Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (55 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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When you’ve got sixteen-year-old kids dosing themselves with an array of substances of unknown potency and unpredictable interactions, adolescents who often aren’t emotionally mature enough to surf the psychedelic maelstrom, then you have the recipe for a freak scene. ‘I played at LSD in Philadelphia at New Year’s Eve, and
twenty-five people
overdosed at that party,’ says Heather Heart. ‘There were ambulances outside all night long. The party was finally shut down’cos some girl was unconscious and they went to wake her and she was defecating herself. These were kids overdoing it, and doing a mixture of drugs – Ecstasy, ketamine, crystal, acid. None of them were just on one thing.’ Dennis The Menace argues that the polydrug culture has destroyed the synergy effect that occurs in rave scenes during the honeymoon phase of Ecstasy use: the ‘rave-gasm’ feedback loop of ravers, all relatively fresh to the drug, buzzing on the same pure E. Polydrug abuse shatters that synchronized rush; everyone’s on different trips. ‘The scene got ruined when the pills got replaced by powders,’ he claims, referring to K, crystal, PCP and cocaine. ‘The raves just splintered into different vibes.’
Because it was a
transplant
– literally imported by English expats, in many cases – rave has had trouble establishing roots in America. It never became a mass working-class movement, and it lacks certain key elements of the UK’s self-sustaining subcultural matrix, like pirate radio. America is also a more hostile soil for rave. For rockers who still think ‘disco sucks’ and who hate English ‘haircut’ synth bands, rave is self-evidently inauthentic, a phoney fad. This prejudice is not entirely without foundation. Exempt from the picture the black house traditions in Chicago, Detroit and New York (all of which pre-date rave), and it’s striking that the white rave scene in the USA has so far failed to generate a uniquely American mutation of the music. There are isolated cells of brilliance, for sure: Josh Wink and his Ovum label in Philadelphia, the Hardkiss crew, the Brooklyn milieu in the early nineties, plus a scattering of individual DJ – producers. But America has yet to spawn a creative mis-recognition of the music to rival jungle, gabba or trance. The nearest contender is the ‘funky breaks’ or ‘breakbeat’ style of house that’s emerged in Southern California and Florida – a hybrid of hip hop, electro and acid house that, while great fun, is historically stuck at the level of UK rave in 1991.
According to Steven Melrose, co-founder of the City of Angels label, the West Coast breakbeat sound has little connection with house apart from its use of ‘acid builds’ (Roland 303 bass-riffs), and its 125 – 135 b.p.m. tempo. The breakbeats are popular because the four-to-the-floor house beat is just too European and disco for most American kids. ‘Funky breaks stems from the first rave music from the UK that was big in the USA – the ’91 breakbeat hardcore of SL2 and Prodigy.’ This makes West Coast breakbeat the American equivalent of jungle, except that it’s not as fast or as polyrhythmically complex; tracks usually feature just one looped break. The West Coast tracks also have a sunny, upful vibe compared with jungle, making the music ‘better for that 5 a.m. in the morning, palm trees vibe.’
Formed by Scottish expat Melrose and his English partner Justin King, City of Angels is one of the leading funky breaks label. Its first release, ‘Now Is The Time’ by The Crystal Method (a Las Vegas outfit named after a technique for staying up all night, i.e., taking speed) defined the sound. Other West Coast pioneers include Überzone, The Bassbin Twins, Bass Kittens, DJs like John Kelley and Simply Jeff, and labels like Bassex and Mephisto. In Florida, the regional variant of funky breaks is influenced by Miami Bass – electro-descended, party-oriented rap that consists of little more than drum machine beats and booming Roland 808 bass. The leading lights of Florida breakbeat are Rabbit In The Moon and DJ Icey, whose Zone label is named in homage to UK 1991 breakbeat house labels Ozone and D-Zone.
Southern Death Cult
 
Florida now rivals Southern California as the USA’s number one rave state. These two sunshine-states have a lot in common. Geographically and culturally, Florida is not really part of the traditional Dixie South. Just as Los Angeles was imposed on the desert, Florida is a leisure paradise carved out of an inhospitable Jurassic environment. It only really came into its own as a vacation and retirement hotspot after the invention of air conditioning. Like the So-Cal region, Florida is a subtropical suburban sprawl, a car culture of booming bass-speakers and rootless anomie. Ostensibly the polar inverse of the state’s other big youth culture, death metal, Florida rave puts the morbid metal-kids to shame; it is infamous for taking excessive hedonism to the point of near-death experience, and sometimes taking it all the way. ‘Florida, it’s an active place, but the whole state’s done too many E’s,’ says Scott Hardkiss. ‘We’ve played a lot of parties where 3000 people are there, but no one’s dancing. Everyone’s off their head on [the downer] Rohypnol and E that’s like heroin, sit-down E.’
Probably because of the number of wealthy old people who retire there, Florida is one of the most conservative states in America. Hardly surprising, then, that its rave scene is under siege from police departments and legislators. As with Los Angeles in 1992, the local news media used a series of rave fatalities to marshal public opposition to the deadly ‘drug supermarkets’. In July 1994, eighteen-year-old Sandra Montessi died from ‘cardiac dysrhythmia due to MDMA intoxication’ after consuming one and half tablets at Orlando’s Edge club. In the same year, Ecstasy also killed twenty-year-old Teresa Schwartz at the pioneering Orlando rave-club Dekko’s. And in 1996, a young woman and her two male friends went into convulsions at a Tampa nightclub after a dealer used an eyedropper to deposit GHB on their tongues. With overdoses a regular occurrence, Orlando formed a Rave Review Task Force in 1997, while the city legislature passed a bill to prohibit clubs from renting their spaces out for alcohol-free after-hours raves. But the ordinance only shifted the problem elsewhere – to illegal raves outside the city limits.
This kind of repression is not unique to Florida. All across America, police departments, fire marshals and city councils use teen curfews, ordinances and licence restrictions targeted at particularly notorious clubs. The anti-rave crackdown is nationwide simply because there are very few states in America that don’t have a rave scene. According to the Hardkiss brothers, the entire South is kickin’ – Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland. ‘In the Bible Belt, the kids go a little crazy, they need to break loose,’ says Robbie. Heading up the East Coast, the Washington DC/Baltimore area is a stronghold, thanks to DJs like Scott Henry and promoters like Ultraworld. Washington/ Baltimore is really part of an integrated East Coast network that connects Boston, New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia, a circuit of one-off raves to which kids travel by chartered buses as well as by cars. Another burgeoning scene, says Scott Hardkiss, is the Pacific North West: from San Francisco right up to Vancouver, via Portland and Seattle.
In the Hardkiss Brothers’ hometown San Francisco, the rave scene is still going strong. Younger kids attend Martin O’Brien’s The Gathering. Wicked are still active. The elders of the scene have formed ‘rave communities’, says Jody Radzik, tight cliques who throw small parties: the Rhythm Society of St John the Divine, Sweet, Friends and Family, Cloud Factory, Gateway Systems. The distinctive Bay Area spirituality endures, often in unusual ways – like the Planetary Masses at Grace Cathedral, modelled after the Nine O’clock Service in England and organized by Rev. Matthew Fox, who joined the Episcopalians having been defrocked as a Dominican priest after a dispute with the Vatican. On the techno-pagan tip, Dubtribe and other small outfits still throw renegade parties. The Full Moon concept migrated South to Southern California, thanks to a crew called Moon Tribe. Along with parties in the desert, many LA raves take place on Native American reservations, where the police have no jurisdiction. Like the post-Spiral Tribe sound-systems in Britain, American rave outfits exploit the local terrain, looking for ‘cracks and vacancies’ left by the state.
From illegal free parties through borderline events like Even Furthur to massive commercial extravaganzas, American rave survives, despite its stylistic fragmentation and regional dispersion. Whether it will benefit from the record industry’s enthusiasm for ‘electronica’ is unclear. The major labels are trying to distance the music from drug culture by marketing techno as band music rather than a DJ culture. Where that will leave the ‘real’ American rave scene remains to be seen.
THIRTEEN
 
SOUNDS OF PARANOIA
 
TRIP HOP, TRICKY AND
PRE-MILLENNIUM
TENSION
 
Musicians, bless ’em, hate categories. ‘Don’t pigeonhole us’; ‘It’s all music, man’; ‘is there any kind of music we don’t like? Just bad music, really’ – these are the kind of platitudes regularly encountered by the journalist. In recent years, no genre designation has been more resented and rejected as a press-concocted figment by its purported practitioners than ‘trip hop’.
Personally, I always thought the term was just fine. Not only does ‘trip hop’ sound good, but it instantly evokes what it describes: a spacey, down-tempo form of hip hop that’s mostly abstract and all-instrumental. Coined by
Mixmag
’s Andy Pemberton (although others have claimed parentage), trip hop is a handy tag for a style that emerged in the early nineties (hip hop without the rap and without the rage, basically) and that, while not exclusively UK based, nonetheless remains almost totally out-of-step with current American rap, where rhymin’ skills and charismatic personalities rule.
Designed for headphone-listening as opposed to parties, reverie rather than revelry, trip hop retains the musical essence of hip hop – breakbeat-based rhythms, looped samples, turntable-manipulation effects like scratching – but takes the studio wizardry of pioneering African-American producers like Hank Shocklee and Prince Paul even further. When not entirely instrumental, trip hop is as likely to feature singing as rapping. Widely regarded as the genre’s inventors, Massive Attack deployed an array of divas both female (Shara Nelson, Tracey Thorn, Nicolette) and male (roots reggae legend Horace Andy) alongside rappers 3D and Tricky. The latter’s solo work mixes singing and rapping, with Tricky often providing bleary ‘backing raps’ to his partner Martina’s dulcet lead vocal. Generally, when trip hoppers do rap, their style is contemplative, low-key and low-in-the-mix.
Opponents of the ‘trip hop’ concept often argue that it’s nothing new, citing precedents for abstract impressionist hip hop like the early collage-tracks of Steinski & Mass Media and The 45 King, the sampladelic fantasia of Mantronix, cinematic soundscapes like Erik B and Rakim’s ‘Follow The Leader’, obscure one-offs like Red Alert’s ‘Hip Hop On Wax’ or ‘We Come To Dub’ by the Imperial Brothers. True enough, but the fact remains that, with the twin rise in the late eighties of ‘conscious’ rap (Public Enemy, KRS1) and gangsta rap (NWA, Scarface, Dr Dre), the verbal, storytelling side of hip hop gradually came to dominate at the expense of aural atmospherics. Just as this was happening Stateside, the idea of instrumental hip hop was flourishing in Britain (perhaps because of the difficulties involved in rapping convincingly in an English accent). Some of these early collage-based ‘DJ records’ – M/A/R/R/S’s ‘Pump Up The Volume’, Coldcut’s ‘Beats and Pieces’, Bomb The Bass’ ‘Beat Dis’ – were sufficiently uptempo to get swept up into the burgeoning house scene. But others, by the likes of Renegade Soundwave, Meat Beat Manifesto and Depthcharge, jumbled up elements of hip hop, dub reggae and film soundtracks to create a distinctly UK sound; a moody downtempo funk, high on atmospherics, low on attitude, and a precursor to today’s trip hop.
In America, hip hop and rave culture are utterly separate and estranged subcultures. But in Britain, trip hop can be considered an adjunct to rave culture, just another option on the smorgasbord of sounds available to ‘the chemical generation’. Like rave music, trip hop is based around samples and loops; like techno, it’s the soundtrack to recreational drug use. In trip hop’s case, that drug is marijuana rather than Ecstasy. Funky Porcini’s James Bradell went so far as to define trip hop as ‘the mixture between computers and dope’.
Living in my Headphones
 
Hip hop’s influence in the UK blossomed in the form of jungle and trip hop, distinctly British mutants that Black Americans barely recognize as relatives of rap. Where hyperkinetic jungle is all about the tension and paranoia of London, trip hop’s mellow motherlode is Bristol. Laidback verging on supine, Bristol is Slackersville UK, a town where cheap accommodation allows bohemia to ferment; members of Portishead describe it as a place where ‘people take a while to get out of bed’ and ‘get comatosed’ of an evening. Because of its history as a port in the slave trade, Bristol has a large, long-established black population. Combined with a strong student and bohemian presence, this has made the town a fertile environment for genre-blending musical activity. All these factors fostered a distinctive Bristol sound, a languid, lugubrious hybrid of soul, reggae, jazz-fusion and hip hop.
The story begins with The Wild Bunch, a mid-eighties sound-system /DJ collective renowned for its eclecticism. Members included Nellee Hooper (who later brought a Bristol-ian jazzy fluency to his production work for Soul II Soul, Neneh Cherry and Bjork) and Daddy G and Mushroom, who went on to form Massive Attack with rapper 3D. Tricky contributed raps to both Massive albums, while Portishead’s soundscape-creator Geoff Barrow assisted with the programming on Massive’s 1991 debut
Blue Lines
.

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