Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (47 page)

Read Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Online

Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
2.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
In the spirit of the occasion, and in order to really
feel
the music, I score an E for twenty guilder (about £8), gulp it down and wait for the rush. Ecstasy makes you more vulnerable to the music; defences knocked down, you start to merge with the noise instead of resisting it. Above all, E brings your metabolism up to speed, makes your insides buzz as fiercely as the swarming killer-bee riffs. Swept up in gabba’s cyclone of velocity and victim-less ultraviolence, I feel like I’m inside a forcefield, my flesh seared and irradiated with demonic energy.
Gabba has a terrible reputation. For some, it’s ‘kill your mother’ music, nasty noise for trainee psychopaths. For others, it’s ‘Nazi techno’. When the scene first emerged, many were quick to equate the gabbas’ cropped hair with white-power skinheads, a connection helped by the Feynoord supporters’ unfortunate habit of hurling anti-Semitic chants at their Ajax opponents (a reference to Amsterdam’s historical role as a Jewish merchant centre). In October 1997, the
Daily Star
somewhat belatedly discovered England’s tiny gabba scene. Grossly exaggerating the threat it posed to British youth, it published an exposé bearing headlines and captions like ‘Bop Till You Drop . . .
Dead
’, ‘Nazi Gabba Hell’, and ‘Jack Boots and Birds: Nazis have adopted sick Gabber’.
Gabba’s aggression does seem to hold an attraction for the extreme right; I’ve heard stories of Austrian neo-fascists doing drill to gabba’s regimented rhythms, of jackbooted and swastika-adorned thugs at Italian hardcore events. To counter this, Netherlands labels often print slogans like ‘United Gabbers Against Racism and Fascism’ or ‘Hardcore Against Hate and Violence’ on their record sleeves, while Dutch fans call themselves ‘bald gabbas’ to distinguish themselves from white-power skinheads.
Most of the time, though, gabba ignites a firestorm of belligerence with no specific target. Despite an emotional spectrum ranging from hostility to paranoia (song titles like ‘I’m the Fuck You Man’, ‘Mad As Hell’, ‘I’ll Show You My Gun’), there’s rarely any tension or fights at Dutch or Scottish raves. Instead, gabba kids direct their aggression at their own bodies, punishing their nervous systems with noise and drugs. In the early days of gabba, the big buzzword was ‘hakke’ – pronouced ‘hack-uh’, it sounds like ‘hardcore’ but means to strike someone with an axe. Echoing British rave slang like ‘sledgehammered’ and ‘caned’, ‘hakke’ captures the concussive nature of gabba’s quest for oblivion.
What redeems gabba is its playful sense of humour. The logo of the K. N. O. R. label is a horned demon in nappies, while Babyboom’s mascot is a nappy-clad infant giving you the finger: both images nicely blend rave’s regression with heavy metal’s puerility. Funniest of all are the series of T-shirts put out by the Forz label: a teddy bear with a submachine gun, a teddy wielding the sort of Christmas pudding bomb clutched by nineteenth-century anarchists, and most tasteless of the lot, one where Teddy’s blown his head clean off with a pistol. Stuffing, rather than blood, is spattered on the floor, while the slogan reads ‘Game Over’.
As well as Nintendo, gabba always makes me think of Bill Buford’s book on football hooliganism,
Among the Thugs
, and specifically that moment he describes when the mob becomes conscious of its collective power, and wills itself over the brink between normality and running amok. Gabba is arrested at just that brink of adrenalinized pandemonium. The missing link between thrash metal and gay Hi-NRG disco, gabba is the ultimate masculinist music. A transsexual once said that when she started taking testosterone, ‘it felt like mainlining rock ’n’ roll’. Suffice to say that if she’d doubled the dose, the sensation would be like gabba.
The ugly side of the music’s sado-masochismo is audible later on at Nightmare when technical difficulties led to the bizarre spectacle of Gabba Unplugged. As technicians fiddle beneath the DJ’s decks, the burglar-masked MC leads the crowd in a chant: ‘Happy / Is For Homos’. This is a reference to the poppy, sentimental strain of ‘happy gabba’ or ‘fun-core’ which has recently taken the Dutch charts by storm, and even scored a Top Ten smash in Britain with Technohead’s irresistibly zany pro-marijuana anthem ‘I Wanna Be A Hippy’. The chant also seems like a diss to a DJ who performed earlier tonight, Paul Elstak – the Rotterdam producer who invented gabba but who has recently disgusted the scene’s diehards by going cheesy and chuneful with hits like ‘Rainbow in the Sky’ and ‘Life Is Like A Dance’.
Backstage, Elstak shrugs off the anti-happy backlash, which has resulted in answer songs like ‘Paul Elstak, We Love You No More’ (a dig at his soppy chart smash ‘Luv U More’). The way he explains it, gabba had to mellow out at some point. ‘By 1994, the music was too hard, too fast. Fewer girls were dancing, and we lost the party atmosphere. And kids were taking too many drugs to keep up with the speed.’ Elstak and producers like Darkraver and Gizmo picked up on the lighter, less frenetic hardcore sound invented by Scottish producer Scott Brown, and kickstarted the happy-gabba explosion.
‘Happy’ was also a bid for respectability, after drug-related deaths had thrown the scene into disrepute. In Rotterdam, says Elstak, ‘one party was cancelled ’cos the authorities saw the flyer for the event and it was very aggressive, lots of blood and guts’. One reason Nightmare has gone on the road to towns like Arnhem is that raves are being refused licences in Rotterdam at the moment. And then there’s the Church, whose animosity is directed not just at gabba but all forms of rave music. According to Technohead’s Michael Wells, the Church ‘feels threatened because it used to be where people turned for meaning and a sense of belonging’. For European youth, rave has usurped that role.
Bounce to the Beat
 
‘I lost my religion the day I discovered raving.’ So says Chris, a nineteen-year-old lapsed Catholic and confirmed hardcore disciple. We’re hanging out in the chill-out zone of Rezerection, Scotland’s biggest rave, and – chiming in with the Christian theme – it’s 3 a.m. on Easter Sunday morning.
Chris, his fair hair cropped in the Caesar-cut that UK hardcore boys favour, tells me that rave is ‘a way of life, a culture’. It’s a way-of-life that demands sacrifices; when he was working, he spent £3,000 in one year on tickets, drugs, transport, and now that he’s on the dole, events like Rez require weeks of planning and scrimping. And drugs are an inseparable part of that way of life. ‘They help you forget all your problems for one night,’ says Chris. I’m told that some of the kids at Rez take an E every hour, sometimes as many as twelve a night. Chris says he’s been on a few benders, and once necked ten pills. ‘But that way you end up dancing yourself into an early grave,’ he adds. This idea sometimes surfaces in the music itself, in sick-humorous song titles like ‘Friday Night Can Kill You’, ‘I Died In My Teens’ and ‘I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight’ (which samples the soppy AOR hit of the same title by Cutting Crew). Tonight, though, Chris is accentuating the positive, telling me ‘I class everybody at a rave as a friend,’ with a believer’s gleam in his eye.
Although Chris says that ‘Rotterdam died when Elstak started to go cheesy,’ Rezerection is full of testaments to the peculiar Scottish cult of all things Dutch. Everywhere there are T-shirts bearing the logos of the top Netherlands gabba labels – K. N. O. R., Ruffneck, Mokum, Dwarf, Terror Traxx, Babyboom. A few kids even sport Feynoord team-colours. The music, though, is not the kind of ‘kill-your-mother’ gabba played at Nightmare, but the fun-core strain that so aggravates the diehards. The big buzzwords in Scotland are ‘bouncy’ (one of Chris’s friends says, ‘I’m just off for a wee bounce’) and ‘cheesy’ (like gabba, an insult transformed into a positive term). With its rinky-dink keyboard refrains, spine-tingly riffs and anthemic choruses, happy-core is almost disturbingly fixated. A lot of tunes recall oom-pah music or Jewish
klezmer
(in fact there’s actually a gabba version of the wedding jig ‘Havanagila’); others have carousel-like fairground melodies. That sense of kiddy-kartoon frolic is completed by the whirligig, funhouse hall-of-mirrors and fruit machines in the chill-out zone.
In its own senti-MENTAL way, fun-core is just as extreme as the more sadistic kinds of gabba. And the Scottish kids certainly match the Dutch for sheer mania. Stripped to the waist, tattooed and sweaty, the lads gurn like heavy metal bands posing for a photo shoot. Wee lassies twitch ’n’ twirl like clockwork toys wound up too fast, their hands inscribing semaphore patterns at hyperspeed. Everywhere the trappings of UK rave’s golden era circa 1991 – 2 are visible – gas masks, white gloves, floppy hats and jester caps, baby’s dummies, fluorescent light-sticks (which cost two quid each and last a mere six hours). And the golden age’s infectious bonhomie is still alive and kickin’: total strangers come up and shake my hand, sharing your soft drink or water is
de rigeur
.
By 5 a.m., though, the euphoria is giving way to battle-fatigue. And you start to notice the kids who look fed up because they can’t afford another pill, or have simply caned the E so hard for so long that the chemical’s lovey-dovey effect has worn off. It’s then that you become alert to the dark side of E culture. In the chill-out room, there’s a booth offering Lifeline’s drug education leaflets, chirpy comics that try to engage the kids on their own level, with cartoons about Temazepam Tom, a cat with a wooden leg (he got gangrene from melting the sleeping pill, popularly known as ‘jellies’, and injecting it), and Peanut Pete comics that illustrate the dangers of paranoia and overheating. In the paramedic support room, kids suffering the effects of ‘snidey E’s’ or over-indulgence huddle wrapped in blankets with plastic puke pots on their laps. Despite the fig-leaf of intensive drug searches on entrance, big-scale raves like Rez are highly organized spaces designed for kids to freak out, with safety nets provided if they take it too far.
As in Holland, Scotland’s spate of E-related deaths gave hardcore a disreputable image and prompted a clampdown by the authorities. According to Jamie Raeburn of Scottish rave mag
Clubscene
, ‘Hardcore clubbing is now almost dead.’ There’s the Metro in Ayr, Nosebleed in Fyfe, and in Stirling, the Fubar (it stands for ‘Fucked Up Beyond All Repair’). But all the other Scottish clubs are pushing the mellow, upmarket sound of house, because they associate hardcore with ‘schemie’ hooligans, i.e., kids from deprived housing schemes. The big raves, like Rezerection, keep faith with the hardcore massive. ‘People come to see bands like Ultra-Sonic, Q-Tex, Q-FX, ’cos they associate them with doing their first E’s!’ says Raeburn.
Beneath Scottish techno’s bouncy, fun-core aura, there’s an undercurrent of punk rage. Take ‘No D. S. Allowed’ by The Rhythmic State, a tirade against the Drug Squad, who have maintained an intimidating presence at raves ever since the wave of drug deaths at Hangar 13 in 1994. (A common paranoid delusion of wired-and-tired Scottish ravers is that the guy next to them is an undercover DS agent.) “No D. S.” is the ultimate two-finger-salute,’ says Raeburn. ‘You can’t blame the kids, really. Most of their clubs are being closed down, the police harass them, pull them out of clubs for having half an E on their person, really abuse them. If “they” – DJs, the media, and the authorities – are trying to take your music away, you’re gonna tell ’em to fuck off.’
Only the Happiest of People Need Apply
 
‘I’m pleased to be uncool and happy. It’s like the white gloves . . . You ever seen a white glove raver start a fight? If you hate people who wear white gloves, then basically you’re saying having a good time is crap.’
– Chris Howell of Kniteforce Records
 
 
Despite all the Dutch gabba T-shirts at Rez, Scottish hardcore’s allegiances are shifting; several of the DJs playing tonight are from south of the border, where they’re big names on the English ‘happy hardcore’ scene. The difference between happy hardcore and happy gabba is slight: basically, the English tracks have sped-up breakbeats running alongside the stomping four-to-the-floor kick-drum, and at 170 b.p.m., they’re slightly slower than happy-gabba. But the genealogy of happy hardcore is quite different: the scene began as an offshoot of jungle.
Back in 1993, when hardcore plunged into the ‘darkside’, a breakaway faction of DJ – producers like Seduction, Vibes and Slipmatt continued to make celebratory, upful tunes based around hectic breakbeats. By the end of 1994, happy hardcore had coalesced into a scene that operated in parallel with its estranged cousin, jungle, but had its own network of labels, its own hierarchy of DJs, its own circuit of clubs. Labels like Kniteforce, Impact, Remix, Hectic, Slammin’, SMD, Asylum and Universal; DJ – producers like Dougal, Brisk, Sy and Unknown, Force and Styles, Hixxy, DJ Ham, Ramos and Supreme; venues like The Rhythm Station in Aldershot, Die Hard in Leicester, Club Kinetic in Stoke-On-Trent, and Labrynth in East London.

Other books

Solitude Creek by Jeffery Deaver
The Qualities of Wood by Mary Vensel White
Mindwalker by AJ Steiger
Deadly Deceit by Hannah, Mari
Blessed Fate by Hb Heinzer
Jam and Roses by Mary Gibson
Expecting the Cowboy's Baby by Charlene Sands
BlackWind by Charlotte Boyett-Compo