Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (36 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Chaotic Chemistry
From my double vantage point as fan and critic, participant and observer, darkside was a pivotal and revelatory moment: the life-affirming, celebratory aspects of rave were turned inside out, the smiley-face torn off to reveal the true nihilism of any drug-based culture. Amidst all the positivity and idealism, that nihilism was always lurking, waiting to be hatched. When rave’s ‘desiring machine’ is really crankin’, when you’re one of its cogs (locked into the pirate-radio signal or plugged into the sound-system), there’s no feeling like it. Trouble is, the machine is demanding: it exacts a heavy toll on its human software. Artificial energy is required to bring the nervous system up to speed; the human frame was not built to withstand the attrition of sensations. Rave’s regime of bliss wears out the machine’s flesh-and-blood components, both physically (hot and sweaty, raves are incubators of viruses) and mentally (post-rave comedown, mid-week emotional fragility, and in the long run, burn-out and melancholia). By late 1992, hardcore rave resembled a machine-gone-mad.
Deleuze and Guattari warn that drug use can turn ‘fascist’ or ‘suicidal’, that the body-without-organs (the Ecstatic body) can become a ‘black hole’, voided and numb. In the beginning, Ecstasy makes you feel angelic; ultimately, it can turn you into a demon. Gradually, the experience of raving itself changes; single-minded fervour turns to tunnel-vision fixation. Getting high degenerates into getting out of it. Suddenly the clubs are full of dead souls, zombie-eyed and prematurely haggard. Instead of outstretched arms and all-embracing extroversion, there’s grimly fixated vacancy, automaton body-moves, autistic self-absorption. What started off as life-affirming fun begins to smack of desperation. The folkloric drug tales get grimmer and grimmer: someone who threw up and then picked the half-digested pills out of the puke and gulped them down again, rumours of kids using syringes to shoot speed in the toilets. One night in 1993 at Labrynth stands out for me as the point at which I realized the scene had turned squalid. Outside, in the Labrynth’s hitherto sacred grove of a garden, two teenage girls hold on to their friend as she retches – too many pills on an empty stomach. Gloating, demonic laughter floats across from a murky corner. Back inside the club’s fluorescent catacombs, a seriously fucked-up guy, sweaty and shaking, cadges a cigarette off me, and says, so earnest it’s scary, ‘You just saved my life, mate.’
What I remember most of all is the number of ravers whose smiles had been replaced by sour, cheated expressions – they hadn’t come up on their E’s, probably because they’d over-indulged so heavily the past few years that the old buzz just couldn’t be recovered. That moment of disenchantment is captured in Hyper-On Experience’s 1993 anthem ‘Lords of the Null Lines’, a Gothic symphony of hiccuping, skittery rhythms and something-wicked-this-way-comes strings. ‘There’s a void where there should be ecstasy’ laments the sampled diva. The line could refer to the desperation of a raver who suspects he’s swallowed a dud or ‘snidey’ E, but it could equally describe the hollow numbness of veteran ravers whose brains have been emptied of serotonin, the ‘joy-juice’ which Ecstasy releases in a gush-and-rush of euphoria. Having caned E so hard for so long, these ravers find their pleasure-centre synapses are firing blanks.
Dark-core reflected the complicated pharmacological reality of the rave scene in 1992 and 1993; a chaos of amateur, untutored neurochemistry and unreliable medicine combined to form an unbeatable recipe for psychic malaise. First, ravers experienced a temporary dip in the quality of Ecstasy. With rave peaking commercially in 1992, dealers looked to exploit the influx of gullible, undiscriminating punters, and maximized their profits by cutting MDMA with cheaper drugs: primarily amphetamine and LSD, but also tranquillizers or inert substances. The market was flooded with ‘cocktail’ pills that combined speed and acid in a crude attempt to approximate the Ecstasy feeling. This deterioration in the rave-drug’s purity didn’t last, but it birthed an enduring myth that ‘Ecstasy isn’t as good as it used to be’, which in turn provided ravers with an excuse to take more pills to get the same effect. The unreliability of the drug – the fact that the raver stood a good chance of getting a dud – did not inspire caution or utter disillusionment, as you might expect, but a spirit of recklessness: take more rather than less, take another if the first one doesn’t come on strong and fast enough.
This headstrong heedlessness was particularly risky given another pharmacological trend at work in this period: the selling of Ecstasy that contained MDA rather than MDMA. MDA is the chemical parent of MDMA and MDEA (‘Eve’). Widely available in 1992 in the form of Snowball and White Caps, and apparently originating from government-controlled factories in Latvia, MDA offers an altogether fiercer, more deranging experience than Ecstasy, devoid of MDMA’s empathic warmth. MDA’s effects are closer to LSD’s hallucinatory disorientation; it lasts much longer than proper Ecstasy, around eight to twelve hours; the comedown is harsher. MDA is also more toxic than MDMA: Snowballs often contained a high concentration of MDA, around 177 mgs, so that three pills would bring the raver within range of a fatal dose. At the very least, it would almost guarantee a psychedelic freak-out or an autistic veg-out. And yet, by 1992, three pills was by no mean an abnormal number to take during a session. While some blamed snowballs for ‘killing the scene’, mistakenly believing them to be cut with heroin, others actively sought out and savoured MDA’s manic sensations.
The other syndrome at work in the darkside era was simple excess. By 1992, many hardcore ‘veterans’, who’d gotten into raving only a few years earlier and were often still in their teens, had increased their intake to three, four, five, or more pills per session. They were locked into a cycle of going raving once or twice a week, weekend after weekend. It was at this point that Ecstasy’s serotonin-depletion effect came into play. Even if you take pure MDMA each and every time, the drug’s blissful effects fade fast, leaving only a jittery, amphetamine-like rush. In hardcore, this speedfreak effect was made worse as ravers necked more pills in a futile and misguided attempt to recover the long-lost bliss of yore. The physical side-effects – hypertension, racing heart – got worse, and so did the darkside paranoia. Amphetamine and Ecstasy both flood the nervous system with dopamine, and ‘dopamine over-activity’ has been linked to such symptoms of schizophrenia as auditory hallucinations and delusional beliefs.
All of these syndromes (fake Ecstasy ‘cocktails’, MDA masquerading as MDMA, the diminishing returns of long-term use) were exacerbated because the norm among ravers is ‘polydrug use’. Ecstasy is commonly taken with other illicit substances – amphetamine, LSD, cannabis, ‘poppers’ (legal inhalants like propyl, butyl or isobutyl nitrite), the barbiturate-like sleeping pill Temazepam – each with their own risks, side-effects and nasty adulterants. Recent research shows that nearly 80 per cent of British ravers take amphetamine as a booster to accompany their E; serious nutters chase down their E’s with diverse configurations of speed, LSD and Temazepam. Nearly everybody smokes marijuana, which has its own effects of paranoia and perceptual distortion (especially potent with super-breeds of weed such as ‘skunk’). The results of all this amateur pharmacology range from added fun to greater disorientation, increased toxicity, and more punishing comedowns. MDMA can be the classic gateway to a veritable drug supermarket, in so far as uncertainty of supply can lead punters to experiment with other substances as an alternative route to the high.
By 1992, the hardcore raver was a veritable connoisseur of poisons, skilled at mix ’n’ matching drugs to modify their own neurochemistry and achieve the precise degree of oblivion desired. This ‘street knowledge’ often expressed itself in the imagery of science: Bizzy B’s ‘Ecstasy Is A Science’, the band Kaotic Chemistry. The latter’s self-titled debut includes tracks like ‘Five In One Night’, ‘Strip Search’ and ‘The Comedown’, while the sleeve mischievously depicts the ingredients for an average night of Dionysian mayhem. On the front, a hand simultaneously holds a spliff and chops out a line of speed with a credit card; on the back, the table is strewn with a dozen or more white pills. Kaotic Chemistry’s ‘LSD’ EP continues the polydrug excess theme with ‘Space Cakes’, ‘LSD’, ‘Drum Trip II’ and ‘Illegal Subs’ (a later remix EP adds ‘Vitamin K’, named after a slang term for ketamine). The title ‘Illegal Subs’ is a nudge-nudge, wink-wink pun, referring both to illicit substances and to sub-bass levels so harmful they should be outlawed. The song itself is a sort of tribute to the ’ardkore nation, sampling a Nation of Islam orator who hails her African-American audience as ‘the people of chemistry . . . of physics . . . of music . . . of civilization . . . of rhythm’.
Some theorists of addiction argue that for certain borderline individuals, neurotic or emotionally damaged, taking drugs is a form of self-medication. This idea of ‘healing toxins’ is another theme running through hardcore, from Doc Scott’s ‘Surgery’ and ‘NHS’ EPs, through Praga Khan’s ‘Injected With A Poison’, to the Prodigy’s ‘Poison’, with its chant ‘I’ve got the poison / I’ve got the remedy’. Renegade physicians raiding the pharmacopoeia, hardcore ravers embarked upon a massive, uncontrolled psycho-social experiment, whose unconscious goal was perhaps to heal themselves, damaged products of a sick society. Grasping greedily for utopia
right here, right now
, they hurtled instead into a dystopian future.
Drowning in Loveright here, right now
, they hurtled instead into a dystopian future.
In the utterly blissed hardcore of early 1992, you can hear darkness shadowing the swoony delirium. Take one of the scene’s most successful labels, Production House. There’s an aura of dangerously overwhelming bliss to tracks like Acen’s ‘Trip To the Moon Part One’, with its fizzy electronics and portentous orchestral fanfares (sampled from John Barry’s ‘Space March’ from the soundtrack to
You Only Live Twice
). What sounds like a classic E-rush exultation – ‘I can’t believe these feelings!!!’ – could easily be an expression of distrust, a distraught intimation of unreality.
You Only Live Twice
). What sounds like a classic E-rush exultation – ‘I can’t believe these feelings!!!’ – could easily be an expression of distrust, a distraught intimation of unreality.
Lurking within the effervescent ‘hyper-ness’ of Production House tracks like DMS’s ‘Love Overdose’ and ‘Mindwreck’ is a kind of death-wish. Appropriately enough, Acen’s other big smash of 1992, ‘Close Your Eyes’, samples Jim Morrison, the original death-obsessed Dionysian rock star. Mystic incantations from The Doors’ epic ‘Celebration of the Lizard’ – ‘forget your name . . . go insane’ – are sped up into a hilarious but eerie Munchkin squeak. ‘The Darkside’ remix of ‘Close Your Eyes’ adds the line ‘forget the world, forget the people’, fed through a hall-of-mirrors echo effect to conjure a bedlam of Morrison-ghosts. Two other samples – ‘I think I’m gonna’ and ‘OVERDOSE!’ – are concatenated to spell out the flirting-with-the-void vibe.
Even Baby D’s ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ – Production House’s biggest smash, eventually making Number One in the Pop Charts when rereleased in 1994 – is veined with ambivalence. With its grand piano trills and bittersweet tenderness, ‘Fantasy’ is that seemingly impossible entity, a rave ballad. Its creator, Dyce, has described the track as a love song to the hardcore scene, to the spirit of loved-up-ness itself. Listen to the lyrics, and it becomes clear that the siren-like figure is actually Ecstasy ‘herself’ serenading the listener: ‘I’ll take you up to the highest high . . . Come and feel my energy . . . Come take a trip to my wonderland . . . I’ve got what it takes to make you mine.’
‘Fantasy”s manoeuvre – personifying MDMA as the seductive chanteuse Baby D – was a singular masterstroke. More common was the hardcore track that took the needy beseeching of the sampled soul-diva and separated it from its original flesh-and-blood referent, in order to create a
love song to the drug
. Foul Play’s ‘Finest Illusion’, a near-symphonic rush of pizzicato riffs and swoony cascades, is a classic example: if ‘you’re the finest I’ve ever known’ doesn’t refer to a particularly pure batch of MDMA, why else did the band title the track ‘Finest Illusion’?
love song to the drug
. Foul Play’s ‘Finest Illusion’, a near-symphonic rush of pizzicato riffs and swoony cascades, is a classic example: if ‘you’re the finest I’ve ever known’ doesn’t refer to a particularly pure batch of MDMA, why else did the band title the track ‘Finest Illusion’?
Recording as 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Foul Play took this idea all the way into the twilight-zone with ‘Drowning In Her’. The track has all the languishing langour and desolate dejection of a torch song; its tremulous textures and dolorous, dislocated feel conjure a mood of paralysis and enervation. Blurry with reverb, the sampled vocal hook sounds like ‘drowning in love’ but is actually ‘drowning in her’:
jouissance
is associated with an alluring but ultimately asphyxiating femininity. Mid-track, there’s a sample of a single word, the horror-struck cry ‘how??!?’ This is taken from the spoken-word intro of 4 Hero’s 1990 classic ‘Mr Kirk’s Nightmare’ – itself sampled from Think’s 1971 hit ‘Once You Understand’, a cautionary tale about the generation gap – in which a policeman comes to a father’s house to tell him that his seventeen-year-old son Robert is dead. ‘Dead!!?! How??!?’ whimpers the aghast Mr Kirk, ‘He died of an overdose,’ says the officer. A classic example of rave music intertextuality, the sampled ‘how’ in ‘Drowning In Her’ triggers memories of ‘Mr Kirk’s Nighmare’, of all the rumours and scare stories surrounding Ecstasy. It reminds the raver that each time they take a tablet of dubious origin they are dicing with death; that to dance with Ecstasy is to embrace a
femme fatale
.
You Got Me Burnin’ Upjouissance
is associated with an alluring but ultimately asphyxiating femininity. Mid-track, there’s a sample of a single word, the horror-struck cry ‘how??!?’ This is taken from the spoken-word intro of 4 Hero’s 1990 classic ‘Mr Kirk’s Nightmare’ – itself sampled from Think’s 1971 hit ‘Once You Understand’, a cautionary tale about the generation gap – in which a policeman comes to a father’s house to tell him that his seventeen-year-old son Robert is dead. ‘Dead!!?! How??!?’ whimpers the aghast Mr Kirk, ‘He died of an overdose,’ says the officer. A classic example of rave music intertextuality, the sampled ‘how’ in ‘Drowning In Her’ triggers memories of ‘Mr Kirk’s Nighmare’, of all the rumours and scare stories surrounding Ecstasy. It reminds the raver that each time they take a tablet of dubious origin they are dicing with death; that to dance with Ecstasy is to embrace a
femme fatale
.
If anyone can claim to have invented dark-core, it’s 4 Hero. Two years after ‘Mr Kirk’s Nightmare’, the band returned to the subject of Ecstasy fatalities with 1992’s sick-joke concept EP, ‘Where’s The Boy’. The funereal-black sleeve depicts a coffin with a question mark on it: the tomb of the unknown raver. The four tracks on ‘Where’s The Boy’ trace out the theme of death by heatstroke, which in 1992 was first entering public consciousness as the explanation for a spate of E-related deaths. ‘Burning’ and ‘Cooking Up Yah Brain’ sound literally delirious. The sample-textures seem to ripple like a heat-haze of vapourized sweat, making me think of the
Guardian
’s description of one particular Ecstasy fatality caused by dehydration and overheating: after taking three E’s, a teenager ‘boiled alive in his own blood’. ‘Time To Get Ill’ samples the Beastie Boys to make a deadly pun that conflates ‘ill’ in the hip hop sense with the internal bleeding and major organ failure associated with severe heatstroke. The track sounds literally nauseous, all vomitous gurglings and migraine-like squeals. Finally, ‘Where’s The Boy (Trial By Ecstasy)’ reinvokes ‘Mr Kirk’s Nightmare’, with its dialogue between a policeman (‘You killed the boy, you didn’t just dream it?’) and a middle-aged man (‘yes!’)
Guardian
’s description of one particular Ecstasy fatality caused by dehydration and overheating: after taking three E’s, a teenager ‘boiled alive in his own blood’. ‘Time To Get Ill’ samples the Beastie Boys to make a deadly pun that conflates ‘ill’ in the hip hop sense with the internal bleeding and major organ failure associated with severe heatstroke. The track sounds literally nauseous, all vomitous gurglings and migraine-like squeals. Finally, ‘Where’s The Boy (Trial By Ecstasy)’ reinvokes ‘Mr Kirk’s Nightmare’, with its dialogue between a policeman (‘You killed the boy, you didn’t just dream it?’) and a middle-aged man (‘yes!’)
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