Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (22 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Attempting to convey the generation gap created by the bleep-and-bass invasion of the British pop charts, a colleague of mine once likened LFO and their ilk to fifties rockabilly. Rock ’n’ roll and bleep-and-bass both seemed like alien musics that came out of nowhere; both flouted then accepted pop notions of melody and meaningfulness, and offensively asserted the priority of rhythm and the backbeat. Other commentators cited the twangy guitar instrumentals of the early sixties as a precedent: The Shadows, Duane Eddy, The Tornadoes’ ‘Telstar’, all of which fascinated teenagers with their gimmicky futurism and otherworldly sheen.
Outside the Warp fraternity, there was a legion of independently released bleep-and-bass classics: Ability Il’s ‘Pressure’, F-X-U’s ‘The Chase’, Hi-Ryze’s ‘Ride The Rhythm’, Autonation’s ‘Crosswires’, Ubik’s ‘System Overload’ EP. Even Detroit-aligned Network got on the case, putting out Forgemasters’ awesomely inorganic ‘Stress’ (sounds so shiny, sibilant and serrated they seem to lacerate the ear-drum), along with insidiously catchy yet utterly unmelodic tracks by Rhythmatic like ‘Frequency’ and ‘Take Me Back’. And 808 State dropped the ambient house swirl in favour of synth-fart brutalism on hits like ‘In Yer Face’ and ‘Cubik’.
Greatest of the non-Warp outfits, and one of the few to survive the bleep-and-bass era, was Orbital (aka Paul and Phil Hartnoll). Knocked out in their attic studio at the brothers’ home in Sevenoaks, a London commuter belt town, Orbital’s debut ‘Chime’ cost virtually nothing to make but got to Number Seventeen in the UK charts. Appearing on
Top of the Pops
in the spring of 1990, Orbital infuriated the producers and confirmed all the Luddites’ fears about techno knob-twiddlers’ non-musicianship: the brothers simply pressed a button (all it took to trigger the track) and stood there listlessly, not even pretending to mime.
The British ‘Strings of Life’, ‘Chime’ sounds at once urgent and serene, capturing the classic Ecstasy sensation of sublime suspension, of being stuck on an endless pre-orgasmic plateau. ‘Chime’ pivots around a tintinnabulating, crystalline sequence of notes that hop and skip down the octave like a shiver shimmying down your spine. This motif is one of the first instances of what would become a defining hardcore device, the melody-riff: a hook that is as percussive as it’s melodious. Then a Roland 303 enters, jabbering like a bunch of funky gibbons, while a second sub-bassline quakes beneath it at half-tempo. At the breakdown, muzak-strings (sweeping, beatific) clash with staccato string-stabs (impatient, neurotic), then the melody-riff cascades in again like a downpour of diamonds and pearls. And your goosepimples run riot.
To this day, ‘Chime’ is a rave anthem, guaranteed to trigger uproar; the Hartnolls claim that various elements of the track have reappeared as samples in some fifty other tracks. But Orbital themselves quickly distanced themselves from hardcore rave, preferring to weave celestial techno-symphonies like ‘Belfast’, a soaring lament for the strife-torn city. Pivoting around the same eight-note sequence of psalmic female vocal – sampled from
A Feather on the Breath of God: Sequences and Hymns by the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen
– stolen by The Beloved for ‘The Sun Rising’, ‘Belfast’ always make me think of Wim Wenders’s
Wings of Desire
, with its guardian angels who invisibly bring succour to the anguished.
Dance Before the Police Come
 
In 1990, long before rave culture fragmented into sub-scenes and the semantics went haywire, there were really only two words for the music – house and techno – and even these tended to be interchangeable. House could range from soulful and songful (‘deep’ or ‘garage’) to track-oriented (‘hardcore house’). The latter term was vague enough to encompass a multitude of styles that were united less by sound than by context and effect: they all incited frenzy at big raves.
Just as the subliminal influence of the UK’s reggae and hip hop scenes shaped a distinctive Northern style of hardcore, similar factors spawned a quite different sound in the South. There was the same emphasis on sub-bass pressure, but instead of the Warp-style bands’ programmed drum machine rhythms, the South of England producers sampled and looped breakbeats. The break is the percussion-only section of a funk or disco track. House producers got these breakbeats second-hand from hip hop records, or from album compilations of the most highly sought after breaks. American producers like Todd Terry, Fast Eddie and Tyree, and Brooklyn’s Lenny Dee and Frankie Bones had already experimented with the idea, but it was in the UK that ‘breakbeat house’ caught on like wildfire. Partly, it was because looping breaks lent itself to the anyone-can-do-it aspect of the hardcore home-studio boom. It’s easier for novices to get a good groove going by using samples of real-time drumming, than by painstakingly programming a rhythm track on a drum machine. And it’s cheaper too, since the basic set-up to make tracks is turntables, a sampler and a sequencer program, with no need for drum machines or synthesizers. But breaks also appealed to a multiracial, London and surrounding counties population who’d grown up on Black American imports like jazz-funk, hip hop and rare groove. With their raw, ‘live’ feel, breakbeats added extra grit and oomph to house’s clinical rhythms.
Although artists like Demon Boyz, Rebel MC, and Blapps Posse/ Dynamic Guvnors all played a part in forging the UK hip-house hybrid, the key figures in the rise of breakbeat house were PJ and Smiley, two black British youths from Stoke Newington in North East London. Using the name Shut Up And Dance, they operated as a band, a production team and a label. In the mid-eighties, they’d started out on the sound-system Heatwave, where they took Def Jam tracks and sped the breaks up from 100 b.p.m. to 130 b.p.m., then chanted MC-style over the top. They also put out a few Brit-rap tracks as Private Party, including ‘My Tennants’, an Anglicized rebuke to Run DMC’s sponsorship-rap ‘My Adidas’. Like Warp, they began Shut Up and Dance in 1989 as a white label operation, selling tracks direct to dance stores from their car boot, and servicing the burgeoning pirate-radio stations. The duo’s pro-pirate stance – ‘once a station goes legal it’s shit,’ they declared to
Melody Maker
– was given anthem-form in a track by SUAD act Rum and Black, ‘**** The Legal Stations’: a grainy slice of breakbeat-and-bass minimalism pivoting around a soundbite that complains ‘turn off that muthafuckin’ radio’ and a looped squeal of guitar-feedback sampled from Prince’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy’.
Based on the flagrant theft of highly recognizable chunks from mainstream pop records by the likes of Suzanne Vega and The Eurythmics, SUAD cut-and-paste tracks seemed like sonic documents of hardcore rave’s black economy: uncleared samples, dodgy warehouse raves, pirate radio, drug dealing, bootleg tracks and no-permission, no-royalty mix-tapes. It sounded like fast money music, the perfect soundtrack for an underground/underworld geared to the blag and the scam.
But Shut Up and Dance saw themselves as young black entrepreneurs engaged in bettering themselves
and
giving back something to their disenfranchised community. They had a conscience: at heart, they were disenchanted hip hoppers, inspired by Public Enemy’s righteous politics but bored by their increasingly staid production. ‘We’re not a rave group, we’re a fast hip hop group,’ they told
Melody Maker
. ‘We’ve moved hip hop on in a way that people like Public Enemy haven’t dared to.’ On tracks like ‘Rest In Peace (Rap Will Never)’ and ‘Here Comes A Different Type Of Rap Track Not The Usual 4 Bar Loop Crap’, they pledged allegiance to rap even as they berated it for its sonic stasis quo.
But SUAD’s early output didn’t galvanize the moribund Britrap scene. Instead their tracks found favour with the hardcore house audience, despite the fact that SUAD specialized in a kind of social realism that foregrounded not just the grim realities that rave aimed to evade, but many of the squalid, exploitative aspects of the rave scene itself. Alongside anti-racism polemic (‘White White World’), urban vigilante rage (‘This Town Needs A Sheriff’) and survivalist determination (‘Derek Went Mad’, with its ghostly sample of a fragile male voice whispering ‘but I’ll return a stronger man’), there were tracks like ‘£10 To Get In’, a jibe at rip-off raves. The remix sequel ‘£20 To Get In’ begins with a white cockney punter ringing up a phone-line for instructions on how to get to a warehouse party, only to be horrified by the extortionate entrance fee. ‘I thought it was £10!!’. ‘No, mate,’ says the black promoter in a deadpan, take-it-or-leave-it voice, ‘it’s ’ad a remix.’
Shut Up And Dance were at pains to distance themselves from drug culture. They bemoaned London’s escalating crack problem on their Top Fifty hit ‘Autobiography of a Crackhead’ and its flipside ‘The Green Man’, a stirring, string-swept instrumental named after a Hackney pub notorious for its open drug-dealing. And their biggest hit, ‘Raving I’m Raving’, targeted Ecstasy. If you actually listen to the lyrics, ‘Raving’ isn’t a celebratory anthem but a withering probe into the void at the heart of the rave dream. The track is based almost entirely on Marc Cohn’s AOR ballad hit single of late 1991, ‘Walking In Memphis’. Retaining the song’s heartbusting piano chords but tweaking the words slightly, PJ and Smiley created a raver’s anthem with a booby-trap lyric. ‘Bought myself a first-class ticket,’ gushes singer Peter Bouncer, referring to a tab of Ecstasy, before rapturously evoking his touchdown in a loved-up wonderland. ‘Everybody was happy / Ecstasy shining down on me . . . I’m raving I’m raving / But do I really feel the way I feel?’ At this fissure of doubt, a foreboding bassline kicks in, followed by a loop of anguished female vocal.
For most of the 50,000 ravers who bought the track, ‘Raving I’m Raving’ was doubtless received as an irony-free affirmation of the rave dream-state, a glorious hymn to MDMA. Going straight into the national pop chart at Number Two on its first week of release, the booby-trap concealed in ‘Raving I’m Raving’ promptly blew up in PJ and Smiley’s face. Within two weeks of its release, the track had to be withdrawn after protests from Marc Cohn and his record company. Cohn insisted that no more pressings be made and all profits be donated to charity. SUAD went into liquidation, with PJ and Smiley railing against an alleged record industry conspiracy to put young black entrepreneurs out of business. When they returned to the fray in 1994 – bitter, battle-scarred and desperately plugging their ‘Phuck the Biz’ EP – SUAD were still harping on the same theme, telling all who would listen that SUAD could have been another Motown.
With their looped-breaks-and-uncleared-samples aesthetic, their roots in hip hop and reggae’s sound-system culture, their ambivalence about Ecstasy, and their street survivalist politics (on the cover of their debut album,
Dance Before The Police Come!
, they struck kung fu poses, barechested, oiled and musclebound), Shut Up And Dance laid the groundwork for jungle, the subculture that would evolve out of breakbeat hardcore. Other acts on SUAD anticipated crucial strands of the jungalistic sound-spectrum. Rum and Black’s ‘Bogeyman’, with its scared-out-of-her-wits woman’s whimper of ‘oh no, don’t go in there’ and distorted blurts of jazz trumpet, was 1993-style darkside hardcore
avant la lettre
. On tracks like ‘Illegal Gunshot’, ‘Hooligan 69’, ‘Spliff-head’, ‘Wipe The Needle’, and the awesome ‘Mixed Truth’, The Ragga Twins mashed up ruff B-boy breaks, uproarious dancehall reggae chatter and Euro-techno terror-riffs with results that uncannily prophesized the ragga-influenced jungle sound of 1994. And the bittersweet breakbeat-driven torch songs of sultry chanteuse Nicolette on
Now Is Early
looked ahead to the jazz-tinged directions that jungle would explore in 1995 – 6. All in all, Shut Up And Dance left a major legacy.
Mentasm Madness
 
‘I’m sure the constant exposure to amplifiers and electric guitars . . . has altered my body chemistry . . . It is the proximity of the electric hum in the background and just the tremendous feeling of buoyancy and power . . . I was really determined to use the noises on myself, as if I were a scientist experimenting on himself, like Dr Jekyll . . .’
– Iggy Pop, anticipating hardcore in his memoir
I Need More
 
 
Across the English Channel, another version of hardcore was hatching: hard as fuck, whiter-than-white, based around riffs rather than bleeps and distorted noise rather than clean lines. Believe it or not, for about eighteen months
Belgium
ruled the world of techno. Groups as geographically distant as Detroit’s Underground Resistance and Dollis Hill’s Manix paid tribute to the mysterious Lowlands nation: UR put out the ‘Belgian Resistance’ single, Manix recorded the track ‘Never Been To Belgium’.
The seeds of the new sound, however, germinated somewhere between Belgium and Brooklyn, New York, where DJ – producers like Lenny Dee, Mundo Muzique and Joey Beltram were pushing rave music in a harder and faster direction. Beltram revolutionized techno twice before he reached the age of twenty-one. First, with 1990’s ‘Energy Flash’, which gets my vote as the greatest techno track of all time. With its radioactive bass-glow and pulsing loop-riff, ‘Energy Flash’ sucks you into a miasmic maelstrom like nothing since the first acid house tracks. An insinuating whisper murmurs ‘acid, ecstasy’, like a dealer in the murk, or the voice-of-craving inside an addict’s head. The track really does sound like the speedfreak’s drug ‘flash’, like being plugged into an electric mains (no wonder amphetamine-
aficionados
talk of being ‘wired’).
Years later, I realized ‘Energy Flash’ thrills me for exactly the same reasons as Stooges songs like ‘Loose’ and ‘Raw Power’. Proto-punk and hardcore techno are both an intransitive surge of object-less aggression: ‘raw power got no place to go . . . it don’t wanna know’, as Iggy sang. Instead of being a form of self-expression, this is music as
forcefield
, in which the individual is suspended and subjective consciousness is wiped clean away. The title of Beltram’s second genre-revolutionizing classic, 1991’s ‘Mentasm’, could be a synonym for another Iggy trope: the ‘O-mind’, a paradoxical state of hyper-alert oblivion in which self-aggrandizement and self-annihilation fuse. Produced in collaboration with Mundo Muzique and released under the name Second Phase, ‘Mentasm’ was even more influential than ‘Energy Flash’. The monstrous ‘mentasm’ sound – a swarming killer-bee drone derived from the Roland Juno Alpha synthesizer, a writhing, seething cyclone-hiss that sends ripples of shivery, shuddery rapture over your entire body-surface – spread through rave culture like a virus, infecting everyone from the Belgian, Dutch and German hardcore crews to British breakbeat artists like 4 Hero, Doc Scott and Rufige Cru. The ‘mentasm stab’ – which took the sound and gave it a convulsive riff-pattern – was hardcore’s great unifier, guaranteed to activate your E-rush.

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