you feel like you’ve already done an E) and boasts of preserving the ‘lost spirit’ of Chicago acid and Detroit techno. Meanwhile, a bastard form of acid emerged from London’s underground milieu of squat-raves – a screeching, raucous, punk-fierce blare of overdriven 303s. The scene-and-sound’s defiantly impurist attitude was emblazoned in the gloriously titled compilation It’s Not Intelligent, It’s Not From Detroit, But It’s Fucking ’Avin It, mixed by crusading free party DJ-collective Liberator and released on their label Stay Up Forever.

  A world away from the squalor of the squat-scene (where ketamine was increasingly the drug-of-choice,) garage – for years, the nearest thing to a static entity in the post-rave universe – spawned its own distinctively British mutant called ‘speed garage’. Sometime in late 1996/early 1997, a segment of London’s jungle audience began to wonder why they were listening to such dark, depressing music. Jungle had been shaped by the desperation of the recession-wracked mid-nineties; now, with ‘loadsamoney’ in their pockets, the junglists didn’t feel desperate anymore. Increasingly alienated by the white industrial bombast of techstep, these mostly black junglists began to complain about the surfeit of distortion-drenched and melody-free tracks (‘disgusting music, mad music’, as V Records’ Bryan Gee put it). Searching for a sound that better reflected their affluence and insousiance, the ex-junglists built a brand new scene based around the ‘finer things in life’ – designer-label clothes, flash cars, champagne, cocaine, and garage music.

  As well as attracting upwardly mobile, ‘mature’ white clubbers who reviled rave culture as juvenile and lumpen, garage’s mellow opulence had long appealed to junglists; where a techno chill-out room offered beat-free ambient, the second room at jungle clubs like Thunder & Joy tended to play bumpin’ garage. For most of the nineties, homegrown UK garage had slavishly imitated American producers. But when the ex-junglists entered the fray, they created a distinctly British hybrid strain that merged house’s slinky panache with jungle’s rude-bwoy exuberance.

  Like all innovations in dance music – from early eighties house to early nineties hardcore – speed garage began as a DJ-driven sound. Pirate DJs pitched up American garage imports – particularly the tuffer style of producers like Todd Edwards and Armand Van Helden – to +8 on their Technics turntables, and insinuated jungalistic elements: dub-wize effects, rewinds and ragga-MC chatter. Inevitably, DJs started to cut dubplates that sounded like their mixes; the next step was to release the tracks. And so a new genre was born. Tougher and faster than its US prototype, speed garage is a winning combination of the most crowdpleaser elements from house, jungle circa 1994, and hardcore rave: sultry divas, ‘dread bass’, dancehall reggae chants,’ardkore’s sped-up, helium-squeaky vocals, plus the filtering effects used by house producers like Daft Punk to make sounds shiver up your spine.

  What really defines speed garage, though, is its beat: syncopated, highly textured snares with a curiously organic, wood-block timbre. Unlike house’s metronomic four-to-the-floor kick-drum, speed garage is polyrhythmically perverse, riddled with itchy percussive tics, micro-breakbeats and quivery synth-stabs. And where most rave music is asexual, speed garage is lascivious – the skipping snares tug at your hips, the rumpshaker B-lines wiggle your ass. This sexiness is probably a side-effect of British clubbers’s shift of allegiance from anti-aphrodisiac Ecstasy to horny-making cocaine.

  The craze for coke ties in with the way the scene resurrects the snobby exclusivity of the pre-rave club culture of the mid-eighties (the last time the economy was booming). Most speed garage clubs ban jeans and sneakers. Speed garage’s ethos of ‘living large’ also parallels US ‘playa’ rap’s ‘we-are-the-beautiful people / we be the baddest clique’ hedonism – its conspicuous consumption and luxury-commodity fetishism, its weird blend of chilled languor and latent menace. Hence the garage bootleg version of L’il Kim/ Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Crush On You’ doing the rounds. If jungle was gangsta rave, speed garage is gangsta house.

  Converts hail speed garage as a revolution in British dance culture. Certainly, its victory has been swift and total. In 1997, just about every jungle pirate radio station in London switched to speed garage. Jungle’s populist core withered away; hitherto ‘rammed’ jump-up events like the Roast suddenly found their dancefloors almost deserted, with the punters defecting to speed garage clubs like Absolute Sundays, Numb Nums, Twice as Nice, Sun City, the Powerhouse and Horny. ‘A lot of the dread side of jungle has gone into the garage,’ says Phil Aslet from Source Direct, ‘dread’ referring to the dancehall reggae fans originally lured into jungle by its ragga samples back in 1994. Yet because its non-breakbeat rhythms appeal to house fans, speed garage has achieved way more popularity and commercial success than jungle ever did; genre-defining singles like Double 99’s ‘Ripgroove’, 187 Lockdown’s ‘Gunman’ and Fabulous Baker Boys’ ‘Oh Boy’ (a brilliant remake of Jonny L’s ‘Hurt You So’) were propelled int
o the UK Top Twenty only months after the scene’s discovery by the media.

  Inevitably, speed garage has inspired emnity. From house purists to drum and bass scientists, many argue that, far from being revolutionary, speed garage is merely a crafty collage of the most cheesily effective clichés from the last seven years of UK dance. True enough – although it’s hard to imagine even the sternest purist managing to resist this pleasure-principled sound’s alluring obviousness. And more innovative strains of speed garage are emerging, like the dub-spacious, percussa-delic and succulently textured productions of artists such as A Baffled Republic and Ramsey & Fen, which recall the eighties avant-disco of Arthur Russell. Generally, the best version of any given speed garage track is the stripped-down and weirder ‘dub’.

  Then there’s the fierce, jungle-dominated style that’s been called ‘dangerous garage’, tracks like Gant’s ‘Sound Bwoy Burial’ and Strickly Dub’s ‘Small Step’: baleful sub-bass pressure, dub-noise (sonar bleeps, sirens, gunshots, explosions of reverb) and patois dancehall shouts ‘timestretched’ so that the sample seems to crack apart like it’s afflicted with metal fatigue. Another exciting sub-style is the spate of speed garage remakes of hardcore classics like ‘Some Justice’ and ‘We Are I.E.’

  Given that back in 1992 the garage and rave scenes were polar opposites and implacable enemies, speed garage’s nostalgia for hardcore seems weird. But there’s actually a continuum linking hardcore, jungle circa 1994 and speed garage – not only do the same figures crop up (Suburban Base’s Dan Donelly, for instance, has now shifted his energy into his speed garage sub-label Quench), but the core attitude endures. As with all hardcore dance scenes past and present, it’s the ‘trackhead’, FX-crazy, ruthlessly digital side of speed garage, rather than the we-wanna-move-toward-using-real-instruments, ‘musical’ sector, that is really shaping any kind of future sound of London.

  Still, it’s sheer hype(rbole) to rank speed garage alongside jungle, let alone acid house, as a sonic/subcultural revolution. Coloured by the feel-goodism of the late Major/early Blair boom, the politics of speed garage are so much less interesting than jungle’s ‘darkside’ paradigm (temporarily outmoded in 1997 – 98, but probably not for long). On a strictly musical level, speed garage is a composite (house + jungle) where drum and bass was a mutant (hip hop × techno). Jungle twisted and morphed its sources; as yet, an equivalent warp factor is barely audible in speed garage.

  Like most of the sub-generic turnover of the late nineties, speed garage reflects the fact that rave-and-club music seems to have reached an impasse. The extremes in every direction have been probed. The only way to advance seems to be through ‘internal’ hybrids (house + trance = ‘epic house’, for instance) or by mounting strategic, one-step-back-two-steps-forwards retreats in order to explore a path prematurely abandoned (as techstep did by reactivating elements of 1991-era Belgian hardcore). With micro-genres like harsh-step (techstep + gabba) and nu-breaks (midtempo jungle? ‘intelligent Big Beat’?!) on the horizon in early 1998, rave music seems to be being torn everywhichway by linked-but-opposed processes of disintegration and reintegration. For every new subgenre that breaks off from its progenitor style, a new hybrid coalesces that reconnects parts of the shattered whole that was once ‘rave’.

  The rampant proliferation of hybrid sub-genres like speed garage may smack of hype or hairsplitting to outsiders, but it’s actually a sign of house music’s continued vitality, proof that it’s still evolving. But I can’t help feeling that in the broader cultural sense, house music and the club circuit are fundamentally conservative. At its more populist end, house has reverted back into mere disco, the soundtrack to traditional Saturday Nite fever. As for the more ‘discriminating’ house sub-scenes, these are simply pre-rave metropolitan clubland élitism back in full, coked-up effect.

  Rave was to club culture what punk was to rock: a kind of internal revolt within the broader musical formation. Punk didn’t really change the sound of rock that much, but it changed the attitude and it revived the late sixties’ exorbitant expectations of what the music could do (change the world). While rave as music was initially identical to the music played in clubs, rave as a subculture inverted all the guiding principles of clubland: rave was anti-élitist, anti-cool, pro-inclusivity, pro-abandon. Eventually, that spirit, that new subcultural context, changed the music itself, resulting in hardcore, jungle, trance, gabba and all the other mongrel mutations of the Detroit/Chicago blueprints. For me, the idea and ideal of raving – mass communion, communal freak-out – seems crucial. When dance subcultures revert from full-on rave madness and ‘go back to the clubs,’ my enthusiasm begins to wane.

  If Britain’s house mainstream has distanced itself from the psychedelic, freakbeat element of rave – noise, aggression, riffs, juvenile dementia, hysteria – it has also reneged upon rave’s counter-cultural utopianism. House clubs are now a hi-tech leisure industry, offering the paying customer the opportunity to step inside a drug-conducive, sensorily intensified environment of ultra-vivid sound-and-visuals. No sacrifices are required to participate, beyond the financial; no ramifications extend into everyday life, beyond the drug hangover. As the late Gavin Hills put it, ‘Ecstasy culture is like a video-recorder: an entertainment device, something you use for a certain element of pleasure. The club structure now is like the pub structure, it has a role in our society.’

  It also has a role in the economy. The dance record and nightclub industries generate huge amounts of taxable income. Big-capacity ‘superclubs’ like Ministry of Sound, Cream and Renaissance are closer to corporations than the traditional notion of the club promoter; these are businesses with staffs, payrolls, profit-margins and long-term expand-and-diversify strategies that encompass merchandising, club-affiliated CD compilations, sponsorship deals, even transporting their legendary vibe to other cities in the form of the ‘club tour’. Alongside the corporate clubs, the other big earners in dance culture are the first-division DJs – like Sasha, Jeremy Healey, Carl Cox, Pete Tong, Judge Jules, John Digweed and Paul Oakenfold – who charge fees in the region of £1,000 – £2,000 for a two or three hour set. Thanks to the ‘guest DJ circuit’ that links one-off commercial mega-raves and the superclubs, these DJs can play several gigs per night at weekends. Factor in mid-week gigs plus all the other sources of income (mix-CDs, making tracks, radio shows, remixing pop groups), and it’s clear that some of these guys must be close to becoming DJ-MILLIONAIRES.

  Beyond the amount of tax revenue the dance industry creates, club-and-rave culture has contributed – alongside the Britpop explosion of retro guitar bands like Oasis – to the global perception that ‘England is Swinging, Again’. Despite this, the establishment attitude to rave-and-club culture is deeply conflicted. Both John Major’s Conservative government and its Labour successor have maintained the war against recreational drug use. Following the media and public outcry in 1996 about Ecstasy deaths, MP Barry Legg drafted the Public Entertainment Licences (Drug Misuse) Bill. Passed just before the downfall of the Tories in May 1997, the law gives local councils and police forces the power to close down nightclubs if it is believed that drug-consumption is taking place on the premises. Given the endemic use of Ecstasy, amphetamine, acid and marijuana (a 1997 Release survey conducted in nightclubs revealed that 97 per cent of British clubbers had tried drugs, and that just under 90 per cent were planning to take some kind of illicit substance that evening), this law ought to mean that every dance venue in the UK should be closed down.

  If the political establishment were to take a more realistic and cynical point of view, they might conclude that recreational drug use is not only an established component of British society, it’s an essential component. Ecstasy culture is a useful way of dissipating the tensions generated by wage-slavery and under-employment; it’s an agent of social homeostasis, in so far as the loved-up ambience of clubs and raves offers youth a sort of provisional utopia each and every weekend, thereby channelling idealism and discontent out o
f the political arena altogether. ‘I reckon that if it wasn’t for Ecstasy, there’d have been a revolution in this country by now,’ declared The Prodigy’s Maxim Reality back in 1992; although he clearly meant to praise MDMA, others might read that remark as an indictment.

  Irvine Welsh, ‘rave author’ and icon of ‘the chemical generation’, confronts this idea of Ecstasy as counter-revolutionary force in his novella ‘A Smart Cunt’ (from The Acid House). A left-wing militant is attempting to recruit Brian, Welsh’s most autobiographical protagonist. ‘I’m thinking, what can I do, really do for the emancipation of working people in this country, shat on by the rich, tied into political inaction by servile reliance on a reactionary, moribund and yet still unelectable Labour Party?’ muses Brian. ‘The answer is a resounding fuck all. Getting up early to sell a couple of [political pamphlets] in a shopping centre is not my idea of the best way to chill out after raving . . . I think I’ll stick to drugs to get me through the long, dark night of late capitalism.’ Could it be that the entire project of rave and post-rave club culture has amounted to little more than a survival strategy for the generation that grew up under Thatcher, a way of getting by? A culture of consolation, where the illusory community of the Ecstatic dancefloor compensates for the withering away of the ‘social’ in the outside world, ever more deeply riven by class divisions and rich – poor disparities? The explosion of pent-up social energies that occurred in the late eighties has been channelled and corralled into a highly controlled and controlling leisure system. The rave as temporary autonomous zone has become the club as pleasure-prison, a detention camp for youth.