Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (76 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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This renewed enthusiasm for Ecstasy, after years in which its reputation had suffered because of its unreliability, coincided with a dearth of music congenial to taking E. Trance rushed back in to fill the vacuum. Compared with the emotional dryness of late-nineties techno and drum and bass, trance was accessible – highly melodious, euphoric, with emotions that corresponded to ‘normal’ human feelings (longing, poignancy, tenderness, etc.). Where techno and drum and bass producers titled their tracks using terminology from astrophysics or biogenetics, Van Dyk’s most famous anthem ‘For An Angel’ was inspired by meeting his girlfriend! Sensuous and uplifting like house, but with the banging rave energy that house lacks, trance rode the Mitsubishi wave and by 1999 it had achieved an almost tyrannical popularity.
The Esperanto of electronic dance, trance became the world’s most beloved form of techno. But it was also the most hated and despised – connoisseurs dismiss it as cheesy trash, not serious or ‘deep’ like minimal techno and drum and bass. People with an emotional and intellectual investment in concepts like ‘subculture’, ‘underground’, ‘hardcore’ etc. typically characterize trance’s spirit as meek and mild, lacking in edge. And there’s certainly some element of truth to the stereotype of the trance fan as white, middle class and apolitical, unwillingly to deal with the ‘urban’ (code for ‘black’) elements of dance culture. Consciously or not, trance producers had refined out both the black gay disco elements of house and the hip-hop/reggae-derived ruffage of hardcore.
This musical blanding out seemed to parallel the corporatisation of dance culture. The chaos of the early nineties rave scene, which was anarcho-capitalist and borderline criminal, had been gradually replaced by a professionalized and hugely profitable clubbing industry. Going to raves in 1988 – 92 was often edgy, equally likely to result in unforeseen adventures or some kind of disaster. But the UK superclubs like Cream and Gatecrasher where progressive and trance held sway were efficient and well-organized spaces designed for dependable enjoyment. The result was that you got what you paid for – but nothing more. The ‘surplus value’ that came from participating in the rave underground disappeared. What’s weird is that for the new generation of clubbers, the ‘quality night out’ consumerist ethos of the superclubs inspired huge loyalty. They identified with these mini-corporations so intensely that they marked their bodies with brand-name logos – tattoos of Cream’s symbol or Gatecrasher’s heraldic British lion logo.
Based in Sheffield, Gatecrasher became the symbol of the new trance culture in all its ambivalence. The club’s slogan ‘Market Leaders In Having-It-Right-Off Leisure Ware’ played up their corporate image. ‘Having it’ means full-on, pill-gobbling, getting-messy-on-the-dance-floor hedonism; the ‘Having-It-Right-Off Leisure Ware’ slogan, while a cute joke, showed how an underground drug culture had been transformed into an almost legitimate mainstream leisure industry. Yet some commentators hailed the new generation of crazily dressed ravers filling Gatecrasher and similar trance-oriented UK nightclubs like Sundissential and God’s Kitchen as a massive rejuvenation for British dance culture, even a ‘revolution’. Dance journalist Bethan Cole visited Gatecrasher as a sceptic but was blown away by the fervour and madcap creativity of the crowd, who called themselves ‘the Gatecrasher kidz’, ‘mentalists’ or ‘nutbags’, and developed their own look blending elements of rave, eighties New Romanticism, cyberpunk and Ibiza’s carnivalesque fancy-dress vibe. Gatecrasher kids are into hi-tech gadgets, flashing Cyberdog T-shirts, toy robots, Teletubbies – anything that’s futuristic, shiny and pleasing to the tripping eye. ‘Lots of the kids paint their faces bright blue or orange in this really primitive childlike way,’ recalled Cole. ‘Boys spike their hair up in blue and green. And the kids are very interactive with the DJs, holding up gigantic banners or writing notes.’ Walking through the club, she added, ‘there’s this eerie sense of things moving around you – kids with glove puppets and glow-sticks, light guns and those laser pens that write stuff in the air. There’s an eerie intensity about the whole place – childlike and innocent but also very druggy. You could smell that suburban odour of Pantene hair conditioner mingled with the chemical tang of drugs being sweated through the skin.’
The Gatecrasher name is also synonymous with the Mitsubishi pill. With high-MDMA-content pills in plentiful supply again, Crasher kids and others at similar clubs across Europe seized the chance to gorge themselves on quality E. ‘A lot of these Crasher kids were
really
fucked up,’ Cole observed. Indeed common slogans on banners held by the kids are ‘Fucked Again!’ and ‘Never Too Many!’ Some nutbags shave the Mitsubishi logo onto the back of their heads, daub it on their bodies in body paint, even get it as a tattoo. Others spell out the word ‘Mitzis’ with kindergarten-style brightly coloured plastic letters attached to their scalps!
Because E generates a surfeit of love and will-to-belief, a lot of that energy ends up focused on the DJ. This syndrome of Ecstasy-induced worship elevated the first-wave-of-rave DJ godstars like Sasha and Oakenfold, and now it created a new pantheon of crowd-pleasers like Tall Paul, Judge Jules and Paul Van Dyk. ‘When Paul was playing the encore to one of his six-hour sets, me and my friends held up a sign saying “Van Dyk Is God”, with each word on a piece of A4 paper,’ a Gatecrasher regular who travelled 124 miles from his home town Preston to get to the club told me. Although Van Dyk himself rejected the linkage of his popularity to the Mitsubishi upsurge and claimed to have never tried Ecstasy, the dewy-eyed melodic refrains and twinkling textures of tunes like his glorious remix of Binary Finary’s ‘1998’ fit the MDMA sensation like a glove.
The first Ecstasy explosion was messy and chaotic, its dazed participants creating a new culture as they went along, improvisational and adhoc. What’s different about the Mitsubishi-driven trance resurgence – and the reason why it couldn’t be a revolution – is that the social and economic mechanisms were in place to channel and exploit its energy. The ‘big room’ sounds of progressive and trance, with their audio-visual pyrotechnics and punctual climaxes, illustrate how rave’s explosive energies have been corralled by the clubbing industry. Sound becomes spectacle; dancers become pseudo-participants. The fact that even the illegal substructure to European club culture – the drug labs and big-time dealers – realized that the only way to salvage Ecstasy’s fading prestige was to put out ‘quality’ pills, a dependable product competitive against other drugs like cocaine, only reinforced the sense that rave had become a big business.
People who hate trance often accuse of it of lacking ‘funk’ or ‘soul’ – for basically being too white. The ‘funkless’ accusation is pretty undeniable. Rooted in Giorgio Moroder’s Eurodisco with its rhythmic grid of evenly emphasized four-to-the-floor beats and regular-as-clockwork sequenced pulsations, trance creates a sensation of surging through a frictionless soundscape. The ‘soulless’ critique is a bit unfair, though.
Mild-mannered Van Dyk let slip a hint of anger when I put the ‘soul’ accusation to him: ‘When people talk about “soul”, they mean black people, music that comes out of the blues. But we Europeans have soul – I have a heart, I have feelings. They don’t have a monopoly on that.’ And it’s true, there is a European soulfulness to trance, a quality that descends from Kraftwerk’s
Autobahn
,
Trans-Europe Express
and most of all
The Man-Machine
’s ‘Neon Lights’, with its serenely gliding monorail-like motion. Listen to trance and you think of the glistening, hygienic beauty of a modern unified Europe where parochial differences are slowly fading, the Europe of high-speed trains, autobahns, the pedestrian-only and pristine boulevards of city centre shopping districts, the noiseless moving walkways of airports. (It seems somehow appropriate that seminal trance club Dorian Gray was actually located
inside
Frankfurt’s airport.)
This is why trance and progressive flourish wherever the romance of streamlined, sterile modernity holds sway, from Hong Kong to Sao Paolo (the most European and modern of Brazil’s cities). Part of the point of progressive and trance is that they’re everywhere-and-nowhere sounds, completely post-geographical. With the
Global Underground
series of progressive superstar DJ mix-CDs, the sleeve notes always point out that the hip, ‘educated’ crowd in whatever city that mix-CD is notionally based around – Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Cape Town –
always already
know the tunes that Sasha/Trevor Seaman/whoever is spinning. Progressive/trance is music whose ‘locale’ is the Globe – an abstraction. A big part of the music’s allure is its aura of streamlined pleasure-tech, where the tracks are components to be assembled into seamless mixscapes by ultra-skilled technicians, who whiz back and forth across the global superclub circuit. The matt silver-grey fabric of progressive’s sound seems like it’s made from the same shiny synthetic material as the DJ bags and vaguely space-age-looking clothes these jet-setting jocks favour.
A world away from progressive’s global quasi-underground, psy-trance is a genuine subculture. The Mitsubishi wave didn’t have much impact in these quarters, because psy-trance fans tend to look down on E as a ‘fluffy’ drug strictly for lightweights. ‘You’ll find a lot of people at psy-trance parties who are only on mushrooms or acid,’ a psy-trance fan called Gordon told me in Puerto Rico. ‘They’re much more honest hallucinogens, because they let you go where your mind chooses to – you’re not locked into one emotion like with Ecstasy.’ Gaia-given ‘organic’ substances like peyote, DMT and psilocybin are preferred over synthetic designer drugs. Mushrooms and DMT evangelist Terence McKenna is something of a godfather figure to the psy scene, his voice frequently sampled on tracks.
Like the original counterculture and its offshoots from the Grateful Dead to Popol Vuh, psy-trance combines the shamanic use of hallucinogens with the gamut of Eastern spiritualities and polytheistic pagan-isms. The result is a syncretic spirituality mishmashed from chunks of Tao, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, hatha yoga, Mayan cosmology and Wicca, then spiced with alien abduction theories and other renegade forms of parascience. At psy-trance parties, you frequently spot signs of overt transcendentalism: a guy meditating in yoga’s lotus position, a conga of people sitting on the floor massaging the neck of the person in front.
Chai shops selling a very strong Indian-style tea laced with honey, cream and cardamom spices (ideal for replenishing energy after all-night dancing) are a big part of the scene. There’s also a bazaar marketplace element, with people selling self-designed T-shirts, jewellery, handcrafted objects and food. And psy-trance has developed a whole fashion look that mixes sixties hippie garments (loon pants, bell-bottoms, ponchos, shawls, tie-dye and paisley leggings, op art bikinis, knee-high boots in shaggy white mohair), Third World ethnic kitsch (batik fabric, mesh sarongs, cowrie-shell necklaces, fluorescent Hindu-style bindis between the eyebrows) and cyberdelic rave gear (luminous tongue piercings, flashing light contraptions wrapped around your wrist, ‘No Speak Alien’ T-shirts). A lot of the ethnic garments come from Bali, while the intricate, fractal-patterned T-shirts done in glowing inks are made by a UK company called Space Tribe.
To an unkind eye, your average psy-trance party resembles a detention camp for fashion criminals. The scene puts a premium on looking like a freak: absolutely anything goes. At El Cuco, I see a plump chap wearing one-strap dungarees decorated with astrological moons and planets and a boy wearing an outsize papier mâché monster-head. Other popular looks for the male psy-trancer are the ‘
Jesus Christ Superstar
/Khao San Road in Bangkok’ backpacker look (straggly-bearded, lank-haired, body odour optional) and the ‘Israeli hunk/Milli Vanilli’ look (mocha skin, long mane of oily curls, hairy muscled chest on display). Psy-trance women look a whole lot better, for some reason. Combining ultra-feminine flamboyance and tomboy practicality, the female trancepacker blends hippie chick, Tank Girl, and beach babe (white halter-tops, hair swept away from the face using white plastic sunglasses, suntans). Another micro-trend is for girls to wear headscarves and kerchiefs, making them look like peasant milkmaids on a Soviet collective farm or kibbutz women picking oranges. Indeed this trend actually stems from the huge Israeli influence on the scene. Even the characteristic psy-trance style of dancing – bouncing on the balls of their feet, shoulders braced as if dancing in a wind tunnel – is nicknamed ‘the Israeli stomp’.

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