Nineties house culture in Britain also seems utterly in tune with the apolitical, consumerist spirit of the Thatcher – Major era. House clubs offer their customers the prospect that each and every weekend can be a miniature Ibiza, a vacation from the workaday. One catchphrase seems to sum up house’s ‘work hard/play hard’ conservatism: having it, or, pronounced authentically, ’avin’ it. Used as an adjective (a havin’ it club, a havin’ it crowd) or as a hedonist war-cry (‘we’re ’avin’ it LARGE, ’avin’ it major!’), the buzzphrase captures the voracious greediness of house culture, its spirit of pleasure-principled acquisitiveness, a sort of psychedelic materialism. Neck those pills, snort some lines of charlie, puff on a big fat spliff, guzzle down those import lagers, chase the lot down with a wrap of billy whizz; let’s get fucked up good and proper.
For me, the exhilarating thing about rave was that it was psychedelic disco, a mindblowing merger of rock delinquency and club culture’s science of sound. At the time of writing, the most vibrant sound in dance music is the rave’n’roll hybrid called Big Beat, as purveyed by The Chemical Brothers and the Skint label’s Fatboy Slim and Bentley Rhythm Ace, amongst many others. Resisting the tyranny of good taste and ‘intelligence’, Big Beat has brought back a sense of messy, ‘mindless’ fun.
Reared on the neo-psychedelic turmoil of My Bloody Valentine and that most riff-driven of rap groups Public Enemy, then radicalized by their experience of acid house during their college days in Manchester, The Chemical Brothers bring a punk-like attack to techno by accentuating the same blaring mid-frequencies supplied by distorted guitars. Take ‘Loops of Fury’, a black-and-white riot of stuttering beats, convulsive fuzz-riffage and floor quaking electro sub-bass; when they unleashed this monstertune at New York’s Irving Plaza in 1996, I found myself pogoing for the first time in fifteen years!
The Chemicals’ second album Dig Your Own Hole was even more rockist. In interviews, the duo – Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands – testified to the influence of sixties garage punk and freakbeat groups like Tintern Abbey, and even sampled psych-rockers Lothar and the Hand People on the awesomely monolithic mantra-stomp of ‘It Doesn’t Matter’. On their breakthrough single ‘Setting Sun’, they teamed up with the biggest rock star of the day, Oasis’s Noel Gallagher, for a track that sounds like a fusion of The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and Public Enemy’s ‘Rebel Without A Pause’. Unlike those other rock/rave crossover giants Underworld, though, The Chems stay true to the most radical aspects of house and techno; they mostly shun songs and vocals, and rarely resort to melody, yet still manage to enthral through texture, noise and sheer groove-power alone.
The mentality of the milieu from which The Chems emerge – clubs like The Heavenly Social, the Big Kahuna Burger and the Big Beat Boutique, labels like Wall of Sound and Bolshi, bands like Monkey Mafia and Death In Vegas – is decidedly rockist too. It’s all a bit Loaded-laddish and lager-loutish, a tad too close to Britpop’s boy’s own boorishness. Perhaps that’s not so strange when you consider that The Chemicals, Fatboy Slim and Bentley Rhythm Ace all have indie-rock skeletons in their B-boy closet: Fatboy’s Norman Cook played bass in jangle-pop hitmakers The Housemartins, while Bentley’s Richard March was in Pop Will Eat Itself. (Indie’s revenge: Norman Cook remixes Cornershop’s late-Velvets pastiche ‘Brimful of Asha’ and it gets to Number One!)
Then again, these dodgy origins could be Big Beat’s secret strength. At a time when so much electronica suffers from anal-retentive complexity, the Big Beat outfits ‘regress’ to those eras when rave music itself was most rock’n’roll in its druggy abandon: Madchester’s indie-dance, breakbeat hardcore, acid house and the late eighties DJ records of Coldcut, Bomb The Bass et al. Big Beat simultaneously uses rock ’n’ roll’s hell-for-leather attitude to show up how too much of today’s electronic music is po-faced, while deploying club culture’s arsenal of drug-tech effects to make trad guitar bands look terribly dated. Of course, this hasn’t stopped dance purists dissing Big Beat as rock ’n’ roll tarted up with ideas ripped off techno and house, or trad-rockers dismissing it as inane party music without the redemptive resonance of your Verves and Radioheads.
Guilty as charged on both counts, for sure – but so what? Big Beat’s sole raison d’être is to generate excitement and intensity: what could be more rock ’n’ roll, more rave, than that? Big Beat tracks are crammed with crescendos, drops, builds, explosions, crowd-inciting drum rolls and wooshing sounds that pan across the stereo-field. These roller-coaster thrills ’n’ spills carry over to Big Beat DJing, a style-hopping frenzy closer to a jukebox than to the house/techno DJs seamless mixing. Where the latter is designed for MDMA’s sustained plateau of bliss, Big Beat’s jagged, epileptic-eclectism reflects the polydrug norms of the late nineties. Where once the E in ‘Generation E’ stood for Ecstasy, now it stands for everything.
And yet Big Beat could not have emerged without Ecstasy culture’s prior existence; most of its pilfered repertoire of licks and kicks originally evolved specifically in order to tantalize the Ecstatic body. Big Beat represents the latest stage in British rave’s abiding musical narrative: the attempt to fuse house and hip hop, a compulsion that runs from the late eighties DJ records through bleep-and-bass, ’ardkore and jungle, to who knows what future (per)mutations. And so tracks like Fatboy’s ‘Everybody Loves A Filter’, Dr Bone’s ‘I Came Here To Get Ripped’ and Environmental Science’s ‘The Day The Zak Stood Still’ marry rush-activating riffs, stabs and tingle-textures with boombastic breaks ’n’ sub-bass; DJing, Norman Cook has been known to mix Public Enemy’s ‘Bring The Noise’ over the acid-tweekin’ 303-driven funk of Josh Wink’s ‘Higher State of Consciousness’.
Now that The Chemical Brothers fancy themselves as ‘mature’ album artists, Norman Cook has usurped their role as rave-saviour. Truer to Big Beat’s immediacy-is-all-that-counts attitude, the debut Fatboy Slim LP Better Living Through Chemistry is more like a ‘greatest hits’ singles collection than an album. It’s also a compendium of tried-and-tested devices for triggering the rave ’n’ roll rush. ‘Song For Lindy’ features an oscillating piano-vamp melody-riff that flashes back to Brit-rave’s euphoric peak circa 1991; ‘Everybody Needs A 303’ rubs seventies slap-bass up against Roland acieed bass-drone, topped with a psychedelic soul chorus courtesy of Edwin Starr; ‘Going Out Of My Head’ has the nerve to nick the powerchord-riff from The Who’s ‘Can’t Explain’ and the nous to make it feel modern rather than mod (none of Britpop’s sepia-tinted retro-referentiality). Bentley Rhythm Ace’s own killer tune ‘Return of the Hardcore Jumble Carbootechnod-isco Roadshow’ pivots around a frenetic chickenscratch-guitar riff that draws a white line between 1966 mod’s amphetamine-frenzy freakbeats and 1998 Big Beat’s pills-and-Pils fuelled pandemonium.
Above all, what I hear in the Skint sound and similar labels like Bolshi is the partial return of 1992’s breakbeat ’ardkore. Take Bolshi producer Rasmus. His exhilarating EP ‘Mass Hysteria’ recalls the scratchadelic mayhem of DJ Hype and Danny Breaks’s ‘I Can’t Understand It’; tracks like ‘Afro (Blowing In The Wind)’ feature old skool rap sliced ’n’ diced into locked-groove blurts of glossolalia, 78 r.p.m. squeaky voices, incongruous eighties pop samples. Unwittingly resurrecting ’ardkore, Big Beat is a bit like jungle’s retarded cousin – it occasionally steals the odd jittery rhythm-programming trick from the breakbeat scientists, but generally favours much more simplistic looped breaks.
Compared with the sophistication of drum and bass, Big Beat may seem like a step backwards. But at this point in techno’s history, ‘how experimental is it?’ is not really the most helpful question to ask of a new music. ‘Does it work? Does it get me worked up?’ may be more telling. (After all, most scientific experiments lead to inconclusive results or abject failure; similarly, most experimental dance music is seriously dysfunktional when it comes to working as a desiring machine). Big Beat’s back-to-1992 tendency parallels the way seventies punk reactivated the adrenalizing minimalism of
mid-sixties garage punk. But maybe pub rock is a better analogy, with beery Big Beat as the necessary back-to-basics initiative before the real revolution, a techno-punk that’s hopefully just round the corner.
Such a punk-style revolt is sorely needed. Too many post-rave genres bear an uncanny resemblance to progressive rock: conceptualism, auteur-geniuses, producers making music to impress other producers, muso virtuosity reborn as the ‘science’ of programming finesse. Purist genres like Jeff Mills-style minimalist techno initially defined themselves against the ‘cheesy’-ness of hardcore rave and happy house (‘cheese’ meaning the corny-but-effective elements in music) by dedicating themselves to the pursuit of endless subtleties. The thing about cheese, though, is that it creates flava and increases the phat content of any given music. When it comes to cheese, I’ll choose a pungent cliché over an insipid subtlety any day. In fact, I’d argue that the entire history of dance music is about the creation of potent clichés – sounds and effects so good that other people couldn’t resist copying them. Clichés like disco’s snare-crash, acid house’s 303 bass-squeal, hardcore’s Morse-Code pianos and ‘Mentasm’ noises, jungle’s ‘Amen’ breaks, gabba’s distorted kick-drum, and house’s skin-tingling EQ/filter effects.
To invent a cliché from scratch is a great feat. The Chemicals, Fatboy Slim and the other Big Beat acts may not have actually invented any new clichés, but by inventively crushing together all of the golden oldies from rave, house, rap, disco, ad infinitum, they’ve reminded us that dance music is supposed to be about fun, about freaky dancing as opposed to headnodding and trainspotting.
The rock-like qualities in The Chemical Brothers, Underworld and The Prodigy are precisely what has enabled them to cross over into the American mainstream. Although the ‘Electronica Revolution’ has been trailed in the US media as the long-overdue arrival of techno to America, it’s readily apparent that the British invaders have met the post-grunge audience halfway.
The Prodigy’s story is the most bizarre example of this ‘market repositioning’ syndrome. Back in late 1992 The Prodigy seemed, for all their hit singles and healthy album sales, like a band without a future: their destiny was surely to go down the plughole along with the rave scene Mixmag gloatingly accused them of destroying with a single song, ‘Charly’. But over the next two years, The Prodigy sidestepped the decline of the mega-rave circuit and pulled off an astounding feat of self-reinvention. By 1994, the band were playing rock festivals, selling to NME and Melody Maker readers, and wowing the crits with Music For the Jilted Generation: a vaguely conceptual album that protested the crackdown on rave culture, from local councils refusing licences for commercial events to the Criminal Justice Act’s assault on illicit raves.
After a slew of hits – the rock-guitar propelled ‘Voodoo People’, the awesome slow-mo break-and-bassquake ‘Poison’ – The Prodigy scored their greatest triumph in early 1996 with ‘Firestarter’, a metal-riffin’ hymn-to-destruction that sampled grunge grrls The Breeders and The Art of Noise. Transforming dancer/MC Keith Flint into star vocalist and videogenic focal point, ‘Firestarter’ went straight to Number One in the UK. Appearing at the MTV Europe Awards to pick up a trophy for Best Dance Video, The Prodigy greeted the youth of the EC with a matey ‘hold it down! – a vintage 1992 rave buzzphrase – as if to confirm ’ardkore’s historical vindication. It had become what it always secretly had been, for those with ears to hear it: the new rock ’n’ roll.
Several months later, ‘Firestarter’ became a heavy-rotation buzz-video in America, igniting a major label bidding war (amazingly, The Prodigy had already been signed and then let go after just one album by two substantial American labels, Elektra and Mute). Madonna’s Maverick – a Warner Bros. sub-label – won the war, at considerable expense. With corporate heft behind it, The Prodigy’s third album The Fat Of The Land went straight to Number One in America (and in another twenty or so countries as well). But by this point – with almost every Fat track featuring vocals and guitar-riffs where once there had only been samples and breaks, and the hectic rave tempos slowed to a Big Beat pummel – The Prodigy were a rock band, to all intents and purposes. Liam Howlett even declared in interviews that he’d never liked house or Kraftwerk (Detroit techno’s sacred source). The Oi!-meets-jungle menace of ‘Breathe’ and a cover of L7’s ‘Fuel My Fire’ defined The Prodigy’s new sales shtick: an apolitical update of punk offering post-grunge kids an aerobic work-out for their frustration and aggression. On-stage and in video, mohican-sporting maniac and self-proclaimed ‘youth corrupter’ Keith Flint pulled grotesque faces and threw twisted shapes like some cartoon cross between Alice Cooper and Vivian from The Young Ones.
For underground techno and house fiends, the American music-industry sponsored buzzword ‘electronica’ – the rubric under which The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy have been hyped – is already a dirty word. Like ‘rave’ – the milieu in which The Prodigy originally honed its crowd-pleasing stagecraft – the term ‘electronica’ holds out the threat of the music’s corruption, as it makes the transition from intimate clubs to stadiums, from discriminating cognoscenti to a mass audience. The house and techno purists want to keep the music contained at the level of the pre-rave, club-oriented scenes in Detroit, Chicago and New York.
And yet the myth and the reality of rave still haunts this music, even the sub-scenes that explicitly define themselves against its populism. However much ‘we’ might disagree over the future course of the music, ‘rave’ is what keeps us talking to each other. This can be seen in the success of Tribal Gathering, the UK dance festival. Its very name acknowledges the Balkanization of post-rave culture, even as it seeks to resurrect the lost unity by shepherding the scattered tribes together.
In 1996, Tribal Gathering was touted as the successor to the Glastonbury rock festival, which didn’t happen that year. But at Glastonbury, the side-shows and bazaars are strictly supplementary to the main arena, where fifty thousand plus convene to watch the headlining bands. For the thirty thousand who attend Tribal Gathering, the experience is far more disparate. In 1996, TG offered seven circus-size tents catering for different tastes: Nexus for jungle and happy hardcore, Planet Cyberpunk for bangin’ techno, Astral Nuts for Euro trance, Tribal Temple for Goa Trance, Planet Erotica for house and garage, Planet Phunk for trip hop. Each of these tents was approximately the same size. Even the biggest, Starship Universe (at 6500 capacity) was nowhere close to being the focal point of Tribal Gathering, despite its line-up of crowdpleasers, crossover acts and genre-blenders, like Leftfield, Black Grape, Carl Cox and Josh Wink.
Tribal Gathering’s decentred structure is the only sensible way to reconcile the mega-rave ideal of thirty-thousand-people-in-a-field grooving to the same beat, with the post-rave reality of shattered consensus, uncommon aims and different strokes. In years to come, there will doubtless be more and more tents, as sub-genres sub-divide. (Indeed in 1997, happy hardcore got its own tent, separate from jungle; how long before the happy hardcore sub-style ‘trancecore’ gets its own marquee?)
What I wondered as I wandered from tent to tent on that May night in 1996 was whether the gathered tribes were fraternizing, or simply co-existing in adjacence. There were a lot of non-aligned types drifting about, but it seemed equally possible that most people gravitated towards their own kind and fixated on their particular drug/technology fix. It was hard to imagine any of the hardcore massive in Nexus stepping out of their particular locked groove in order to check out what was Goa-ing on in Astral Nuts, or vice versa. What was really odd about the event was the Goa-heads could have enjoyed a similar line-up of DJs at regular Goa events like Return To The Source, for about half the price, and without having to trek forty miles to the event; the junglists and happy-core kids could equally have heard a similarly stellar selection of DJs at events like World Dance. The extra £15 everyone had paid was basically their homage to the myth of rave, the living dream of unity-in-diversity. They were subsidizing a ritual re-enactment of
something that was long lost but that still mattered in some obscure way.
In Britain, on the eve of acid house’s tenth anniversary, there’s a sense of legacy and achievement, a feeling of ‘what a long strange trip it’s been’. Nostalgia abounds (although there’s disagreement over when exactly the lost golden age was: 1988 – 9, or 1991 – 2, or even 1994, the year jungle broke through), a nostalgia expressed in double and triple CD compilations of house classics and hardcore anthems, in ‘Back to 92’ raves and ‘Old Skool’ events. Genealogies, canons, and counter-canons are being drawn up, historical knowledge and narratives accumulated.
In America, the feeling is rather different. The rave scene grows steadily but seems stuck in a holding pattern; the much-vaunted ‘electronica revolution’ may be that scene’s long-deferred explosion into mass consciousness, but will more likely be a top-down, corporate-imposed phenomenon, oriented around bands rather than DJs, and slyly distanced from the taint of drugs.
I have a pet theory that the vitality of a pop genre is in inverse ratio to the number of books written about it. Compared with the thousands of biographies, essay collections and critical overviews that clog up rock’s arteries, only a handful of tomes (academic efforts included) have addressed the dance-and-drug culture – despite the fact that in Europe it’s been the dominant form of pop music for nearly a decade. I guess this inverse-ratio theory makes my own effort here one of the first nails in the coffin. But we’ve a long, long way to go before this music is dead and buried, mummified as a museum culture like rock’n’ roll. The Rave Hall of Fame is a couple of decades away from being built. Ten years on, this culture – call it rave, or techno, or electronic dance music, whatever – still feels incredibly vital. It’s only just hitting its prime; internal revolutions and reconfigurations like punk surely lie ahead. If this precise moment feels like a pause for breath, it’s only because there’s so much still ahead.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 56
