Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (43 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Rapt then and now by this phone-in session and others like it, by the listeners’ fervent salutations and the MCs’ invocations, I’m struck by the crusading zeal and intransitive nature of their utterances: ‘rushing!’, ‘buzzin’ hard!’, ‘get busy!’, ‘come alive, London!’, ‘let’s go!’, ‘time to get hyper, helter-skelter!’, ‘hardcore’s firing!’, and, especially prominent in the Index-at-Xmas session, the near-Gnostic exhortation ‘belief!!’
Gnosis is the esoteric knowledge of spiritual truth that various pre-Christian and early Christian cults believed could only be apprehended directly by the initiate, a truth that cannot be mediated or explained in words. In pirate discourse, ‘the score’ or ‘the key’ is code for the secret knowledge to which only the hardcore, ‘the headstrong people’, are privy. And this is
drug knowledge
, the physically felt intensities induced by Ecstasy, amphetamine and the rest of the pharmacopoeia. The MC’s role, as encryptor, as master of the sacra-
mental
ceremonies, is to ceaselessly reiterate that secret without ever translating it. The MC is a potent inclusion/exclusion device; if you’re not on the bus, if you’re not down with the programme, you’ll never know what that idiot is raving about.
The cold print of the Index-at-Xmas transcript can’t convey the electricity of everyone in the studio coming up on their E’s at the same time, by the NRG-currents pulsing down phone-lines and across the cellular-phone ether from kids buzzing at home. Listening to pirate phone-in sessions like this, I felt like there was a feedback loop of ever-escalating exultation switching back and forth between the station and the hardcore ‘massive’ at home. The whole subculture resembled a giant mechanism designed to generate fervour without aim. ‘Come alive, London!’, ‘coming on strong’: a power trip for the powerless, a mass hallucination of in-the-place-to-be grandiosity. Bastard children of Radio Alice, the pirates mobilize a goal-less, apolitical unity. Massification, excitation and amplification: this alone is the pirates’
raison d’étre
. A massive could be just two kids at home, huddled ’round the radio, rolling spliffs and getting seriously ‘red-eye’. By maintaining lines of communication between all the micro-massives across the city, the pirate station keeps alive the idea of the macro-massive as a virtual presence, a latent potential, thereby shoring up the community’s belief in its own existence during the fallow, dead-time intervals before and after the rave.
Pirate Utopias
 
The rave and the pirate radio show (the ‘rave on the air’) are exemplary real-world manifestations of two influential theoretical models, Hakim Bey’s ‘temporary autonomous zone’ (TAZ), and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘desiring machine’. A decentred, non-hierarchical assemblage of people and technology, the desiring machine is characterized by flow-without-goal, expression-without-meaning. Powered by E-lectricity, the rave sound-system or pirate radio is a noise factory; the feedback-loop of the phone-in sessions makes me think of Hakim Bey’s vision of the TAZ as a temporary ‘power surge’ against normality, as opposed to a doomed attempt at permanent revolution. A power surge is what it feels like – like being plugged into the National Grid. A great MC’s effect has a literally electrifying effect on the listener; the audience is galvanized, shocked out of the living death of normality. ‘Come alive, London!’
’Ardkore is where rave’s anti-politics of rapture (techno as euphoria-generator without pretext or context) meets hip hop’s cut ’n’ mix. The combination of the DJ’s inexhaustible, interminable meta-music flow and the MC’s variations on a small set of themes, has the effect of abolishing narrative in favour of a thousand plateaux of crescendo, an endless successions of NOWs. Over and over, again and again, the DJ and the MC reaffirm ‘we’re here, we’re now, this is the place to be, you and I are
we
’.
This radical immediacy fits Hakim Bey’s anarcho-mystical creed of ‘immediatism’, so named to spell out its antagonism to all forms of mediated, spectacular, passivity-inducing leisure and culture. The rave is a machine for generating a series of heightened here-and-now’s, a concatenated flow of sonic singularities and ultra-vivid tableaux. If the illegal rave comes closest to Bey’s conception of the TAZ (which must always be a physical, tangible location), the pirate radio station works both as a ‘virtual’ TAZ-surrogate, and as an informational web that provides logistical support for the creation of future, geographically ‘real’ TAZs. Both these functions help to stoke the fires of anticipation and keep alive the dream that the TAZ will soon be reconstructed. While pirates continue to provide ads and news about raves and clubs, this ancillary role of radio was most pronounced during 1991 – 2, when DJs like the Rough Crew provided ravers with phone-line numbers and travel directions concerning Spiral Tribe’s free parties.
But perhaps what’s most subversive about the pirates resides not in its advertising of illegal raves, or even in its own crimes of trespass on the airwaves, but in the way they transgress the principles of exhange-value, commodity-fetishism and personality-cult that govern the music industry. The pirates fill the air with an endless, anonymous flow (DJs and MCs almost never identify tracks or artists) of free music (you can tape all the new tunes, long before their official release). In
The Revolution of Everyday Life
, the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem argued that a new, utopian reality ‘can only be based on the principle of the gift’. With their sacrificial expenditure of energy into the ether, their amateur pay-to-play ethos, the radio pirates have more than a whiff of the utopian about them. You can taste the freedom.
TEN
 
ROOTS’N FUTURE
 
JUNGLE TAKES OVER
LONDON
 
Notting Hill Carnival, August 1993. Black sheep of the post-rave diaspora, jungle has been banished to a small public park called Horniman’s Pleasance on the outskirts of the carnival zone. Adverts on pirate radio rave breathlessly about the park’s 25,000 capacity, but the event doesn’t quite live up to the hype. In fact, it’s a dismal turn-out: around twenty-five people have shown up. A few try to dance, in a desultory fashion; most stand around looking confused. After half-an-hour, my posse’s patience runs out, and we head back to the centre of the carnival, where the pumping house’n’garage systems have packed the side-streets off Portobello Road. A believer, I can’t reconcile the awesome vitality of the music seething out of the pirate airwaves, with this seeming proof that jungle just ain’t runnin’.
Notting Hill Carnival, August 1994. What a difference a year makes. This time, it seems like every other sound-system is blasting jungle, deafening and distorted through overdriven speakers. UK Apachi, man of the moment with his Top Forty cracking ‘Original Nuttah’ seems to be doing PAs at most of them; we see him perform at least three times. And wherever there’s a jungle system, the streets are choked with a crush of mostly young black bodies. Trying to make your way into the crowd to get closer to the speakers is impossible; it’s a battle even to stand your ground, let alone dance. And every so often, people start to scatter in a ripple effect – maybe because it looked like a fight was about to start, like someone had pulled a gun or a blade. Within seconds, people a few rows ahead have turned on their heels and are sprinting full-tilt straight at you, eyes wide with terror, and you’re running too, to avoid a collision and whatever appalling incident has sparked the panic. Then almost instantly the fear dissipates, calm is restored, the MC offers some platitudes about peace and unity, and the sound-system detonates again. 1994, and jungle is
running ’tings in London town right ’bout now
.
‘We like the speed of it, the barrage of stimuli. People often think of psychedelic experience in terms of slow-and-dreamy music, but rushed, garbled music like jungle is closer . . . It’s part of the whole speeding-up process of Western society. And you can’t have an escalated culture without more extremes of everything, positive and negative.’
– Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine
 
 
Out of the fluxed-up chaos of ’ardkore evolved an entirely new sound, a new subculture: jungle. Between 1992 and 1994, jungle shed the chrysalis of hardcore, and with it, every last vestige of the rave ethos. The only element of hardcore rave to survive was the sheer velocity of the music; it was as though Ecstasy culture had permanently hyped up the metabolism of a generation.
The speed aspect is crucial. Scene insiders offer platitudes like ‘jungle is a feeling’. But if you need a definition, then the music’s core is the accelerated, chopped-up breakbeat rhythms that create that feeling – what Bjork crystallized as ‘fierce, fierce, fierce joy . . . sort of “I’m just too happy, I want to explode.” ’ Happy isn’t quite the word: jungle’s militant euphoria is fuelled by the desperation of the early nineties. Composed literally out of fracture (‘breaks’), jungle paints a sound-picture of social disintegration and instability. But the anxiety in the music is mastered and transformed into a kind of nonchalance; the disruptive breakbeats are looped into a rolling flow. In this way, jungle contains a non-verbal response to troubled times, a kind of warrior-stance. The resistance is in the rhythms. Jungle is the metabolic pulse of a body reprogrammed and rewired to cope with an era of unimaginably intense information overload. As such, its rhythmic innovations will pervade popular music well into the twenty-first century, as insidiously and insinuatingly as rock ’n’ roll, funk and disco have done in the past.
Renegade Snares and Brutal Bass
 
‘Percussion music is revolution.’
– John Cage, 1939
 
 
A breakbeat is the percussion-only section of a funk or disco track, the peak moment at which dancers cut loose and do their most impressive steps. In the mid-seventies Bronx, DJ Kool Herc invented the hip-hop technique of looping these breaks into a continuous, hypnotic groove, by using two turntables and two copies of the same record. By the mid-eighties, rap producers were using sampling and sequencing technology to loop beats with greater precision.
Prized for their gritty, live feel, breakbeats come from James Brown and his band the JB’s, from the Meters, Kool and The Gang and the Jimmy Castor Bunch, from fusion artists like Bob James and Herbie Hancock, and from a legion of obscure funk and disco artists of the seventies. As hip-hop culture burgeoned in the early eighties, the choicest breakbeats – like ‘Apache’ by the Incredible Bongo Band – were collated on ‘Breaks and Beats’ compilations. The most famous break in all of jungle is ‘Amen’, a hard driving snare-and-cymbal sequence from ‘Amen, My Brother’ by the soul group The Winstons. Chopped up, processed through effects, resequenced, ‘Amen’ has been used in thousands of tracks, and is still being reworked. How would the drummer in the Winstons respond, if you told him that a stray moment of casual funkiness, thrown down in a studio in 1969, had gone on to underpin an entire genre of music? Close behind ‘Amen’, there’s the classic break from Lyn Collins’s ‘Think’, in which James Brown yells ‘you’re bad, sister’ to Collins. Sped-up so that JB sounds like a funky elf with a chronic case of hiccups, ‘Think’ became a feverish, percussive tic almost as ubiquitous in jungle as ‘Amen’.
In the early nineties, many house and techno producers had started to use breakbeats in tracks, either to add extra polyrhythmic ‘feel’ or simply because it was easier to loop and speed up a segment of ‘real’ drums than to program a drum machine. As breakbeat house and hardcore grew popular, this short-cut was transformed into a positive aesthetic by younger producers, many of whom had been original British B-boys. Living up to the root meaning of that term (the B refers to ‘breaks’), producers like Gavin King of Urban Shakedown, DJ Hype, and Danny Breaks of Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era layered multiple breakbeats to form an exhilarating bedlam of clashing and meshing polyrhythms.
This hyper-syncopated hardcore drew more Black British kids into rave culture, catalysing the feedback loop of black influence that resulted in jungle. But the breakbeat mess-thetic alienated as many as it seduced. While jungle, like most pop music, is in 4/4 time, it lacks the stomping, metronomic four-to-the-floor kick-drum that runs through techno, house and disco. Eurodisco pioneer Giorgio Moroder had deliberately simplified funk rhythms to make it easier for white dancers; the ‘jungalistic hardcore’ that emerged in 1992 reversed this process, and for many ravers, it was simply
too funky to dance to
. That year, Josh Lawford of
Ravescene
magazine prophesized that the breakbeat was ‘the death-knell of rave’, and in a sense, he was correct. But it was more than just the disappearance of the four-to-the-floor kick that alienated ravers. Jungle’s dense percussive web destabilizes the beat, traditionally the steady pulse of pop music. Breakbeats make the music feel treacherous. The in-built safety factor in most machine-made dance music, the predictability that allows the listener to trance out, was replaced by a palpable danger. Jungle makes you step in a different way, wary and
en garde
. It was this edginess that drove many ravers out of the hardcore scene and back to house.

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