Just as ferociously impurist, Basement Jaxx probably did more than anyone to awaken outside interest in house at the close of the nineties. Their 1999 debut Remedy, full of audacious hybrids like the ragga-driven thug-house of ‘Jump ’N’ Shout’, drew a huge amount of attention towards a genre that the Jaxx, ironically, had every intention of leaving behind. Having started out in the UK purist house scene alongside Idjut Boys and Faze Action, Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton quickly tired of that milieu’s smug piety and decided that the best way to honour house’s spirit was by vandalizing its forms.
Early Jaxx tracks like ‘Fly Life’ and ‘Set Yo Body Free’ took what Ratcliffe called ‘the untouchable sexiness and polish of American deep house’ and roughed it up with English aggression, attitude and noise. The duo incubated their style, which they punningly dubbed ‘punk garage’, in the cramped and rowdy basement of a Brixton pub called George IV. ‘That’s where our chaos came from,’ Ratcliffe recalled. ‘There was always feedback, records jumping, things going wrong. But people cheered because there was a real vibe – it wasn’t clinical.’ The duo became obsessed with colliding musicality and anti-musicality (the ‘ugliness’ and ‘wrongness’ of early Chicago house, hardcore rave and so forth). The punk aspect came to the fore on Remedy’s stand-out tune ‘Same Old Show’, which pivoted around a baleful sample from New Wave ska band The Selecter, then blossomed on Rooty with the headbanger house of ‘Get Me Off’ and ‘Where’s Your Head At’, the latter sampling a doomy Gary Numan riff and featuring an Oi!-like jeering hooligan chorus. But there was a whole other vein of Jaxx tracks that recalled Prince circa Sign O’ the Times – insanely detailed production, warped vocal multitrackings, maximalist-not-minimalist extravagance (ideas that other producers might spin out for entire tracks occurring as sonic singularities, gratuitous one-offs). A good rubric for the Jaxx sound would be the Prince-echoing moniker ‘The Genre Formerly Known As House’.
Ironically, given their attempts to move beyond house, artists like Van Helden and Basement Jaxx served as a gateway drug that turned disillusioned drum and bass and techno heads onto the glories of the disco-house tradition. One New York club defined the mood at the cusp of the new millennium: Body & Soul. Founded in 1996 by two veterans of the seventies, Francois Kevorkian and Danny Krivit, plus their younger comrade Joe Claussell, the club was conceived as a restoration of the open-minded, eclectic ethos of the gay dance underground of the mid-seventies, before disco had even been codified as a defined style, let alone commercialized as mainstream pop. Emulating David Mancuso’s party The Loft, Body & Soul had an alcohol-free juice bar and a fabulously crisp sound system. Many of the audience turning up at B & S when the club opened early on Sunday afternoons were middle-aged veterans of The Loft and Paradise Garage.
Harking back to Mancuso’s approach, Kevorkian, Krivit and Claussell almost always played tunes from start to finish, rather than mixing them. In opposition to the cult of DJ virtuosity (jocks like Sasha showing off their seamless mixing by picking compatible samey-sounding tracks), the B & S crew believed in the sacrosanct integrity of the Song. DJing, they felt, was the art of ‘programming’, the selection and sequencing of songs to tell a story. Soul classics by Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield got dropped next to seventies disco obscurities and nineties Afro-house full of Fela Kuti-like percussion and dubby FX. It wasn’t all spiritually healing vibes and organic earthy textures – sometimes the DJs would play thrillingly chilly electrodisco like Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, while they were fond (some would say, overfond) of a technique called ‘crossover’ which cuts whole frequency bands out of the music and creates violently lurching, staccato dynamics. Applied by the B & S DJs to, say, a hoary old slice of rock disco like the Stones’s ‘Miss You’, crossover transformed the original into something jaggedly futuristic, as though a latent house track was fighting its way out of the song’s body, Alien-style.
B & S was very much a response to the divide in New York club culture between rave-style superclubs like Twilo and the more intimate ‘vibe’ or ‘soul’ clubs playing deep house. On one side, white glow-stick warriors from the bridge-and-tunnel zones of New Jersey, Queens, Long Island, got stoked on E and rallied to superstar DJs from Europe. On the other, visiting Europeans and jaded hipsters flocked to worship at the shrine of all things authentically old school – the largely gay and black dance underground, where the DJs are local boys. By 1999, Body & Soul was getting hailed as the best club in the world, and tourists were arriving from all over the world – purist house scholars from the UK, party-hard Eurotrash, immaculately retro-styled Japanese waifs – in search of a time-travel simulacrum of back-in-the-day. Body & Soul and similar clubs like Bang the Party effectively transformed the New York prehistory of house into a veritable heritage industry similar to jazz in New Orleans.
That ‘the best club in the world’ was based on the idea of restoration – a return not just to the golden age of early house, but to the ‘original principles’ of the pre-disco underground – seemed to symbolize the closing of a circle. Rave had gone all the way out to the farthest extremes in every conceivable direction, and then all the way back to the start. And now it was stalled. In the first few years of the twenty-first century, dance culture seemed to be struggling to come up with a great leap forward. Instead of a Next Big Thing, all it could generate was Next Medium-Sized Things, newish hybrid genres like broken beats and nu-skool breaks. These micro-scenes flashed up briefly on the specialist dance media screen but were of minimal interest to the outside world. To stake its claim on the wider world’s attention, dance music needed to smack listeners upside the head with mind-blowingly unfamiliar new sounds. That’s what it had done repeatedly from the late eighties to the late nineties, surging into unknown territory so rapidly you had to scramble to keep up with its constant mutations. Even those who couldn’t stand a genre like jungle, couldn’t deny its radicalism, the fact that it sounded like nothing they’d ever heard before. In contrast, the new substyles in twenty-first-century dance had a kind of ‘plausible deniability’, such that sceptics or lapsed believers could dismiss them as mere tweaks to established forms.
While the cool undergrounds bustled with medium- or smaller-sized activity, the mainstream of clubbing ’n’ drugging had driven the music into nullifying dead ends like the bang-bang-bang-bang-you’re-brain-dead style known as hard house. The combination of corporatisation, complacency and crappy music proved lethal. You started to hear murmurings of disquiet at the end of 2001, when the normally booster-ish dance-mag Muzik claimed that the industry was in total denial about the oncoming crisis: attendance at clubs was declining, record sales were sliding, the only real growth area was chill-out compilations. The stores and the charts were awash with the latter, suggesting that clubbers were choosing to save their money and take their drugs at home to a soundtrack of stoner muzak, rather than pay a small fortune to attend megaclubs with their sterile, shopping-mall-like atmospheres, bouncers carrying walkie-talkies, and extortionate drinks prices.
Another factor was that the original audience for dance was tiring of going out because it was getting older, while the tidal waves of fresh recruits that had repeatedly restocked the movement during the forward-surging nineties were no longer materializing. Next Medium-Sized Things aren’t compelling enough to make converts. Electronic dance music had also simply been around for such a long time (in 2002 it was fifteen years since acid house) that familiarity bred, if not outright contempt, certainly ennui. The next generation of cool kids were turning away from ‘faceless techno bollocks’ towards more face-full music: garage-punk revivalists like the Hives and White Stripes, neo-post-punkers like the Strokes and the Libertines, the freak folk of Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. In their different ways, all these artists were stylish-looking and intensely tuneful, charismatic and literate. More often than not, they put on an entertaining show, as opposed to fiddling with laptops or turntables like the sallow-faced technicians of electronica. P
aul Oakenfold once bragged that turntables were outselling guitars. By 2002, the situation was reversed: guitars outstripped decks as more kids wanted to be rock stars than DJs. There was also competition from rap and R & B. Spurred by a turn-of-millennium burst of adventurous beat-making and futuristic production by figures like Timbaland and the Neptunes, hip hop increasingly beat electronica at its own game on club dance floors, even as its mad-catchy tunes made it into the globally dominant form of chart pop.
The decline in dance’s fortunes was precipitous. Records sales dropped from thirteen per cent of the total UK market in 2000 to a measly seven per cent in 2004 – almost halved. A series of dramatically ominous landmark events heralded the industry’s contraction. In 2003, Cream, one of the world’s biggest superclubs, closed; Gatecrasher drastically scaled back from a weekly club to a monthly event. Other clubs tried an image makeover, distancing themselves from the gurning pill-monster market and adopting a more glammy aura of velvet ropes and bottle-service tables, where music was a cosmetic backdrop rather than the central experience. The ‘music head’ clubs that prospered in the new reduced conditions were ones like London’s Fabric, which wasn’t locked into a particular sound and didn’t cater to the caner community. Switching between genres on a weekly basis and booking DJs who weren’t superjocks but tastemakers in their respective specialist sounds, Fabric appealed to a compact but enduring constituency: dance fans whose sensibility was discerning but non-purist.
Dance music’s mainstream was imploding, leaving an array of micro-scenes and little undergrounds orbiting a collapsed centre. One major consequence was the near-extinction of the dance media, as the general readership withered away and genre fanatics found their information through other sources (increasingly the web). At their late nineties peak, all the UK dance magazines collectively sold around 250,000. But then three of the big five closed within eighteen months of each other – first Ministry in early 2003, then Muzik and Jockey Slut. This left just the long-established specialist publication DJmagazine and the market leader Mixmag, whose circulation slid from well over 100,000 at its height to its current humiliating figure of under 40,000. It would be lovely to think that Ministry and Mixmag were punished for their relentlessly lowest-common-denominator approach – the endless pix of clubbers off their tits and club babes in furry bras and micro-skirts and teak-toned fake tans; the fawning and content-free profiles of celeb DJs. But the demise of the more trainspottery Muzik suggests the problem was simply a dearth of people interested in reading about dance as it devolved into unconvincing sub-flavas like ‘smash house’, ‘tribal tech’ and ‘funky-chunky twisted house’.
Part of the dance mags’ lowbrow approach to boosting circulation was endless rehashed articles about drug use, all those ‘What drugs are YOU on?’ reader surveys and ‘Are drugs driving you mad?’ scare stories, which resembled nothing so much as the ‘new’ angles on sex that women’s mags like Cosmo dredge up every month. Even earnest Muzik tried to latch onto the ‘chemical generation’ trend, launching a column in which readers related their excruciatingly embarrassing tales of crazy, undignified or plain dumb things they’d done when off their heads (few of which contained sufficient narrative structure to qualify as anecdotes). As club culture became sanitized, practically the only edge factor left was the continued illegality of Ecstasy and other dance drugs. Yet by the early noughties, most young people were utterly blasé about E – the ‘magic pill’ had become safe, passé, naff. The declining allure of the drug/dance combo as leisure option and marker of youth cool was symbolized by the plummeting price of E. By 2002, its dealer-to-punter unit cost had dropped to as low as £1 in certain parts of the UK – making it even more lowly and commonplace than a pint of lager, perhaps just a notch above inhaling lighter fluid.
In America, where rave culture in its full-on form never got deeply entrenched in the mainstream of society, electronic dance music’s eclipse came swifter. The late nineties had looked promising: okay, the much-vaunted Electronica Revolution turned out to be a false dawn, but the serious end of the music (drum and bass, home-listening techno) continued to make inroads with American ex-indie types. Matador, home of lo-fi outfits like Pavement, went all Warp-y, licensing records by the likes of Boards of Canada, while Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx were as hip as could be. Big beat and trance DJs played to increasingly massive crowds in particular parts of the country. Paul Oakenfold, bullish as ever, was confident that America was the next commercial frontier for dance.
The big obstacle to crossover was access to the airwaves. MTV had been enthused by electronica’s ‘Next Big Thing’ candidacy – the channel programmed videos by The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Orbital and Underworld, and launched Amp, a late-night show dedicated to more experimental electronic music. But by the end of 1997, it became clear that electronica was being eclipsed by the craze for ska and swing: in an almost pointed repudiation of machine music, American kids wanted to dance but weren’t prepared to dance to actual, y’know, dance music. So MTV shunted electronica back into the ghetto (Amp ended up in the graveyard slot of Sunday night between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.). As for US radio, it had only ever been open to electronica at its most song-ful and rock-like – Prodigy’s digital simulacrum of punk, Chemical Brothers’ Britpop-with-breakbeats – and wasn’t prepared to playlist the purer forms of instrumental electronica for fear of alienating listeners. Nor did it get behind groups like Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk when they made rock-friendly moves. Daft Punk’s inspired merger of disco and FM soft-rock on 2001’s Discovery alchemized its shlocky sources (ELO, Supertramp, Frampton, Van Halen) to achieve a splendour of sound that felt almost religious. But this fantastique-plastique sound was out of step with the rock trends of the day (nu-metal, the new garage punk) and without serious radio support or MTV hit videos, Discovery sold only 500,000 in America – a decent result but way out of proportion to its monstrous success in Europe. Basement Jaxx’s Rooty likewise shifted less than 250,000 in America, putting this heavy-hitter of Anglotronica on a Billboard par with the runt of Roc-A-Fella’s litter or a side project by Tool’s drum technician.
In a cruel irony, electronica reached the American mainstream not as crossover pop music that grabbed your attention full-on, but as background music, the soundtrack to TV commercials or ‘interstitial’ music as used on channels like Bravo and ABC News. Massively touted as a star for 1998, Fatboy Slim never really had a proper hit in America, but his tunes were heard in countless commercials and dozens of Hollywood movies, with Moby and the Crystal Method close behind him. Sped-up breakbeats, acid riffs and other Ecstasy-associated sounds were plastered as a glaze of ‘cool’ and ‘contemporary’ over products as square as Mastercard, BMW, Smint breath fresheners and even the US Army. Big beat briefly became the signifier of ‘youth today’, even though far more actual American youth were listening to nu-metal and rap. There were technical reasons why it worked well in commercials: big beat’s high-energy style suited the frantic fast-cut pace of advertising. It also just happens that the advertising industry is based in hipster-dense cities like New York, Los Angeles and London, where electronica at that point was the music of choice for information-technology--wielding young professionals.
Music usually becomes Muzak only after it has been chartpop for a good while, but in America electronica skipped the radio hegemony stage and went straight to ubiquity. The combination of overexposure and lack of real success left American dance culture in an unhappy limbo – neither underground nor mainstream. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the ailing rave scene then started to get a battering from the authorities – a non-coordinated but virtually nationwide campaign of anti-rave legislation at the State or City level local police forces cracking down on promoters and club owners for drug use at their events, and, in New York, overzealous enforcement of the ‘cabaret law’, which forbade dancing in bars unless the proprietor had purchased an expense licence. Continuing the ‘quality of life crimes’ campaign of his predecessor Rudy Giulia
ni, this was Mayor Bloomberg appealing to property owners concerned about nocturnal noise in their neighbourhoods.
Hang on a minute, why were people dancing in bars anyway? The rise of the DJ bar wasn’t just an American trend, but happened on both sides of the Atlantic. As the formerly packed superclubs closed, moved to smaller venues or went irregular, club nights increasingly moved into pubs and bars. These could be vibey (especially if the bar was an illegal after-hours drinking den) and the intimacy was cool compared to the impersonal megaclubs. But small-is-beautiful had serious downsides. Through its evolution at raves and big clubs, this music had reached the point where it was made for large sound systems; the music didn’t achieve the right degree of scale and sensory overload on a bar’s titchy audio set-up. The reduction in the size of events was also a knock to the scene’s self-image. When the massive is no longer massive, the vibe diminishes significantly. Dance had contracted to the hardcore believers and the cognoscenti, but the fly by night fashionista types actually play an important role in creating a sense of ‘this is the place to be’. And that floating hipster vote had simply drifted off elsewhere.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 64
