Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (80 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
6.31Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
The etymological root of ‘educate’ is ‘lead’. The ‘good’ DJ is shepherd to an audience that is implicitly posited as a flock of dangerously impressionable and easily impressed sheep. The ‘bad DJ’ is, paradoxically, the crowd-pleaser, the mercenary who leads the flock astray by only giving them what they already love (anthems). In his suggestive essay ‘The Booth, the Floor and the Wall: Dance Music and the Fear of Falling’, Will Straw pinpoints a tension in DJ culture between populism and connoisseurship. Pander to the crowd’s will too much and you’ll get the reputation of being a ‘cheesy’ DJ. But play only ‘deep’ music and you’ll find yourself playing to a semi-deserted dance floor, sparsely populated by cognoscenti – the sort of people too cool to emit the kind of fervour that creates a killer vibe. Noting that DJs are notorious for never dancing, Straw argues that being ‘hip’ is cerebral, about being in possession of disembodied knowledge, and has nothing to do with the conventional connotations of the word ‘hip’ (hip-shaking, sexuality). The DJ in his booth and his head-nodding acolytes clinging to the club walls are contrasted with the implicitly feminine abandon and hysteria of the dance floor proper. The DJ labours to elicit uncontrolled physical responses that he, as a member of the connoisseur class, disdains and denies himself. He is the maestro, seducing and arousing the ‘female’ crowd, guiding it through a multi-orgasmic frenzy.
Although female DJs like Mrs Wood, DJ Rap, Lisa Lashes and Sandra Collins achieved high profiles in their respective scenes, DJ culture remains distinctly masculine. The presence of women on the dance floor is not reflected by the proportion of women in the DJ booth. The gender imbalance is, if anything, even worse when it comes to the production of techno, despite the ‘white collar’ nature of electronic music (its reliance on computing skills that aren’t physically taxing, and that are transferable from information-based professions in which women are strongly represented). Partly this can be attributed to the homosocial nature of techno: tricks of the trade get passed down from mentors to male acolytes. Partly it’s because DJing and sample-based music go hand in hand with an obsessive ‘trainspotter’ mentality: the amassing of huge collections of records, the accumulation of exhaustive and arcane information about labels, producers and auteurs, the fetishization of particular models of music-making technology. Collecting goes hand in hand with the music-critical discourses that construct canons and genealogies.
Like criticism itself, DJing depends on a certain arrogance, a propensity for characterizing oneself as an
authority
(in both the knowledge and leadership senses). As well as seeing themselves as educators, DJs often style themselves as soldiers crusading for a cause. Certain DJs become identified with a particular sound or subgenre – Jeff Mills and minimal techno, Grooverider for the dark, techy strain within drum and bass – and function as the ambassadors and public figureheads for a whole community of producers. Known as the Godfather, Grooverider has a stable of ‘boys’ who make tracks with his vibe in mind and offer them to the DJ in DAT form. For a long period, Groove has the exclusive right to play these prerelease tunes, which he will get pressed up at his own expense as ‘dubplates’ (10-inch metal acetates that last for about thirty plays before wearing out). Sometimes producers talk of being inspired by a particular DJ’s sensibility or technical style (Randall’s ‘double impact’ mixing at AWOL, for instance) and rushing home from a gig to make a track. This peculiar deferential attitude and the displacement of creativity from the artist to the turntable selector can sometimes be hard to fathom. Far from dismantling the rock-star system in favour of a radically democratic anonymity, dance culture has shifted the impulse to worship onto the DJ-as-virtuoso. The DJ-as-godstar phenomenon has a lot to do with Ecstasy. The drug generates overwhelming emotions and sensations, plus a peculiar will-to-believe, that must be given a focus. Just as it’s possible to fall in love with someone you’ve only just met while under the influence of E, similarly that hyperemotional charge rubs off on the DJ, who seems to have a lot to do with the feelings coursing through your nervous system. This is not to deny the importance of the intuitive sense of what an audience wants to feel, where it wants to go, that experienced DJs develop. But in the throes of Ecstasy, it can feel like the DJ is actually reading the crowd-mind, playing the dancers’
bodies.
authority
(in both the knowledge and leadership senses). As well as seeing themselves as educators, DJs often style themselves as soldiers crusading for a cause. Certain DJs become identified with a particular sound or subgenre – Jeff Mills and minimal techno, Grooverider for the dark, techy strain within drum and bass – and function as the ambassadors and public figureheads for a whole community of producers. Known as the Godfather, Grooverider has a stable of ‘boys’ who make tracks with his vibe in mind and offer them to the DJ in DAT form. For a long period, Groove has the exclusive right to play these prerelease tunes, which he will get pressed up at his own expense as ‘dubplates’ (10-inch metal acetates that last for about thirty plays before wearing out). Sometimes producers talk of being inspired by a particular DJ’s sensibility or technical style (Randall’s ‘double impact’ mixing at AWOL, for instance) and rushing home from a gig to make a track. This peculiar deferential attitude and the displacement of creativity from the artist to the turntable selector can sometimes be hard to fathom. Far from dismantling the rock-star system in favour of a radically democratic anonymity, dance culture has shifted the impulse to worship onto the DJ-as-virtuoso. The DJ-as-godstar phenomenon has a lot to do with Ecstasy. The drug generates overwhelming emotions and sensations, plus a peculiar will-to-believe, that must be given a focus. Just as it’s possible to fall in love with someone you’ve only just met while under the influence of E, similarly that hyperemotional charge rubs off on the DJ, who seems to have a lot to do with the feelings coursing through your nervous system. This is not to deny the importance of the intuitive sense of what an audience wants to feel, where it wants to go, that experienced DJs develop. But in the throes of Ecstasy, it can feel like the DJ is actually reading the crowd-mind, playing the dancers’
bodies.
Legendary DJs owe their godlike status in part to being at the right place at the right time. Most of Britain’s ruling DJs – Oakenfold, Sasha, Carl Cox, Fabio and Grooverider – began their career in the thick of the 1988 – 90 acid house/Madchester explosion. By the early nineties, the network of commercial raves and rave-style big-room clubs had created a ‘guest DJ circuit’ with the leading DJs travelling up and down the country. In pre-rave days, DJs tended to have residencies, regular club nights. But now they became nomadic guns for hire, earning fat fees for performing short sets on bills crammed with other stellar DJs. Smaller clubs maintained loyal followings purely through their vibe, but the big-capacity ‘superclubs’ needed the drawing power of big-name jocks and were prepared to cough up the money. By the mid to late-nineties, Britain’s first-division DJs – Sasha, Jeremy Healey, Pete Tong, Judge Jules, Tall Paul – could charge fees in the region of £2,000 to £5,000 for a two- or three-hour set. These celebrity DJs could afford to keep a driver on salary to shuttle them between gigs and maybe even another assistant just to lug the record boxes. Factor in half a dozen lucrative gigs over the course of a three-day weekend, plus midweek sets, excursions to Europe or America, the rise of dance-music festivals like Tribal Gathering, and the tripling of fees at New Year’s Eve, and you’re talking about certain DJs getting close to being millionaires, just for playing other people’s records. In 1999, the
Guinness Book of Records
identified Paul Oakenfold as the world’s most successful DJ, earning £728,000 purely from his record spinning.
Guinness Book of Records
identified Paul Oakenfold as the world’s most successful DJ, earning £728,000 purely from his record spinning.
Successful DJs get extra income from mix-CDs, remixing singles by pop stars and rock bands, playing shows on radio stations, endorsing products and producing their own tracks. With all the dosh, adulation and fringe benefits (first-class flights and hotel suites, top-brand booze from promoters, free drugs from hangers-on, even DJ groupies), little wonder that the DJ became the new rock star, what EveryBoy dreamt of becoming. ‘Turntables are outselling guitars,’ crowed Oakenfold.
As early as 1996, though, there were stirrings of a backlash against the guest DJ circuit. DJs were getting sick of the travel-induced stress, the burnout caused by sleep deprivation and jet lag. Many were frustrated by having to play brief sets and started to talk wistfully of the old days when they could take audiences on five-hour journeys through peaks and lows. Clubbers, meanwhile, increasingly resented the inflated ticket prices for name DJs who turned up five minutes before they were due on, and who played with no idea of the club’s vibe or what music had been played earlier in the evening, leading to the same handful of current ‘big tunes’ getting played again. Promoters were struggling with the huge fees and expenses demanded by celebrity DJs and their booking agencies. The result was a return to the idea of the residency, albeit in modified form: instead of the resident DJ as someone actually resident in the town in question, these were guest residencies, superstar DJs contractually bound to play a particular club on a regular basis. The most famous example was London-based Paul Oakenfold’s 42-week stint in 1997 at Cream in Liverpool. For Oakenfold, the Saturday-night residency provided both the comfort of routine and the opportunity to take risks: longer sets offered more space for breaking new tunes, while the residency meant a faithful audience prepared to go with the DJ’s flow.
The iconic focus of rave culture, DJs increasingly became a marketing tool for the dance music industry. The phenomenon of the DJ mix-CD evolved out of the trade in mix-tapes. Sold in street markets, specialist record stores and by mail order, the mix-tape is usually of dubious legality, in so far as the producers of the tracks that the DJ mixes together don’t get a penny. The demand for mix-tapes is highest in anonymous hardcore dance scenes where the artists’ profiles are much lower than the DJs’. In early jungle, for instance, mix-tapes were popular because they contained a high proportion of dubplates: tracks to which only certain DJs had access, and which wouldn’t be commercially available for several months. You bought the mix-tape because you knew that you’d get a certain sound from a particular DJ, and the tape would provide all the current hot tunes in that style. The mix-CD simply took this idea and made it legal, by paying royalties to the track’s original producers and record company (paid per minute of usage in the long continuous mix). Most of these mix-CDs, however, are not documents of live mixing using turntables, but digitally woven together in the studio, achieving a pristine perfection but inevitably being somewhat sterile compared to the live DJ experience.
Alongside the mix-CD, the other big earner for the DJ is doing remixes. In the pre-rave eighties, a remix meant an extended, marginally more dance-friendly version of a pop song. Remixing involved hiring a well-known DJ to apply his specialized knowledge to the task of adjusting a song to fit dance-floor requirements, given that records originally mixed for radio or the domestic hi-fi sound tinny compared to records tailored to club sound systems. In the nineties, remixing evolved way beyond its early modest premises. Partly this was as a result of a business strategy of maximum market penetration: instead of just one remix on the flip, dance tracks began to come with a slew of reinterpretations in tow, each designed to appeal to a specific dance scene. These remixes, performed by DJs and producers renowned in those scenes, became increasingly remote from the original in terms of tempo, rhythm and instrumentation, so that only the key riffs or vocal hooks of the original track might be retained. Gradually, remixing became a creative activity in itself; the original track became the pretext and springboard for the remixer to create an almost entirely new piece of music which might contain only tiny shards and ghostly traces of its source. Indeed, when a remixer is hired they are typically provided with only a few sound-files – certain key hooks, riffs, samples – as opposed to the entire original track, because it’s assumed they will construct an entirely new groove. This is basically re-
production
rather than re-
mixing
.
production
rather than re-
mixing
.
In the more experimental zones of electronic dance culture especially, it became the norm for remixers to operate with an almost contemptuous disregard for the material. Yet this is sanctioned by the clients, who delight in the unrecognizability of the end product. This quasi-adversarial attitude of remixer towards remixee was encapsulated in one of the nineties dance scene’s biggest buzzwords: ‘versus’. One of the first examples occurred in 1990 when Mancunian techno crew 808 State transformed avant-garde trumpeter Jon Hassell’s ‘Voiceprint’ into a Latin-tinged house track; the credit ran Jon Hassell vs 808 State. There were sporadic sightings of the term in years to come, but the ‘versus’ trend really blew up in 1995 with Massive Attack vs Mad Professor’s
No Protection
and
The Auteurs vs μ-Ziq
. On the former, UK reggae producer Mad Professor created a dub version of Massive’s
Protection
that many fans and critics considered superior to the original album. Since Massive’s languid trip hop is deeply informed by reggae and sound-system culture, it wasn’t such a huge leap for the band to invite their hero to rework the album. But art-techno boffin Mike Paradinas of
μ
-Ziq and wordy songsmith Luke Haines of The Auteurs came from utterly opposed aesthetic universes, and Paradinas wasn’t shy about revealing his contempt for the material he was dealing with. The result was the merciless mutilation of Haines’s finely honed rock-lit. After this came a deluge of ‘versus’ records, which ranged hugely in the degree of devastation wrought upon the remixee. In some cases –
Tricky vs The Gravediggaz
,
David Holmes ss Alter Ego
– they weren’t remixes but artistic collaborations, or even (
Freaky Chakra vs Single Cell Orchestra
) split albums.
No Protection
and
The Auteurs vs μ-Ziq
. On the former, UK reggae producer Mad Professor created a dub version of Massive’s
Protection
that many fans and critics considered superior to the original album. Since Massive’s languid trip hop is deeply informed by reggae and sound-system culture, it wasn’t such a huge leap for the band to invite their hero to rework the album. But art-techno boffin Mike Paradinas of
μ
-Ziq and wordy songsmith Luke Haines of The Auteurs came from utterly opposed aesthetic universes, and Paradinas wasn’t shy about revealing his contempt for the material he was dealing with. The result was the merciless mutilation of Haines’s finely honed rock-lit. After this came a deluge of ‘versus’ records, which ranged hugely in the degree of devastation wrought upon the remixee. In some cases –
Tricky vs The Gravediggaz
,
David Holmes ss Alter Ego
– they weren’t remixes but artistic collaborations, or even (
Freaky Chakra vs Single Cell Orchestra
) split albums.
The idea of ‘versus’ comes from the reggae tradition of the soundclash, an event where sound systems competed to attract the majority of the audience to its end of the hall or enclosure. ‘In the early days of reggae, you might have
Kilimanjaro vs Jah Love Music
,’ says reggae historian Steve Barrow. The nineties vogue for ‘versus’ chimes in with the widely held belief that dub pioneers like King Tubby, Joe Gibbs and Lee Perry are the founding fathers of today’s science of ‘remixology’. Tubby and Errol Thompson (Joe Gibbs’s engineer) were the first remixers, claims Barrow. ‘At first dubs were just called “instrumentals”, then they started calling them “versions”. Gradually, more effects were added – echo, thunderclap, etc. – and dubs got closer to what we now think of as a remix. By 1982 dub had run its course in Jamaica, it had become a formula.’ But this was just the moment at which dub techniques were being used by New York electrofunk and disco producers, in remixes and vocal-free B-side instrumental versions.
Kilimanjaro vs Jah Love Music
,’ says reggae historian Steve Barrow. The nineties vogue for ‘versus’ chimes in with the widely held belief that dub pioneers like King Tubby, Joe Gibbs and Lee Perry are the founding fathers of today’s science of ‘remixology’. Tubby and Errol Thompson (Joe Gibbs’s engineer) were the first remixers, claims Barrow. ‘At first dubs were just called “instrumentals”, then they started calling them “versions”. Gradually, more effects were added – echo, thunderclap, etc. – and dubs got closer to what we now think of as a remix. By 1982 dub had run its course in Jamaica, it had become a formula.’ But this was just the moment at which dub techniques were being used by New York electrofunk and disco producers, in remixes and vocal-free B-side instrumental versions.
Other books
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
Sand & Snow (Sand & Clay #1.5) by Sarah Robinson
Marley y yo by John Grogan
Afterimage by Helen Humphreys
The Case of the Stinky Socks by Lewis B. Montgomery
Quest for a Killer by Alanna Knight
A Taste of Honey by Jami Alden
Catwatching by Desmond Morris
The Paper Bag Christmas by Kevin Alan Milne
The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita