Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (26 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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’Ardkore’s vulgar approach to sampling always makes me think of cargo cults: hallucinating the sublime and otherworldly in all manner of pop-cultural jetsam. I’m thinking of tracks like NRG’s ‘I Need Your Lovin”, which made the hardest of hearts melt to that hideously soppy Korgis’ ballad ‘Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometimes’, or the Payback track that transformed the
EastEnders
theme into a John Cage urban-gamelan percussion piece, or DJ Seduction’s ‘Sub Dub’, which sampled folk-rock maiden Maddy Prior’s dulcet-toned reverie of walking through ‘rushes and through briars’ to a field where ‘lambs do sport and play’. When it came to making music, ’ardkore youth seemed to have no preconceptions and no discrimination (in the sense of prejudice as much as discernment). If a noise or riff could be made to work in a track, they’d nick it. Listening to the latest torrent of white-labels on the pirate stations, I’d imagine these hyped-up teenagers rifling through their elder brothers’ or parents’ record collection looking for nifty samples.
EastEnders
theme into a John Cage urban-gamelan percussion piece, or DJ Seduction’s ‘Sub Dub’, which sampled folk-rock maiden Maddy Prior’s dulcet-toned reverie of walking through ‘rushes and through briars’ to a field where ‘lambs do sport and play’. When it came to making music, ’ardkore youth seemed to have no preconceptions and no discrimination (in the sense of prejudice as much as discernment). If a noise or riff could be made to work in a track, they’d nick it. Listening to the latest torrent of white-labels on the pirate stations, I’d imagine these hyped-up teenagers rifling through their elder brothers’ or parents’ record collection looking for nifty samples.
’Ardkore was
avant-lumpen
: the subculture’s general impulse towards druggy disorientation required that initially recognizable soundbites be distorted, debased, rendered alien. The sampler worked as an estrangement device, a deracination machine, producing sonorities whose physical origin was increasingly impossible to trace. But unlike the traditional conception of an avant-garde, with its heroic auteurs and lonely pioneers striding out into the unknown, ’ardkore’s creativity operated on the collective, macro-level of the entire genre: a syndrome Brian Eno calls ‘scenius’, as opposed to ‘genius’. When anyone came up with a new idea, it was instantly ripped off a hundred times. Inspired errors and random fucking about produced new riffs and noises, ‘mutations’ that entered the dancefloor eco-system and were then inscribed in the music’s DNA-code.
avant-lumpen
: the subculture’s general impulse towards druggy disorientation required that initially recognizable soundbites be distorted, debased, rendered alien. The sampler worked as an estrangement device, a deracination machine, producing sonorities whose physical origin was increasingly impossible to trace. But unlike the traditional conception of an avant-garde, with its heroic auteurs and lonely pioneers striding out into the unknown, ’ardkore’s creativity operated on the collective, macro-level of the entire genre: a syndrome Brian Eno calls ‘scenius’, as opposed to ‘genius’. When anyone came up with a new idea, it was instantly ripped off a hundred times. Inspired errors and random fucking about produced new riffs and noises, ‘mutations’ that entered the dancefloor eco-system and were then inscribed in the music’s DNA-code.
At the time, ’ardkore really did seem like some monstrous, amorphous creature, sucking in sound and regurgitating great vomit-gusts of anonymous, white-label brilliance. Looking back now, it’s possible to map out a cartography of creativity, trace the trajectories of key producers and identify the house style of crucial labels. Some of these prime movers – fledgling labels like Moving Shadow, Suburban Base, Reinforced, Ram, Formation, and producers like Rob Playford (Kaotic Chemistry/2 Bad Mice), DJ SS, Andy C (Desired State/Origin Unknown), Goldie (Rufige Cru), DJ Hype, Krome and Time, Hyper-On Experience – went on to become recognized and respected auteur-figures in the jungle scene. But many more fell by the wayside or drifted off into other genres when the hardcore boom went bust: labels like Ibiza, Third Party, Big City, outfits like Bodysnatch, Sub Love, Sudden Def, DJ Trax, Criminal Minds, Citadel of Kaos, Holy Ghost Inc, Satin Storm, Mixrace, Phantasy and Gemini.
Of all these, the mysterious trio Noise Factory warrant a special mention, if only for their by-name-by-nature approach to churning out tracks: in a little over a year, their production-line spat out around a dozen underground anthems on almost as many EPs, all released via Ibiza and Third Party. Tracks like ‘My Mind’, ‘Futoroid’, ‘Breakage #4’, ‘Survival’ and ‘Straight From the Bedroom’ were haywire contraptions of jittery breaks, mad noises, and grainy, low-resolution samples: ruff-cut patches of orchestral arrangement, dislocated shrieks of ambiguously pitched diva-bliss, plaintive roots reggae incantations and dancehall ragga chants.
The music on Third Party, Ibiza and Big City mirrored the subcultural underside of the commercial pop-rave explosion in 1992: a black economy of rip-off raves, dodgy drugs, desperate pleasures and bad attitudes (muggings at raves, bouncers who frisked you for illegal substances then re-sold them inside the venue). Ibiza’s first release, the ‘Happy Hour EP’, featured Low Noise Block’s ‘Rave In A Bedroom’, which sampled Rik from
The Young Ones
’ incredulous complaint – ‘five pounds to get into my own bedroom! What’ve you done, turned it into a roller-disco?!?’ Kicks Like A Mule’s Top Ten hit ‘The Bouncer’, with its tersely intransigent bouncer samples of ‘not tonight, you’re not coming in’, provoked Bodysnatch’s answer record ‘Revenge Of The Punter’: a litany of murderous malevolence (‘now you’re taking liberties’, ‘step to this, if you wanna be
done
’) synched up to fitful death-funk rhythms. Noise Factory’s ‘The Fire’ twisted Stevie Nicks’s mystical FM-rock classic ‘Sara’ into the plaint of a neophyte raver whose insides are ablaze with the scalding bliss of unusually pure E: ‘Wait a minute, baby, stay with me a while / Said you’d give me light, but you never told me ’bout the fire.’
The Young Ones
’ incredulous complaint – ‘five pounds to get into my own bedroom! What’ve you done, turned it into a roller-disco?!?’ Kicks Like A Mule’s Top Ten hit ‘The Bouncer’, with its tersely intransigent bouncer samples of ‘not tonight, you’re not coming in’, provoked Bodysnatch’s answer record ‘Revenge Of The Punter’: a litany of murderous malevolence (‘now you’re taking liberties’, ‘step to this, if you wanna be
done
’) synched up to fitful death-funk rhythms. Noise Factory’s ‘The Fire’ twisted Stevie Nicks’s mystical FM-rock classic ‘Sara’ into the plaint of a neophyte raver whose insides are ablaze with the scalding bliss of unusually pure E: ‘Wait a minute, baby, stay with me a while / Said you’d give me light, but you never told me ’bout the fire.’
This new London-based version of ’ardkore was like a reprise of Shut Up And Dance’s urban realism, but stripped of overt politics or any shred of ‘change will come’ hope. It was music for ravers who knew the rave dream was a lie, but carried on taking the bad medicine. ‘I bring you the future, the future, the future’, stammered the vocal-riff on Noise Factory’s ‘Breakage #4’, and this was no idle boast. Ibiza’s record sleeves bore the prophetic word – JUNGLIZM.
White Label FeverSomething tells me that British hardcore’s golden age circa 1991 – 2 will one day be remembered as fondly as the American garage punk of the mid-sixties. The parallels are striking. Both genres were the domain of untrained teenagers fixated on gimmicky sonic effects: wah-wah and fuzz-tone with garage, swarming sampler-noises with ’ardkore. Both were oriented around the riff: in the sixties, there were a million variations on ‘Train Kept A Rollin’ ’ or ‘You Really Got Me’, in the early nineties, a myriad takes on the ‘Mentasm’ stab or on the Morse Code riff first heard on Landlord’s ‘I Like It’ and Todd Terry’s CLS classic ‘Can You Feel It’. The drugs and drug-vibe were similar too: a heady blend of euphoria, aggression and tripped-out disorientation.
Sixties punk was a do-it-yourself movement of bored kids getting together to jam in the garage, just as their nineties ’ardkore equivalents gathered round the Amiga or Atari computer in a bedroom. Released on indie labels, their rough-and-ready lo-fi recordings might become regional hits, then – if they were really lucky – go nationwide.
Billboard
smashes like Count Five’s ‘Psychotic Reactions’ and The Seeds’ ‘Pushing Too Hard’ seemed to come out of nowhere, just like Urban Shakedown’s ‘Some Justice’ and SL2’s ‘On A Ragga Tip’. And in both eras, for every hit there were a hundred obscure one-off bursts of inspiration.
Billboard
smashes like Count Five’s ‘Psychotic Reactions’ and The Seeds’ ‘Pushing Too Hard’ seemed to come out of nowhere, just like Urban Shakedown’s ‘Some Justice’ and SL2’s ‘On A Ragga Tip’. And in both eras, for every hit there were a hundred obscure one-off bursts of inspiration.
The biggest parallel between ’ardkore and the ‘punkadelic’ music of 1965 – 7 is that both were utterly despised by hipsters at the time. Just as hippy snobs worshipped Cream and sneered at the garage bands for their lack of musicianship, the techno connoisseurs rallied to the art-wank of Future Sound Of London while dismissing ’ardkore for its low production values. Years later, garage punk was rehabilitated through the fanatical advocacy of writers like Lester Bangs and musicians like Lenny Kaye. After Kaye’s celebrated
Nuggets
anthology of lost one-hit wonders, there followed a deluge of compilation series – the most famous being
Pebbles
,
Mindrocker
and
Back From The Grave
– dedicated to plucking from History’s dustbin all the one-miss blunders from American garageland. Already, there are signs that a similar rehabilitation process is underway with ’ardkore: there’s a collector’s market for the original 12-inch singles, and a few 1991 – 2 compilations have become available. Who knows, a future form of techno may reinvoke the ideas and attitude of ’ardkore, in the same way that the punks of 1976 staged a partial return to the stark riffs and dynamic minimalism of sixties mod and garage punk. ’Ardkore was partly determined by the limited computer memory and ‘sample-time’ producers had at their disposal. But constraints can be energizing: today’s better-endowed producers often seem to drown in the mire of options, creating hopelessly cluttered and over-nuanced music.
Juvenile DementiaNuggets
anthology of lost one-hit wonders, there followed a deluge of compilation series – the most famous being
Pebbles
,
Mindrocker
and
Back From The Grave
– dedicated to plucking from History’s dustbin all the one-miss blunders from American garageland. Already, there are signs that a similar rehabilitation process is underway with ’ardkore: there’s a collector’s market for the original 12-inch singles, and a few 1991 – 2 compilations have become available. Who knows, a future form of techno may reinvoke the ideas and attitude of ’ardkore, in the same way that the punks of 1976 staged a partial return to the stark riffs and dynamic minimalism of sixties mod and garage punk. ’Ardkore was partly determined by the limited computer memory and ‘sample-time’ producers had at their disposal. But constraints can be energizing: today’s better-endowed producers often seem to drown in the mire of options, creating hopelessly cluttered and over-nuanced music.
In every pop era, there are those hipsters who are seeking some kind of art status for the music they love. And in every era, ‘valid’ art-music is defined against ‘mindless trash’, which may be too polished and commercial, or too raw and anti-musical, but either way is deemed immature and lacking in depth. For sure, ’ardkore was one-dimensional music. But for my money, ’ardkore commands that dimension with a single-minded intensity that is as close to the primal essence of rock ’n’ roll as you can get. What’s the essence? Not sex or drugs or dance, but any or all of these in so far as they’re about
intensity
, a heightened sense of
here-and-now
.
intensity
, a heightened sense of
here-and-now
.
To live in the now, without memory or future-anxiety, is literally child-ish. For those with an investment in techno’s maturation as an art form, one of the most offensive aspects of ’ardkore was its regressive streak. Hits like ‘Sesame’s Treet’ were only the tip of the infantilistic iceberg: there was Bolt’s ‘Horsepower’, based around the wonderfully stirring theme music from the kids’ TV series
Black Beauty
, and Major Malfunction’s ‘Ice Cream Van’, with its music-box chimes and little girl singing ‘we all scream for ice cream’. The greatest Ibiza track of all, Bad Girl’s ‘Bad Girl’, features a sped-up she-sprite sing-songing a playground paean to ‘ ’erb an’ weed, weed an’ ganja, ganja an’ weed, an’ ’erb an’ marijuana’, her prepubescent voice lurking amidst a grotto of globular bass-goo. 2 Bad Mice’s ‘Drumscare’ starts with a looped entreaty – ‘E-wanna-E-wanna-E-wanna-E-wanna-E’ – that sounds like a spoilt child demanding sweeties. It’s surely no coincidence that many of the brands of Ecstasy at this time played on this regressive craving for oral gratification, taking their names from bygone seventies candy (love hearts, refreshers), or school dinner desserts (rhubarb-and-custards).
Black Beauty
, and Major Malfunction’s ‘Ice Cream Van’, with its music-box chimes and little girl singing ‘we all scream for ice cream’. The greatest Ibiza track of all, Bad Girl’s ‘Bad Girl’, features a sped-up she-sprite sing-songing a playground paean to ‘ ’erb an’ weed, weed an’ ganja, ganja an’ weed, an’ ’erb an’ marijuana’, her prepubescent voice lurking amidst a grotto of globular bass-goo. 2 Bad Mice’s ‘Drumscare’ starts with a looped entreaty – ‘E-wanna-E-wanna-E-wanna-E-wanna-E’ – that sounds like a spoilt child demanding sweeties. It’s surely no coincidence that many of the brands of Ecstasy at this time played on this regressive craving for oral gratification, taking their names from bygone seventies candy (love hearts, refreshers), or school dinner desserts (rhubarb-and-custards).
Citing the childhood game of spinning round and round to induce ‘a dizziness that reduced [the] environment to a sort of luminous chaos’, Virilio reminds us that ‘child-society frequently utilizes turnings, spinning around, disequilibrium. It looks for sensations of vertigo and disorder as sources of pleasure.’ This idea of dervish-whirling your way into blissful disorientation permeated ’ardkore in the form of dozens of samples that refer to spinning round, like Noise Factory’s ‘My Mind’: ‘spinning round, you’re dancing like a hurricane / round and round, we search for love in a world gone insane’. And every big commercial rave had funfair attractions like whirligigs and bouncy castles.
Alongside its juvenile craving for thrills and spills, the other threatening aspect of ’ardkore was its naked drugginess. This was emblazoned in sniggery double-entendres like Skin Up’s ‘Ivory’, with its ‘give us an E please, Bob’ sample from
Blockbuster
, a TV game-show based around spelling out words, or Lenny D Ice’s ‘We Are I.E.’, which sampled an African chant and turned it into an affirmation of collective identity through MDMA. But the drugginess is also brazenly apparent in the
sound
of ’ardkore, the way the music seemed to bypass the aesthetic faculties and take effect by direct neurological interface. Critics who liked to deal with rock as a surrogate form of literature were the most perturbed by this anti-humanist noise. But dance cognoscenti looking to establish techno’s status as a ‘progressive’ artform were also embarrassed. Just as it seemed possible to make the case that electronic music could be more than a soundtrack to drugging and dancing, along came ’ardkore: not so much music as a science of inducing and enhancing the E-rush. Could you even listen to this music ‘on the natural’, enjoy it in an un-altered state? Well, I did and do, all the time. But whether I’d
feel it
, viscerally understand it, if my nervous system hadn’t been reprogrammed by MDMA, is another matter. Perhaps you only need to do it once, to get sens-E-tized, and then the music will induce memory-rushes and body-flashbacks.
Rage to LiveBlockbuster
, a TV game-show based around spelling out words, or Lenny D Ice’s ‘We Are I.E.’, which sampled an African chant and turned it into an affirmation of collective identity through MDMA. But the drugginess is also brazenly apparent in the
sound
of ’ardkore, the way the music seemed to bypass the aesthetic faculties and take effect by direct neurological interface. Critics who liked to deal with rock as a surrogate form of literature were the most perturbed by this anti-humanist noise. But dance cognoscenti looking to establish techno’s status as a ‘progressive’ artform were also embarrassed. Just as it seemed possible to make the case that electronic music could be more than a soundtrack to drugging and dancing, along came ’ardkore: not so much music as a science of inducing and enhancing the E-rush. Could you even listen to this music ‘on the natural’, enjoy it in an un-altered state? Well, I did and do, all the time. But whether I’d
feel it
, viscerally understand it, if my nervous system hadn’t been reprogrammed by MDMA, is another matter. Perhaps you only need to do it once, to get sens-E-tized, and then the music will induce memory-rushes and body-flashbacks.
For many, ’ardkore was a depressing manifestation of rave culture’s nihilistic escapism, scantily garbed in the gladrags of a vague and poorly grounded idealism. What interests me about hardcore was the way it simultaneously affirmed rave’s utopianism yet hinted at the illusory nature of this heaven-on-earth, which can only be sustained by artificial energy and capsules of synthetic happiness. Tracks like Rhythm Section’s ‘Dreamworld’ and Desired State’s ‘This Is A Dream’ conjure up a poignant vision of paradise even as they remind the listener of its vaporous and transitory unreality.
’Ardkore was really just the latest twist on the traditional contours of working-class leisure, the latest variant on the sulphate-fuelled 48-hour weekend of mod and Northern Soul lore. There’s an even earlier precedent: the
Tanzwuth
(dance-mania) or St Vitus Dance, in which medieval youth
jigged
their way out of their constrictions to the raucous soundtrack provided by itinerant minstrels. Helped along by fasting, sleep-deprivation and binging on wine, these proto-ravers would get swept up in ‘fits of wild dancing, leaping, hopping and clapping that ended in syncope [mass fainting]’, according to an essay in
The New England Journal of Medicine
which sought a precedent for outbreaks at rock concerts of hyperventilation, palpitations and mass swooning. ‘Syncope’ shares etymological roots with syncopation, the defining rhythmic quality of the ’ardkore breakbeat. Just like raves,
Tanzwuth
carnivals were feared by the authorities as ‘demoniacal festivals for the rude multitudes’, despite the fact that they probably served an ultimately conservative function by dissipating the tensions and frustrations created by the hierarchical, regimented nature of medieval society.
Tanzwuth
(dance-mania) or St Vitus Dance, in which medieval youth
jigged
their way out of their constrictions to the raucous soundtrack provided by itinerant minstrels. Helped along by fasting, sleep-deprivation and binging on wine, these proto-ravers would get swept up in ‘fits of wild dancing, leaping, hopping and clapping that ended in syncope [mass fainting]’, according to an essay in
The New England Journal of Medicine
which sought a precedent for outbreaks at rock concerts of hyperventilation, palpitations and mass swooning. ‘Syncope’ shares etymological roots with syncopation, the defining rhythmic quality of the ’ardkore breakbeat. Just like raves,
Tanzwuth
carnivals were feared by the authorities as ‘demoniacal festivals for the rude multitudes’, despite the fact that they probably served an ultimately conservative function by dissipating the tensions and frustrations created by the hierarchical, regimented nature of medieval society.
In 1992, a slice of rap circulated through ’ardkore’s sample gene-pool: ‘can’t beat the system / go with the flow’. On one level, it was just a boast about how much damage the sound-system can inflict. But perhaps there’s a submerged and enduring political resonance in there too: amidst the socio-economic deterioration of a Britain well into its second decade of one party Tory rule, where alternatives seemed unimaginable, horizons grew ever narrower, and there was no constructive outlet for anger or idealism, what else was left but to zone out, go with the flow,
disappear
? In their quest to reach escape velocity, ’ardkore youth ended up in the speed-trap: a dead-end zone where going nowhere fast becomes a kind of hyperkinetic stasis, strung out between spasm and entropy.
disappear
? In their quest to reach escape velocity, ’ardkore youth ended up in the speed-trap: a dead-end zone where going nowhere fast becomes a kind of hyperkinetic stasis, strung out between spasm and entropy.
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