Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (41 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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To which you might respond, what’s left? If you remove race, class, gender, sexuality, the body and the craving for intoxication from the picture, what exactly remains to fuel the music? Just the ‘pure’ play of ideation. The result is music that appeals to a disinterested and disembodied consciousness. The formalism of minimal techno has some parallels with minimalism in the pictorial arts and in avant-classical composition; both have been critiqued as spiritualized evasions of political reality, as attempts to transcend the messy and profane realm of History and Materiality in the quest for the ‘timeless’ and territorially unbounded.
If the musical legacy of Derrick May and Jeff Mills is largely unimpeachable, the mentality they have fathered throughout the world of ‘serious’ techno is, I believe, a largely pernicious influence. This anti-Dionysian mindset favours elegance over energy, serenity over passion, restraint over abandon. It’s a value system shared by Detroit purists both within the Motor City and across the globe. In Detroit itself, artists like Alan Oldham, Stacy Pullen/Silent Phase, Kenny Larkin, Dan Curtin, Claude Young, Jay Denham, Marc Kinchen, Terence Dixon and John Beltran, uphold the tradition. Many of these producers were corralled on to a 1996 double CD compiled by Eddie ‘Flashin’ ’ Fowlkes, which he titled
True People
as a stinging rebuke to the rest of the world for daring to tamper with the Detroit blueprint. Detroit is living in denial. Techno has long since slipped out of its custodianship, the evolution-through-mutation of music has thrown up such mongrels as bleep-and-bass, Belgian hardcore, jungle, trance and gabba, all of which owe as much to other cities (the Bronx; Kingston, Jamaica; Dusseldorf; Sheffield; London; Chicago) as they do to Detroit. The ancestral lineage of Detroit has been contaminated by ‘alien’ genes; the music’s been ‘bastardized’. But lest we forget, illegitimate heirs tend to lead more interesting lives.
True People
as a stinging rebuke to the rest of the world for daring to tamper with the Detroit blueprint. Detroit is living in denial. Techno has long since slipped out of its custodianship, the evolution-through-mutation of music has thrown up such mongrels as bleep-and-bass, Belgian hardcore, jungle, trance and gabba, all of which owe as much to other cities (the Bronx; Kingston, Jamaica; Dusseldorf; Sheffield; London; Chicago) as they do to Detroit. The ancestral lineage of Detroit has been contaminated by ‘alien’ genes; the music’s been ‘bastardized’. But lest we forget, illegitimate heirs tend to lead more interesting lives.
If anything, the idea and ideal of ‘Detroit’ is even stronger outside the city, thanks to British Detroit-purists. Leading lights in the realm of neo-Detroit ‘abstract dance’ include the British labels Soma, Ferox, Ifach and Peacefrog, and producers like Peter Ford, Dave Angel, Neil Landstruum, Funk D’Void, Ian O’Brien (who titled a track ‘Mad Mike Disease’ as a nod to the endemic influence of the UR/Red Planet maestro), The Surgeon, Russ Gabriel, Luke Slater, Adam Beyer and Mark Broom (whose alter ego Midnight Funk Association is named after the Electrifyin’ Mojo’s legendary Detriot radio show). It is a world where people talk not of labels but ‘imprints’, and funk is spelt ‘phunk’ to give it an air of, er, phuturism.
One of the most vocal of the Detroit-acolytes is tech-jazz artist Kirk deGiorgio. From early efforts like ‘Dance Intellect’ to his late nineties As One output, deGiorgio has dedicated himself to the notion that Detroit techno is the successor to the synth-oriented jazz-funk of fusioneers like Herbie Hancock and George Duke. ‘I never saw techno as anything else but a continuation of black music,’ he told
Muzik
magazine in 1997. ‘I didn’t think of it as any new kind of music. It was just that the technology and the sounds were different.’
Muzik
magazine in 1997. ‘I didn’t think of it as any new kind of music. It was just that the technology and the sounds were different.’
This neo-conservative attitude – the self-effacing notion that white musicians like deGiorgio himself have nothing to add to black music; the idea that music never really undergoes revolutions – reminds me of nothing so much as the British blues-bore purists of the late sixties and early seventies. Actually, given that Detroit techno was a response to European electro-pop, we should really reverse the analogy: Atkins, May and Saunderson are equivalent to Clapton, Beck and Page, virtuoso players worshipped for their purist fidelity to the original music (Kraftwerk for the Belleville Three, Muddy Waters for the ex-Yardbirds). The hip-hop influences (breakbeats and samples) that revolutionized British rave music are studiously shunned by the Detroit purists, who believe synthesizers are more ‘musical’ than computers. There is literally no
future
in this traditionalist approach; the notion that the music of Derrick May (or Carl Craig, or Jeff Mills) represents the Way, the Light and the Truth is no more helpful than the early seventies belief that ‘Clapton Is God’.
future
in this traditionalist approach; the notion that the music of Derrick May (or Carl Craig, or Jeff Mills) represents the Way, the Light and the Truth is no more helpful than the early seventies belief that ‘Clapton Is God’.
This is not to say that Detroit techno has nothing more to offer electronic music. For instance, Kevin Saunderson (the most
im
purist of the Belleville Three – he even put out great hardcore tracks in 1992 like ‘Uptempo’ and ‘Mental Techno’, using the alter-ego Tronikhouse) has inspired some exciting records, like Dave Clarke’s ‘Red’ series. In the wake of UR outfit Drexciya, the Detroit area has also seen an upsurge of electro-influenced music – artists like Ectomorph, Aux 88 and Dopplereffekt, labels like Interdimensional Transmissions and Direct Beat. Returning to Detroit techno’s early eighties roots as a distant cousin of New York electro, these producers have thrillingly revived Kraftwerk’s glacial Germanic geometry and rigid drum machine beats, but – breaking with Detroit’s overly refined aura – they also add a booty-shaking boom influenced by Miami bass music’s lewd low frequency oscillations.
im
purist of the Belleville Three – he even put out great hardcore tracks in 1992 like ‘Uptempo’ and ‘Mental Techno’, using the alter-ego Tronikhouse) has inspired some exciting records, like Dave Clarke’s ‘Red’ series. In the wake of UR outfit Drexciya, the Detroit area has also seen an upsurge of electro-influenced music – artists like Ectomorph, Aux 88 and Dopplereffekt, labels like Interdimensional Transmissions and Direct Beat. Returning to Detroit techno’s early eighties roots as a distant cousin of New York electro, these producers have thrillingly revived Kraftwerk’s glacial Germanic geometry and rigid drum machine beats, but – breaking with Detroit’s overly refined aura – they also add a booty-shaking boom influenced by Miami bass music’s lewd low frequency oscillations.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the Tresor-affiliated labels Basic Channel and Chain Reaction have brilliantly pursued their vision of tech-house abstraction through a million shades of lustrous grey. But for the most part, European neo-Detroit techno-phunk is music that feels anal and inhibited, crippled by its fear of heterodoxy. Its ‘radicalism’ is defined by its refusals, by what it
denies itself
– overt tunefulness, explicit emotion, vulgar exuberance, breakbeats, intoxication. Detroit-purism was born of the impulse to de-crass-ify techno and restore it to its pre-rave sobriety and subtlety. A cruel irony, then, that Colin Faver’s long-running ‘Abstrakt Dance’ show on KISS FM was terminated in the spring of 1997, in order to make room for happy hardcore, the cheesy-and-cheerful sound of rave fundamentalism at its most defiantly E’d up.
denies itself
– overt tunefulness, explicit emotion, vulgar exuberance, breakbeats, intoxication. Detroit-purism was born of the impulse to de-crass-ify techno and restore it to its pre-rave sobriety and subtlety. A cruel irony, then, that Colin Faver’s long-running ‘Abstrakt Dance’ show on KISS FM was terminated in the spring of 1997, in order to make room for happy hardcore, the cheesy-and-cheerful sound of rave fundamentalism at its most defiantly E’d up.
NINE
THIS SOUND IS FOR THE UNDERGROUND
PIRATE RADIO
‘Well out of that now, into this – sounds of the Lucky Spin, believer! Along with the MC OC, along with the full studio crew. Lively business! Shout going out to Rattle, you know the koo. Cooked food, love it to the bone! To the marrow! Normality, believe! L-I-V-E and direct, to the koo. Are you ready, wind-your-waist crew? And those who’s driving around Don-land North East South and West,
we’ve
got you locked
!!! 10.57, get on the case, for the hardcore, hardcore bass. For ya face – 100 per cent bass! All right, red-eye crew, you know the koo. Going out to you, wind-your-waist crew . . . and all those who’s
l-l-l-lickin
’
it
in Don-land in their cars, driving about Don-land, the Don-ites and Don-’eads. Do-it-like-this, jungalist! Believe me, ’ardkore’s firing!’
– MC OC, Don FM, 1993
All through the nineties, London’s ’ardkore and jungle pirate stations have disrupted the decorum of the FM airwaves with their vulgar fervour and rude-boy attitude. MCs surf the DJs’ polyrhythmic pandemonium of breaks ’n’ bass with a Dada-doggerel of druggy buzzwords, party-hard exhortations and renegade war-cries: sublime ‘nonsense’ that is purely invocatory, designed to bind its scattered addressees into a community, mobilize it into an army.
London’s jungle pirates come and go, but at any time of year, you can scan the frequency spectrum at the weekend and find at least a dozen. There are many more illegal stations in the capital, and throughout Britain, representing other dance-genres neglected by mainstream radio: dancehall reggae, soul, house and garage, rap, and more. Some regard themselves as a providers of a community service, like North London reggae pirate Station FM, with its anti-drug messages and funki-dread positivity. And some are so well-organized and well-behaved they’re like independent commercial radio stations that just haven’t bothered to secure a licence, like Dream FM in Leeds, with its all-week-long transmissions and stringent rules about no swearing on air, no playing records with drug references.
My passion, though, is for the pirate stations that seem the most piratical, the stations for whom surviving outside the law is part of the thrill. And that means the jungle pirates. Actually, given that jungle stations like Kool got more ‘professional’ by the late nineties, it really means the unruly ’ardkore pirates of 1991 – 3: Touchdown, Defection, Rush, Format, Pulse, Eruption, Impact, Destiny, Function, and many more.
Out of a personal archive of hundreds of hours of taped transmissions, my favourite sequence is from a mid-week broadcast by a station called Lightning, seemingly hi-jacked for just one night by the FMB Crew (it stands for Fucking Mind Bending). After about an hour of rambling, nursery-rhyme banter, ranging from the sinister and scatological to the nonsensical and outright indecipherable, the duo suddenly get possessed by a kind of free-associational delirium. The soundtrack is a wondrously zany X Project track that warps choirboy Aled Jones’s hit ‘Walking In The Air’ into a speedfreak anthem: ‘we’re walking in the air / while people down below are sleeping as we fly’.
MC no. 1:
‘Biggin’ up the Acting Hard Massive. Stiff as an ’ard on! Work it up! Working up the-rush-in-the-place!’MC no. 2:
‘And it’s haitch with a hot.’MC no. 1:
‘Biggin’ up the Hot Man, the Metal Man, hold it down. Cinders. You know the score . . . Cackooo Crew! Big it up, big it up, doing-the-do!’MC no. 2:
‘Havin’ em in the loo, in the loo-’MC no. 1:
‘Hot hot-’MC no. 2:
‘Doing a lovely poo poo!’MC no. 1:
‘Buzzin’ hard! Having a bubble, in the studio.’MC no. 2:
‘
Trippin’ out
! Phone us an ambulance. Phone don’t work, give us bell – see if it works. Could save a life or two. Or three. Come on, rush with me!’MC no. 1:
‘Going out to Sammy in Stratford, you know the koo. The didgeridoo, the ’abadabadoo.’MC no. 2 (increasingly deranged and demonic):
‘Doing it doing it with the poo. Sounds of the big cack-ooo. Going out to the buzzin’ ’ard crew. You know the koo, koo. Crispy like a crouton! Sounds of the’ot with an haitch. Getting hot in the place. Steamin’. Rollin’. You know the koo. Flex tops are doing the do. Respect is due. To you and your crew.’MC no. 1:
‘Sounds of the South, man. Buzzin’.’
It loses something in transcription: the intonation, the grain of the voice, the instinctual syncopation and drugged slurriness. But I’m not taking the piss when I say that I rate this – and scores more snatches of phonetic poetry plucked from London’s pirate airwaves – among my favourite ‘cultural artefacts’ of the twentieth century.
Fuck the Legal Stations‘The future does not exist for them.’
– Postmaster General Tony Benn, promising to outlaw
Britain’s first wave of pirate radio stations, 1965.
Britain’s first wave of pirate radio stations, 1965.
Pirate radio gets its romantic name not just from its flagrant flouting of government restrictions on the airwaves, but from its early days in the sixties, when unlicensed stations broadcast from ships anchored at sea just outside British territorial waters, or from derelict Army and Navy forts on the Thames Estuary. By 1966, Radio London claimed over eight million listeners, and Radio Caroline over six million; pirate DJs were cult stars and stations had their own fan clubs. But this first golden age of pirate radio came to an abrupt end when Harold Wilson’s Labour government instituted The Marine Broadcasting Offences Act in August 1967, making it unlawful to operate, finance, or aid in any way an unlicensed station. As a sop to public demand, the BBC launched its own national pop station, Radio One, and recruited many pirate DJs, such as Tony Blackburn, John Peel, Johnny Walker and Dave Lee Travis.
In the early eighties, pirate radio entered its second boom period, with the rise of black music stations like Horizon, JFM, Dread Broadcasting Corporation and LWR, specializing in the soul, reggae and funk that Radio One marginalized. But the nautical connotations of ‘pirate’ had faded; the new pirates broadcast not just from the mainland, but from tower blocks in the heart of the metropolis. As the government closed loopholes in the law and increased the penalties, the illegal stations grew ever more cunning in their struggle to outwit the anti-pirate agents of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). The invention of the microlink (a method of relaying the station’s signal to a distant transmitter) made it harder for the DTI to trace and raid the illegal station’s studio-HQ. The result was an explosion of piracy; by 1989 – 90, there were over 600 stations nationwide, and 60 in the London area alone. And by 1989, a new breed of rave pirates – Sunrise, Centre Force, Dance FM, Fantasy – had joined the ranks of established black dance stations like LWR and Kiss.
As in the sixties, the government responded with the double whammy of suppression and limited permission. In a weird echo of the pardons offered buccaneers and corsairs in the seventeenth century, pirate stations were offered an amnesty if they went off the air, and a chance to apply for one of the bonanza of licences being made available as part of the Conservative government’s policy of ‘freeing’ the airwaves. LWR and Kiss closed down voluntarily, but only Kiss won a licence. The legitimization of Kiss FM, in combination with an ultra-tough Broadcasting Act in January 1990, reduced pirate activity to its lowest since 1967.
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