Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (77 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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For psy-trance fans, Goa and all the other far-flung destinations that have superceded it, represent a fantasy of taking a permanent vacation from Western industrial reality in the mystic Orient. It’s psychedelic tourism, basically. And this is the subculture’s major ideological blind spot. Despite the Gaia-awareness and the fluoro imagery of Hindu goddesses like Shiva and Ganesh, places like Bali, Nepal and Thailand really serve as exotic backdrops to hi-tech raving, with the added attraction of being places you can live very cheaply and where drugs are inexpensive and readily available. There is also some truth to the widespread ‘trustafarian’ stereotype that identifies psy-trance with the upper middle class. Possibly it’s the sheer cost factor of taking plane trips across the globe that makes it a sport of the well off, or perhaps it’s a class-inflected generational rebellion: the children of money taking trips outside the parental culture of ambition and acquisition, looking for something both spiritual and earthy. Despite all this, there remains something inspiring about the willingness of psy-trance devotees to travel long distances and deal with the absence of Western comforts and conveniences. It’s this dedication to adventure that makes psychedelic trance a true underground, whereas its mainstream counterpart is ultimately an anti-culture.
I start to understand this in the last hours of the El Cuco festival. The grey predawn light is demystifying, stripping the site of its silvered full-moon enchantment and revealing what looks disconcertingly like a bulldozed clearing in the deforested Amazonian jungle. But it’s eerie, too, like that 7 a.m. moment in nightclubs when the lights come up and you can see the hardcore survivors – spent, zombie-eyed, yet still manic. There’s a man in fluorescent warpaint and black loon pants, stomping back and forth across the dance floor in a lurching frenzy, his eyes black and lost. There’s a Dalai Lama lookalike kneeling in the lotus position and beseeching the heavens with outstretched arms, and a dainty Japanese waif frozen still, lost in the music, utterly freaked. Dawn is peeking through the treetops, but X-Dream are still in full-on darkside mode, grinding out the harshest sounds of the entire weekend, barely more than a vast blare of distorted kick drum and pummelling bass. A willowy girl with waist-length blonde hair, cobwebby lace shawl and bell-bottoms starts to rock out dementedly, stamping her feet and flailing her arms – her eyes narrowed to burning slits of intensity, her mouth a snarl of joy. She grabs her headscarf-wearing friend by the hand and the two hippie chicks caper and prance in a full circuit around the dance floor, like Greek maenads celebrating the rites of Pan. The look on the blonde’s face explains everything, a strange mix of fiery-eyed glee, defiance and triumph. It’s the ‘we-made-it’ look – not just ‘we made it through the night’, but ‘we made this adventure, this scene, for ourselves.’
TWENTY
 
TWO STEPS BEYOND
 
UK GARAGE AND
2STEP
 
London: late summer, 2000. Step into Twice As Nice, a Sunday-night club in the dead centre of the city and it’s like the ‘in da club’ sequence of an R & B video. Everywhere you look there’s Brandys from Brixton, Beyonces from Bethnal Green, Sisquos from Stepney. And look, there’s Aaliyah – the real one, cavorting on the gigantic video screen that shows non-stop R & B videos. Make your way through the sharply dressed press of flesh, and you find the main dance floor bumping ’n’ flexing to the sound called 2step garage. The name distantly originates from the legendary Manhattan club the Paradise Garage and the tradition of soulful house music it (posthumously) inspired. But sonically 2step is a bastard child rather than a purist descendant. It’s a mongrel mishmash of influences – Timbaland-style R & B’s twitchy beats, jungle’s booming bass, house’s slinky synth-riffs, dancehall’s raucous MC jabber, and still more. After two years hatching in London’s dance underground, 2step has the UK pop charts locked down, with artists like Artful Dodger and Sweet Female Attitude busting into the Top Five all through the year 2000. Yet the sound has paradoxically remained an underground pirate radio-driven sound even as it dominates the mainstream.
Like every Sunday, Twice As Nice is ‘a roadblock, off the hook’, as the MC boasts. People flock there to be seen as much as to wind down after a weekend’s clubbing at other UK garage hot spots. Look, there’s drum-and-bass icon Goldie in the DJ booth ostentatiously hugging Spoony from The Dreem Teem, a trio of leading garage DJs. Goldie’s no fool, he knows that jungle is no longer runnin’ t’ings on the streets of London town. The producer’s trademark teeth aren’t the only glittering things at Twice As Nice. Everybody’s rolling with gold – bracelets, rings, necklaces, hoop earrings. Women sport ice-encrusted chokers and diamond-twinkling cheek studs. Bad boys stride through brandishing Moët bottles, little towers of plastic champagne flutes stuck on the bottle neck. Twice As Nice is
incandescent
with money. The dry-cleaning bills alone must run into thousands. ‘We bubblin’ criss,’ chants the MC, using a Jamaican patois term that means shiny/ slick/sharp-dressed to simultaneously praise Spoony’s mixing and celebrate the ghetto fabulous crowd.
Like most UK garage clubs, Twice As Nice bans trainers, jeans, baseball caps. Scene outsiders often criticize the dress code as elitist. Defenders of the policy argue that it’s good to encourage people to make an effort, and that the dress code keeps trouble out. Actually, the only people deterred by the garage veto on trainers and jeans are scruffy but harmless white college kids. And everybody knows that gangstas like to dress expensive – which is why there are metal detectors on Twice As Nice’s doors.
Compared with the early days of the scene, when the soundtrack was ‘speed garage’, the designer-label flaunting is more subtle – discreet Versace logos on the back of the collar, rather than pants covered with the word Moschino or ‘Dolce & Gabbana Is Life’ T-shirts. The bodies underneath the costly clothes have been hard-earned too – one muscle boy sports a condom-tight pink vinyl T-shirt that looks like it’s been sprayed on. Everybody is immaculately groomed and sweatlessly cool; some guys even carry handkerchiefs to dab away any perspiration. Then there’re the real stylists – Jamaican rude boys in bowler hats or even dove-grey morning dress, like they’ve come straight from a wedding; dancehall queens in diamond-brimmed Stetsons and glitterball-like frocks made entirely from dazzling decals. The men purse their lips disdainfully into a scowl-sneer, as if some appalling affront to taste and decorum has been perpetrated (could it be my trousers?). The women have perfected a blank gaze of hauteur, occasionally shattered by sunburst smiles when the DJ drops a ‘ladies tune’ like B15 Project’s ‘Girls Like This’.
According to London folklore, the garage scene spawned itself from the jungle scene when the women left the dance floor en masse, bored by the harsh, tuneless dead end that drum and bass had driven itself down with the techstep sound of No U Turn et al. The girls sought refuge in the smaller garage room that most jungle raves offered, where the music was soulful, sensual and more manageably groovy at 130 b.p.m. rather than jungle’s frantic 170 b.p.m. It was like a giant light bulb clicked on above the collective head of London’s jungle massive: no women on the floor = no vibe. In 1997, virtually every pirate radio station in the city switched from jungle to speed garage. Since then the refrain ‘the girls love this tune’ – typically uttered by record-store assistants as a recommendation, not a diss – has functioned as a self-policing mechanism, keeping the scene on track. Garage’s deference to the ‘ladies massive’, to the female demand for singalong choruses, diva vocals, and wind-your-waist rhythms suitable for close dancing with your partner (or somebody else’s partner), has kept the music deliciously poppy even in its most underground form. In 1998 – 9, as the stop-start, push-me/pull-you 2step style evolved out of pumping four-to-the-floor speed garage, it really felt like garage was a new form of chartpop in exile, just biding its time until the inevitable mainstream breakthrough.
Although there are lots of inputs in the 2step mix, the style really achieved self-definition as a London-specific spin on the stuttering kick-drums template built by R & B producer Timbaland on tracks for Missy Elliott, Aaliyah, Jay-Z and many more. Timbaland’s innovations opened up a whole new ‘BeatGeist’ for American R & B and hip hop, as his ideas were creatively plagiarized by producers like She’kspere (TLC, Destiny’s Child) and became hegemonic across urban radio in America. 2step was UK rave culture recognizing and assimilating the cyborg funk of this nu-R & B, saying ‘yeah, we’ll ’ave this, ta very much.’
In America, there was a famous advertising campaign for pork that disingenuously described it as ‘the Other White Meat’. Someone could, much more honestly, do the exact same for Aaliyah, Missy and the rest of the Timbaland stable: sell it as the Other Electronic Music, to experimental techno connoisseurs who reckon weirdy-beardy types like Squarepusher are actually doing anything original rhythmically. At its utmost, R & B can be as denatured and borderline dysfunctional as the most abstract, arty electronica from Cologne. It figures that UK garage – a scene largely composed of ex-junglists – would dig the Timbaland sound, as both his style of R & B and jungle uses rhythmic patterns as melodic hooks. Jungle, Timbaland-style R & B and 2step all have a breakbeat aesthetic: they break up the even flow of four-to-the-floor rhythm (as in pumping house and traditional garage, including speed garage), riddling the groove with hesitations, erotically teasing and tantalizing gaps. Drum and bass slowed to a languorous frenzy, 2step is lovers’ jungle. But the style is rapaciously omnivorous, stealing ideas from all over the genrescape: nu-R & B’s clusters of rapid-fire kicks, jungle-style micro-breakbeats, house-influenced hi-hats and synth-vamps, electro’s Roland 808 bass-boom, reggae’s slinky skank. Hearing these intricately programmed tracks is like moving through a mesh of pointillistic percussion, your body buffeted and flexed every which way by cross-rhythms and hyper-syncopations. On tracks like Leee John’s ‘Your Mind, Your Body, Your Soul’, the drums are so digitally texturized it’s as if the whole track’s made from glossy fabric that crackles, crinkles and kinks with each percussive impact.
After Timbaland’s rhythmatic influence kicked in, the next stage of interface between UK rave culture and US urban music took the form of a massive spate of bootleg ‘garage’ versions of R & B hits, like the Architechs’s helium-vocalled revamp of Brandy & Monica’s ‘The Boy Is Mine’, a tune that ruled London through most of 1999. Using timestretching to speed up the vocals so that they fit 2step’s brisker tempo, Architechs made the duetting divas sound like ghosts of themselves, wavery and mirage-like. They also added crowd noises ‘to make it feel like a contest between Brandy & Monica’, Architechs’s City told me. ‘We wanted it to sound like a real soundclash with the crowd dividing its support between the two girls.’ Having failed to interest Brandy’s UK record company EastWest in the idea of releasing the remix officially, Architechs put it out as a white-label bootleg. Played incessantly on the pirates, ‘B & M Remix’ eventually sold 20,000 copies – a staggering feat, given that regular record stores won’t stock bootlegs and the record was only available via London specialist stores. This craze for illegal remixes even transformed Whitney Houston into a London underground star – there were around ten different garage bootlegs of ‘It Ain’t Right, But It’s Okay’. Producer Zed Bias released a number of illicit remixes at the height of the bootleg mania, and says that he has it ‘on good authority’ from major label people that, far from being annoyed by the illegal bootlegs, ‘they
want us
to do unofficial remixes’ – partly because street buzz is a form of promotion and partly ‘on the off chance that a slamming bootleg comes out which they can pick up cheap. See, if they didn’t want us to do the bootlegs, they wouldn’t put the a cappellas on the 12-inches.’
Another R & B influence on 2step is the obsession with ‘vocal science’. Coined by dance pundit Anindya ‘Bat’ Bhattacharyya, vocal science refers to the techniques of processing vocal samples that 2step producers deploy to such intoxicating results. Going back to the harmony group SWV in the early nineties, R & B producers have long used technology to make the voice sound unnaturally bright, sweet and ‘perfect’ – mostly recently with the pitch-correcting device known as Autotuner, which can be misused to make a voice momentarily glisten with an angelic perfection that is eerily posthuman. 2step producers similarly use effects such as phasing to create a kind of cyborg-melisma, making the voice scintillate, twinkle or tremble. Updating the diva-sampling techniques of jungle, 2step producers micro-edit vocals into staccato riffs, treating ‘human soul’ as plasmatic material to vivisect and rhythmatize. In a weird way, it’s the more subtle deployments of these techniques that are most disconcerting (like the ecstatic shiver-stutter woven electronically into the word ‘re-e-e-mix’ on Artful Dodger’s remix of Craig David’s already ultra-warbly vocal on ‘Fill Me In’). It’s unnerving because the line between the human and the artificial isn’t so clearly defined and because the biomechanical bliss it incarnates is so seductive.

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