Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (72 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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EIGHTEEN
OUTRO
NINETIES HOUSE
,
SPEED GARAGE AND
BIG BEAT
,
SPEED GARAGE AND
BIG BEAT
Although its technophobe foes still insist that ‘it all sounds the same’, electronic dance music has long since ceased to be a monolith. Rather, it’s a fractious confederacy of genres and sub-genres, metropolitan cliques and provincial populisms, purisms and hybrids. Post-rave culture encompasses a huge span of divergent and often opposed attitudes to aesthetics, technology, drugs, plus wildly different estimations of how much it all matters.
In a sense, you could say that rave culture is a victim of its own success. Like a political party that’s won an election landslide and enjoys a huge majority, rave could afford to fall out with itself, to succumb to in-fighting. Just as the Woodstock convergence of the late sixties gave way to the fragmented drift of seventies rock, just as the class of 1977 split into factions over what punk ‘was all about’, rave’s Ecstasy-sponsored unity inevitably re-fractured and stratified along class, race and regional lines. As early as 1991, the divisions that rave once magically dissolved reasserted themselves.
Partly this disunity is down to the nature of Ecstasy. One of the secrets of the drug’s success is its context-dependent adaptability. MDMA provides a profound but curiously ‘meaningless’ experience. You have to supply the meaning. The overpowering feelings, sensations and idealism generated by the drug demand some kind of articulation, but the terms used are conditioned by a complex mesh of parameters – class, race, gender, nationality, ideology. Hence the huge range of ‘Ecstasy talk’, from the hardcore hedonism of working-class weekenders to the cyberdelic utopianism of San Francisco and the neo-paganism of the Spiral Tribe. ‘Mental’, ‘mystical’, ‘avant-garde’: these may be simply different ways of exalting the same experience, people using the kind of lingo they’re most comfortable with. But the terms used to describe an experience ultimately determine its implications.
On a purely musical level, house and techno mutated as the musics were warped to fit the desires and purposes of different social strata, different races and regions. Once started, the process of subdivision appears to be irreversible, so that the ‘we’ that each post-rave fragment addresses can only get smaller and smaller. Often, the cutting-edge of each style is precisely what cuts it off from universal appeal.
For the newcomer to electronic dance music, this profusion of rave sub-genres can seem at best bewildering, at worst wilful obfuscation. Partly, this is a trick of perspective: kids who’ve grown up with techno feel it’s
rock
that ‘all sounds the same’. The urgent distinctions rockers take for granted – that Pantera, Pearl Jam, and Pavement operate in separate aesthetic universes – only make sense if you’re already a participant in the ongoing rock discourse. The same applies to dance music; step inside, and the genre-itis begins to make sense. Like sections in a record store, the categories are useful. But they’re also a way of talking about the music, of arguing about what it’s for and where it should go. In that sense, the post-rave diaspora is a sign of health, proof that people still care enough to disagree violently about this music, that the stakes are still high.
rock
that ‘all sounds the same’. The urgent distinctions rockers take for granted – that Pantera, Pearl Jam, and Pavement operate in separate aesthetic universes – only make sense if you’re already a participant in the ongoing rock discourse. The same applies to dance music; step inside, and the genre-itis begins to make sense. Like sections in a record store, the categories are useful. But they’re also a way of talking about the music, of arguing about what it’s for and where it should go. In that sense, the post-rave diaspora is a sign of health, proof that people still care enough to disagree violently about this music, that the stakes are still high.
Although I enjoy the semantic struggles over new genre terms (and have coined a few in my time – ambient jungle, artcore, post-rock, gloomcore, neurofunk) even I sometimes wonder if the endless subdivision has got out of hand. Nowhere is the turnover of new sub-styles more rapid than in house music, which is still the mainstream of Ecstasy culture in Britain, the music most clubbers dance and drug to. In 1989, ‘house’ was the all-encompassing general term for rave music. But in the immediately ensuing years, not only was house’s primacy challenged by rival terms like ‘techno’ and ‘hardcore’, but house itself started to splinter, as an endless array of prefixes – ‘tribal’, ‘progressive’, ‘handbag’, and so forth – interposed themselves in front of the word in order to define precise stylistic strands.
‘Handbag house’ was initially a disparaging term, coined by condescending cognoscenti
vis-à-vis
the anthemic, chart-penetrating house tunes that allegedly appealed to women, and above all to the folk-mythic construct of Sharon and Tracy, stereotypes of the undiscrimat-ing working-class party girl. Inevitably, ‘handbag’ – and its slightly tuffer sequel, ‘hardbag’ – became a rallying cry for populists not afraid of ‘cheesy’ emotionalism. While some of the anti-handbag hipsters affiliated themselves with American deep house and garage from New York and Chicago, another faction came up with the dubious concept of ‘progressive house’. Released by labels like Hard Hands, Cowboy, Om and Guerrilla, this was homegrown English house music, trippy and trancey, and distinguished by long tracks, big riffs, mild dub-inflections and multi-tiered percussion. ‘Progressive’ seemed to signify not just its anti-cheese, non-girly credentials but its severing of house’s roots in gay black disco. Out of the 1991 – 3 prog house scene emerged a number of artists who belong to a non-genre that might be dubbed ‘band house’: groups like Leftfield, Lionrock, Underworld, The Aloof and Faithless who sell albums in large amounts and play live.
vis-à-vis
the anthemic, chart-penetrating house tunes that allegedly appealed to women, and above all to the folk-mythic construct of Sharon and Tracy, stereotypes of the undiscrimat-ing working-class party girl. Inevitably, ‘handbag’ – and its slightly tuffer sequel, ‘hardbag’ – became a rallying cry for populists not afraid of ‘cheesy’ emotionalism. While some of the anti-handbag hipsters affiliated themselves with American deep house and garage from New York and Chicago, another faction came up with the dubious concept of ‘progressive house’. Released by labels like Hard Hands, Cowboy, Om and Guerrilla, this was homegrown English house music, trippy and trancey, and distinguished by long tracks, big riffs, mild dub-inflections and multi-tiered percussion. ‘Progressive’ seemed to signify not just its anti-cheese, non-girly credentials but its severing of house’s roots in gay black disco. Out of the 1991 – 3 prog house scene emerged a number of artists who belong to a non-genre that might be dubbed ‘band house’: groups like Leftfield, Lionrock, Underworld, The Aloof and Faithless who sell albums in large amounts and play live.
Back in America, the equivalents to these big-sellers aren’t bands but auteur producers like Masters At Work, Deep Dish, Armand Van Helden and Murk. US underground house seems to shift back and forth between songs and tracks, soft and hard, big vocals and depersonalized abstraction. Somewhere between these two poles lies the vogue for disco cut-ups: raw-yet-camp tracks, vocal-free but based around looped samples from seventies underground disco classics. Pioneering both the disco cut-up trend and the resurgence of Chicago house were the twin labels Relief and Cajual. Relief is a ‘trackhead’ label: its eerie, unhinged, almost psychotic output, by artists like Green Velvet, Gene Farris, DJ Sneak and DJ Rush, thrillingly revived the spirit if not the sound of acid house.
Recently, the proliferation of house sub-genres has gone into hyperdrive, with terms like nu-NRG (hard, gay, Euro house) and dream house/epic house (lushly melodic, atmospheric house influenced by trance) achieving fleeting currency. Progressive house has returned (now shorn of any pretensions to innovation and signifying no-nonsense pumping house for regular heterosexual blokes), while the purist sub-genre of tech-house boasts ultra-clean production (sounds so spangly-pristine you feel like you’ve already done an E) and boasts of preserving the ‘lost spirit’ of Chicago acid and Detroit techno. Meanwhile, a bastard form of acid emerged from London’s underground milieu of squat-raves – a screeching, raucous, punk-fierce blare of overdriven 303s. The scene-and-sound’s defiantly impurist attitude was emblazoned in the gloriously titled compilation
It’s Not Intelligent, It’s Not From Detroit, But It’s Fucking ’Avin It
, mixed by crusading free party DJ-collective Liberator and released on their label Stay Up Forever.
It’s Not Intelligent, It’s Not From Detroit, But It’s Fucking ’Avin It
, mixed by crusading free party DJ-collective Liberator and released on their label Stay Up Forever.
A world away from the squalor of the squat-scene (where ketamine was increasingly the drug-of-choice,) garage – for years, the nearest thing to a static entity in the post-rave universe – spawned its own distinctively British mutant called ‘speed garage’. Sometime in late 1996/early 1997, a segment of London’s jungle audience began to wonder why they were listening to such dark, depressing music. Jungle had been shaped by the desperation of the recession-wracked mid-nineties; now, with ‘loadsamoney’ in their pockets, the junglists didn’t feel desperate anymore. Increasingly alienated by the white industrial bombast of techstep, these mostly black junglists began to complain about the surfeit of distortion-drenched and melody-free tracks (‘disgusting music, mad music’, as V Records’ Bryan Gee put it). Searching for a sound that better reflected their affluence and insousiance, the ex-junglists built a brand new scene based around the ‘finer things in life’ – designer-label clothes, flash cars, champagne, cocaine, and garage music.
As well as attracting upwardly mobile, ‘mature’ white clubbers who reviled rave culture as juvenile and lumpen, garage’s mellow opulence had long appealed to junglists; where a techno chill-out room offered beat-free ambient, the second room at jungle clubs like Thunder & Joy tended to play bumpin’ garage. For most of the nineties, homegrown UK garage had slavishly imitated American producers. But when the ex-junglists entered the fray, they created a distinctly British hybrid strain that merged house’s slinky panache with jungle’s rude-bwoy exuberance.
Like all innovations in dance music – from early eighties house to early nineties hardcore – speed garage began as a DJ-driven sound. Pirate DJs pitched up American garage imports – particularly the tuffer style of producers like Todd Edwards and Armand Van Helden – to +8 on their Technics turntables, and insinuated jungalistic elements: dub-wize effects, rewinds and ragga-MC chatter. Inevitably, DJs started to cut dubplates that sounded like their mixes; the next step was to release the tracks. And so a new genre was born. Tougher and faster than its US prototype, speed garage is a winning combination of the most crowdpleaser elements from house, jungle circa 1994, and hardcore rave: sultry divas, ‘dread bass’, dancehall reggae chants,’ardkore’s sped-up, helium-squeaky vocals, plus the filtering effects used by house producers like Daft Punk to make sounds shiver up your spine.
What really defines speed garage, though, is its beat: syncopated, highly textured snares with a curiously organic, wood-block timbre. Unlike house’s metronomic four-to-the-floor kick-drum, speed garage is polyrhythmically perverse, riddled with itchy percussive tics, micro-breakbeats and quivery synth-stabs. And where most rave music is asexual, speed garage is lascivious – the skipping snares tug at your hips, the rumpshaker B-lines wiggle your ass. This sexiness is probably a side-effect of British clubbers’s shift of allegiance from anti-aphrodisiac Ecstasy to horny-making cocaine.
The craze for coke ties in with the way the scene resurrects the snobby exclusivity of the pre-rave club culture of the mid-eighties (the last time the economy was booming). Most speed garage clubs ban jeans and sneakers. Speed garage’s ethos of ‘living large’ also parallels US ‘playa’ rap’s ‘we-are-the-beautiful people / we be the baddest clique’ hedonism – its conspicuous consumption and luxury-commodity fetishism, its weird blend of chilled languor and latent menace. Hence the garage bootleg version of L’il Kim/ Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Crush On You’ doing the rounds. If jungle was gangsta rave, speed garage is gangsta house.
Converts hail speed garage as a revolution in British dance culture. Certainly, its victory has been swift and total. In 1997, just about every jungle pirate radio station in London switched to speed garage. Jungle’s populist core withered away; hitherto ‘rammed’ jump-up events like the Roast suddenly found their dancefloors almost deserted, with the punters defecting to speed garage clubs like Absolute Sundays, Numb Nums, Twice as Nice, Sun City, the Powerhouse and Horny. ‘A lot of the dread side of jungle has gone into the garage,’ says Phil Aslet from Source Direct, ‘dread’ referring to the dancehall reggae fans originally lured into jungle by its ragga samples back in 1994. Yet because its non-breakbeat rhythms appeal to house fans, speed garage has achieved way more popularity and commercial success than jungle ever did; genre-defining singles like Double 99’s ‘Ripgroove’, 187 Lockdown’s ‘Gunman’ and Fabulous Baker Boys’ ‘Oh Boy’ (a brilliant remake of Jonny L’s ‘Hurt You So’) were propelled into the UK Top Twenty only months after the scene’s discovery by the media.
Inevitably, speed garage has inspired emnity. From house purists to drum and bass scientists, many argue that, far from being revolutionary, speed garage is merely a crafty collage of the most cheesily effective clichés from the last seven years of UK dance. True enough – although it’s hard to imagine even the sternest purist managing to resist this pleasure-principled sound’s alluring obviousness. And more innovative strains of speed garage
are
emerging, like the dub-spacious, percussa-delic and succulently textured productions of artists such as A Baffled Republic and Ramsey & Fen, which recall the eighties avant-disco of Arthur Russell. Generally, the best version of any given speed garage track is the stripped-down and weirder ‘dub’.
are
emerging, like the dub-spacious, percussa-delic and succulently textured productions of artists such as A Baffled Republic and Ramsey & Fen, which recall the eighties avant-disco of Arthur Russell. Generally, the best version of any given speed garage track is the stripped-down and weirder ‘dub’.
Then there’s the fierce, jungle-dominated style that’s been called ‘dangerous garage’, tracks like Gant’s ‘Sound Bwoy Burial’ and Strickly Dub’s ‘Small Step’: baleful sub-bass pressure, dub-noise (sonar bleeps, sirens, gunshots, explosions of reverb) and patois dancehall shouts ‘timestretched’ so that the sample seems to crack apart like it’s afflicted with metal fatigue. Another exciting sub-style is the spate of speed garage remakes of hardcore classics like ‘Some Justice’ and ‘We Are I.E.’
Given that back in 1992 the garage and rave scenes were polar opposites and implacable enemies, speed garage’s nostalgia for hardcore seems weird. But there’s actually a continuum linking hardcore, jungle circa 1994 and speed garage – not only do the same figures crop up (Suburban Base’s Dan Donelly, for instance, has now shifted his energy into his speed garage sub-label Quench), but the core attitude endures. As with all hardcore dance scenes past and present, it’s the ‘trackhead’, FX-crazy, ruthlessly digital side of speed garage, rather than the we-wanna-move-toward-using-real-instruments, ‘musical’ sector, that is really shaping any kind of future sound of London.
Still, it’s sheer hype(rbole) to rank speed garage alongside jungle, let alone acid house, as a sonic/subcultural revolution. Coloured by the feel-goodism of the late Major/early Blair boom, the politics of speed garage are so much less interesting than jungle’s ‘darkside’ paradigm (temporarily outmoded in 1997 – 98, but probably not for long). On a strictly musical level, speed garage is a composite (house + jungle) where drum and bass was a mutant (hip hop × techno). Jungle twisted and morphed its sources; as yet, an equivalent warp factor is barely audible in speed garage.
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