The nu-wave’s coldness isn’t just sonic, though: it relates to the emotional spectrum of the music, which encompasses numbness, alienation, neurosis, isolation. Lyrically, songs echo the man-machine imagery and fears about technology’s dehumanizing and controlling effects that pervaded the first wave of electropop: early John Foxx-fronted Ultravox, Gary Numan, The Normal (aka Daniel Miller of Mute Records). The Normal’s 1978 single ‘Warm Leatherette’ is a particularly seminal reference point and was covered by Chicks On Speed in the early years of the electro revival. Inspired by J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash, it’s a catchy ditty about the eroticism of car accidents: ‘The handbrake penetrates your thigh/Quick, let’s make love before you die.’ Its flip side ‘TV OD’, about a cathode-ray junkie who sticks the aerial into his veins, anticipated David Cronenberg movies like Videodrome with their grisly meshing of the organic and machinic.
Of all the nu-wavers, Adult. have most zealously pursued the themes of anomie and modernity. On songs like ‘Human Wreck’, ‘Lack of Comfort’, ‘Silent Property’ and ‘Dispassionate Furniture’ the sonic textures – sterile yet abject – conjure a mood of desolate decadence: lost souls stranded in sleek luxury, with commodity fetishes and kinky machines as their only companions. Dopplereffekt were also pioneers here, with songs like ‘Porno Actress’ and ‘Plastiphilia’ evoking voyeurism and perversion, deflections of desire from its ‘natural’ course. The frigid pulsations of ‘Porno Actress’ suggest love action so emotionally numb, the protagonists get freezer-burn when they fuck.
Dopplereffekt play it dead straight, but with most of the nu-wave groups, the hollow-inside pose is sluiced through a fair amount of campy humour. A key reference point for the Berliniamsburg milieu is the 1982 cult movie Liquid Sky, a bizarre, low budget science-fiction film set in downtown New York, where nihilistic death-tripping drug fiends and fashion freaks are preyed on by aliens. Adult. covered ‘Me And My Rhythm Box’, a song sung in a Liquid Sky nightclub scene by a performance artist. ‘If there’s one movie that really identifies this whole new look that you get at Berliniamsburg and the As Four parties, it’s Liquid Sky,’ says Larry Tee. ’Because the fashion in that film is so wrong. It wasn’t even eighties style, it was their idea of futuristic fashion. That film is the bad mistake of the eighties, so horrible, yet so weirdly watchable now.’
What Liquid Sky tapped into, and what the whole electroclash/nu-wave sensibility reactivates, is a futuristic update of late nineteenth-century decadence à la Oscar Wilde and Against Nature, J. K. Huymans’s late nineteenth century novel about a dandy aristocrat who dedicates himself to artifice and monstrosity. Wilde declared that sincerity was the enemy of art, and in this spirit electroclash rejects wholesome authenticity in favour of all things synthetic and fake. The motto: ‘Keep it unreal.’ The Electroclash Festival celebrated self-reinvention and artifice – from the porno-punk theatrics of Peaches to the performance art spectacle staged by Fischerspooner, with their costume changes, choreographed routines, props and backdrops, and cast of more than ten performers. Fischerspooner pitched themselves as the vanguard of a New Pretentiousness movement. ‘Our goal is to indulge and embrace the superficial and not to get too wrapped up in issues of integrity,’ frontman Casey Spooner said. ‘We’re completely, unabashedly and absolutely prepared to say that we’re pretentious and superficial.’ Or as My Robot Friend sing it on ‘The Fake’, another Berliniamsburg anthem, ‘We are the fake/No hearts for you to break/ The fake machines/Pretend to live on TV screens.’
If post-rave club culture is organized around Ecstasy-emotions – empathy, cuddly sentimentality, mass fervour – nu-wave is predicated on removing the Ecstasy vibe (by definition, uncool – all about warmth and flow). Initially, it’s refreshing to enter a club like Berliniamsburg, where the whole night isn’t organized around a monolithic mood-sensation (Ecstasy). Not that it’s necessarily a temple to clean living or anything like that. The venue Luxx is round the corner from a notorious spot for copping cocaine. Larry Tee says that if there’s a drug vector to the scene, ‘It’s circled back to the old disco drugs of the seventies, minus the Quaaludes.’ The shift to ego-burnishing powders is signposted by tunes like Vitalic’s ‘You Prefer Cocaine’ or Kittin & Hacker’s ‘Frank Sinatra’ with its allusion to ‘sniffing in the VIP area’. Australian dance critic Tim Finney described DJ Hell as ‘a cocaine producer. It’s all treble sounds and big personalities. International Deejay Gigolos are trying to engage with a certain experience of dancing as a culture that was all about elitism and snootiness and music-as-fashion versus music-as-music.’
Nu-wave rewinds to the pre-E era when clubbing was all about clique-ishness and ‘the beautiful people’: an aristocracy of larger than life characters dedicated to standing out from the faceless herd of nonentities. ‘I am legendary/You are not’ declaims the chorus of Hungry Wives’ ‘It’s Over’. Kittin & Hacker’s ‘Frank Sinatra’ is half satire, half celebration of the velvet-rope superiority complex of the rich and famous. Nu-wave is all about the cold glitter of glamour’s impenetrable surfaces. Its aura of hierarchical hauteur connects back to the gay New York tradition of vogueing, with its fashion-magazine-derived imagery and rampant Europhilia. Larry Tee’s many exploits include co-writing the hit song ‘Supermodel’ for transvestite star RuPaul. In the early nineties, he was also involved in the superfreaky New York clubland milieu centred around the notorious Michael Alig, America’s answer to Leigh Bowery. From early eighties New Romantics at Blitz to the grotesques and poseurs at Bowery’s Taboo, from Alig’s decadent Limelight scene to the cross-dressing queens of vogueing, there’s a common ethos that is pure glam rock: intensely hierarchical, fiercely competitive, bitchy as hell. The Berliniamsburg scene is just the latest iteration of this tradition. Tee’s stable of protégés includes performers with movie-star names like Tobell Von Cartier and Sophia La Marr, whose Berliniamsburg favourite ‘Useless’ starts with the regal and deliciously preposterous proclamation: ‘I’m Catherine Deneuve!!!’. Elsewhere in nu-wave, you get imagery of executive lifestyles and jet-set glamour – Kittin & Hacker’s ‘Stock Exchange’, the formal businesswear look and sterile office environments used by Adult. and Ersatz Audio in their artwork. This echoes the imagery of early eighties groups like Heaven 17, whose sleeve for 1981’s Penthouse and Pavement depicted the group as corporate executives discussing business plans and negotiating deals on the telephone.
In reaching back to the early eighties, nu-wave is also looking to a time when rock and club culture were closer and had a lively conversation with each other. This explains why Larry Tee will praise Adult.’s version of ‘Me And My Rhythm Box’ as ‘just so shattered and so rock ’n’ roll’ and why he stresses how he’ll throw some rock ’n’ roll into the mix during his Berliniamsburg DJ sets, tunes like Andrew W. K.’s ‘Party ’Til You Puke’. It’s why My Robot Friend’s ‘Fake’ wields the promise/threat ‘our rock ’n’ roll will kill you dead.’ And it’s why International Deejay Gigolos use the famous photograph of Sid Vicious ironically flexing his puny arm muscles and wearing McLaren and Westwood’s outrageous ‘two cowboys with their cocks hanging out’ T-shirt. Groups like Le Tigre and Peaches, who come from a more punky riot grrl background, are big on the scene. Fronted by grrl icon Kathleen Hanna, Le Tigre is New Wavey dance-pop with a lo-tech garage punk aesthetic, all spiky riffs and feminist sloganeering, while for all her brain-bashing techno beats Peaches has more in common with Joan Jett, Billy Idol, or Suicide singer Alan Vega than anyone in dance culture. In an echo of punk, attitude and charisma are considered more important than production finesse or beat-science. There’s a nostalgia for a time when pop was full of freaks and weirdos, people like Prince or Boy George.
Within the context of a fatigued dance culture, nu-wave is refreshing, irreverent, a reason to go out again. It is already the Next Big Thing in this corner of the world (electronic music). But there are doubts whether it has what it takes to go all the way and become the next big thing in mainstream pop
. Nu-wave is catchy enough to seem poppy in in the melody-deficient world of tracky techno and semi-songful house. But it’s alarming how so many of the genres most memorable tunes are covers: Fischerspooner’s version of Wire’s ‘The 15th’, Tiga’s reinvention of ‘Sunglasses At Night’ (originally by Canadian eighties pop star Corey Hart), WIT’s nu-wave take on New Wave hit ‘Just What I Needed’ by The Cars. On the whole, nu-wave producers seem superior at beats and textures, and rarely as good at songwriting and pop arrangement as their inspirations. It’s not clear if anyone has the sheer pop genius flowing through their veins to write a song like The Human League’s ‘Love Action’ or Numan’s ‘Cars’. The scene’s roots in techno come through in the fact that some of the biggest and best tunes are instrumentals: Legowelt’s impossibly stirring and portentous ‘Disco Rout’, the magnesium majesty of Vitalic’s ‘Poney Part 1’ (as if glamour somehow abandoned its human husks and became a free-floating ectoplasmic incandescence, a brilliantine trembling and aching of the air itself), the cold glimmering beauty of Der Zyklus II’s ‘Elektronisches Zeitech’. Then there’s the question of stellar singers, and whether the scene really has any. Beyond its rather overused and distinctly tired robot-chic, the excessive deployment of vocoder and similar electronic distortion effects suggests this is a convenient ruse for masking the absence of really top-quality vocalists. One exception is Linda Lamb on ‘Hot Room’, whose haggard and baleful grandeur suggests some unholy hybrid of Marianne Faithfull, Nina Hagen and Kim Carnes. Then there’s Solvent’s amazing ‘My Radio’, which uses vocoder not as a robo-gimmick but to communicate an unearthly and angelic sense of awe and devotion.
If these tracks achieve a sonic gloriousness that propels them beyond the ‘retro’ trap, too much nu-wave seems trapped by its tongue-in-chic irony. It feels like there’s some indefinable line that’s yet to be crossed before this genre transcends period pastiche and tackles the challenge of somehow being more about now than then. Because if it is about then . . . well, the eighties classics remain impossible to beat.
TWENTY-THREE
CRISIS AND CONSOLIDATION
AN OVERVIEW OF
RAVE CULTURE’S
SECOND DECADE
Signing off on Energy Flash the first time round, I used the idea of ‘a pause for breath’ to describe the feeling in 1998. You’ve Come A Long Way Baby is how Fatboy Slim titled his album of that year, and there was a palpable feeling that rave, having travelled so far so fast, was now stopping to take stock, looking back at the journey to date. But, I argued, the forward surge would resume soon, there were still new frontiers to conquer.
This turned out to be wishful thinking. What happened next is that the scene got even bigger, yet the music stayed stuck, its development arrested. Then the boom turned to bust, while the music underwent a kind of implosion. Replacing revolution with involution, it plunged deep into its own vast accumulated history, working through the sprawling sonic legacy through a series of internal hybrids and subtle renovations.
Dance culture reached its absolute peak in popularity and mass cultural hegemony during the three-year period 1998 – 2000. The reigning genres – big beat, filter disco, fluffy trance – were unabashedly poppy. Tracks by leading artists in those genres – Fatboy Slim and Chemical Brothers with big beat; Stardust, DJ Spiller and Modjo with filter; Paul Van Dyk and ATB in trance – hit the toppermost reaches of the charts across Europe and many other territories in the world. Electronic dance was so hot, Madonna leapt on two successive techno bandwagons, assimilating trance with 1998’s Ray of Light and aping Daft Punk-style French house on 2000’s Music.
These were the years when superDJs charged obscene amounts for remixing singles by pop groups and for a few hours spinning records in a club. The years of massive dance festivals and superclubs with grandiose plans of turning themselves into shopping-mall-like leisure complexes. A time of hubris and complacency, stoked by a blizzard of cocaine. The culture kept on swelling: in the boom’s swansong phase, Fatboy Slim drew 250,000 people to a free outdoor party on Brighton’s seafront, with disastrous – and for Norman Cook – bloody expensive consequences. But the music no longer hurtled forward.
In a literal sense, it had stopped hurtling – the exponential escalation of b.p.m. had halted when drum and bass and gabba reached the outer limits of speed circa 1997. While small tribes of headstrong maniacs pushed the tempos even faster (deep into the Zone of Fruitless Intensification) dance culture as a whole took a step sideways. What’s striking about the late nineties is the across-the-board rediscovery of house music, a strategic downshift in tempo and embrace of a warmer, more organic palette of sounds. Oh, house in its crasser and tamer forms (handbag, tribal, funky) had stayed popular throughout the nineties; it was clubland’s default option. What I’m talking about is the adoption of the house template by artists who’d hitherto been in the vanguard of innovation, and by consumers who were the leading edge of hip taste.
The London hardcore continuum was one of the first places the shift registered: in 1997 the bulk of the scene abandoned drum and bass for speed garage, a drop of approximately 30 b.p.m and a switch from chopped-up breakbeats to the pump-and-pound of four-to-the-floor house. But a similar let’s-go-back impulse surfaced in other areas of the late nineties dance culture. Robert Hood and Dan Bell, for instance, talked about wanting to restore an ‘original “jack” element’ – meaning a Chicago house feel – that had been expunged from minimal techno (a genre they’d helped to instigate) in its remorseless pursuit of reduction and rigour. Another example is electronic experimentalist Matthew Herbert (aka Dr Rockit, Radio Boy, et al), who we last glimpsed in the ‘Fuck Dance Let’s Art’ chapter. In 1996 he decided to fuck the art and dance, opening up a new house-oriented alter ego, Herbert, for the album 100 Lbs. Actually, what he really did was fold the artiness into house’s groove matrix. 1998’s Around the House showcased Herbert’s newly subtle approach to avant-gardism. Topped with exquisite jazzy vocals from Dani Siciliano, the album sounded like a voluptuous condensation of the textural/rhythmatic innovations of American deep-house producers like Mood II Swing and Masters At Work. But the lush ‘musicality’ was really musique concrete disguised, because many of the spongy textures and glitch-riffs were derived from the sampled sounds of household objects being used (Around the House, geddit?).
It wasn’t just producers who fell in love with house, it was punters too. Hipsters who’d never had much direct experience of house as a clubbing culture, whose point of entry into rave had been hardcore/ drum and bass, or Aphex Twin/art-techno/IDM, suddenly discovered the delights of house, the amazing richness of its legacy and diversity of its sound-spectrum. This shift in allegiance was partly a response to the way that drum and bass and techno had driven themselves down anorectic, self-desiccating dead ends of punitive purism and hair-shirt minimalism. House signified a return to pleasure and pleasantness.
But the new blood entering house in the late nineties weren’t content to be humble neophytes, listening respectfully to the sage advice of deep-house connoisseurs. Many of them wanted to reform and expand the genre, bringing back an earlier ideal of house as a catholic and aesthetically flexible genre (hence the term ‘house-not-house’ that circulated for a while). In this view of house history, the true spirit of the genre was fundamentally opposed to fundamentalism of any sort, including that of the deep-house custodians (a curmudgeonly and snobbish lot, on the whole) who tried to freeze the style and keep it ‘pure’ (i.e. changeless). The opposing view held that house’s true anti-essence was impurist, a pragmatic openness to outside influence. Rather than getting paranoid about stylistic contamination like, says, the nineties Detroit techno cultists did, these new school house producers of the late nineties slyly assimilated rhythmic and texturological tricks from the overtly experimental forms of electronica, then craftily resituated them within house’s pleasure-principled context. Producers like Daft Punk, Armand Van Helden, Green Velvet and Basement Jaxx revitalized hous
e by working in elements of hardcore rave aggression, industrial techno bombast, jungle’s marauding bass-science, and art-techno’s twitchy glitcherie.
Leaders of a French scene that included Bob Sinclar, I:Cube and Alan Braxe, Daft Punk pioneered a monstrously popular yet hipster-credible style of disco-flavoured house. Their 1996 debut album Homework ranged from kitschy retro-tinged hits like ‘Around The World’ and ‘Da Funk’ to gratingly raw drug-noise like ‘Rollin’ & Scratchin” and ‘Rock ’n’ Roll’. Falling somewhere in between those extremes was the classic ‘Musique’, a loop-da-looping disco cut-up that precociously featured a technique known as the ‘low-pass filter sweep’, an effect that makes riffs or vocal samples seem like they’re receding tantalizingly into the background before surging back in full ecstatic force. Sounding like a cross between panning and phasing, the low-pass filter sweep combines a spangly, spectral unearthliness with a teasing, suppressed-sounding quality. A fabulously effective trigger for the E-rush, filter FX soon became the basis of an entire genre. Thomas Bangalter, one half of Daft Punk, collaborated with Alan Braze to create the defining filter-disco anthem, Stardust’s 1998’s ‘Music Sounds Better With You’, a two-million-selling smash built from an astonishing woozy-oozy male vocal (sung by Benjamin Diamond), cocaine-crisp Chic-style rhythm guitar, and a snatch of strings. The audio equivalent of a glitterball, ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ was widely interpreted as a love song to the Mitsubishi brand of E.
Another UK Number One filter smash was Armand Van Helden’s ‘U Don’t Know Me’. Featuring Duane Harden’s imploring falsetto, this orchestral disco stampede was an unusually ‘deep’ outing for Van Helden, better known as sole inheritor of New York’s rough and ready hip-house tradition. Like Todd Terry’s proto-hardcore anthems of the late eighties, Van Helden’s tunes were huge in the UK. All wooshing dark-diva vocals and jungle-style wah-wah bass, his ominously erotic revamp of Sneaker Pimps’s ‘Spin Spin Sugar’ was a formative influence on speed garage. Collaborating with underground rappers like Company Flow’s MC Ren, throwing in gunshots sounds and generally flexing his ruffneck credentials, Van Helden sometimes seemed to be overcompensating for the fact that his genre was one that most hip hoppers still regarded as ‘gay’. Ironically, his biggest and best tunes have been the least macho – like the languorous, lovesick ‘Flowerz’ and ‘U Don’t Know Me’ itself, whose don’t-judge-me lyrics slot into a gay disco-house tradition of anthems that defiantly demand respect from a hostile world. Still, if he wasn’t so conflicted, Armand ‘I Am A Raw Individual’ Van Helden wouldn’t make such compelling records.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 63
