Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (83 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Electro’s funk is dependent on the same drum machine that underpinned early hip hop, the Roland 808. Alongside its distinctive snare, hi-hat, clave and rimshot sounds, the 808 is most famous for the sub-bass rumble produced by detuning the kick drum – a smudged, red-zone undertow that still quakes beneath contemporary regional rap styles like Miami Bass and New Orleans Bounce. The nouveau electro artists of the late nineties used the 808 to create stabbing, percussive basslines (BOOM! Bup-bup ba-BOOM!) which syncopated with the intricate drum patterns and made the dancer bump ’n’ grind rather than stomp in strict time, techno-style. These 808 B-lines also connected the new electro with the sleazy underworld of ghetto tech, the booty-shaking soundtrack for dancers at strip bars. Hugely popular with Michigan’s black working class, ghetto tech’s lewd bump ’n’ grind is a world away from the refined atmosphere of Detroit techno and its satellite scenes from Berlin to London. Yet in Detroit itself, the bangin’ porno-electro of ghetto tech like DJ Assault vastly outsells the likes of Stacy Pullen. Where Detroit techno seeks to transcend the earth(l)y plane, ghetto tech prefers base materialism (at degree zero, all the tracks are about the female posterior) to spirituality, profanity to profundity.
Alongside syncopation and bass, the third aspect to electro’s appeal to fatigued techno-heads was its melodic content. As Gillen puts it, by the mid-nineties techno was more about
tones
than
tunes
: minimal techno, especially, was an anorectic style that stripped itself down to ‘just rhythm and texture’. Bored by its austerity, producers started harking back to the pocket-calculator jingles of electro and the aching romanticism of eighties synthpop, with its soaring tunes and ‘intricate interlocking keyboard lines’. The decisive turning point that pointed ahead to the eighties-inspired resurgence of nu-wave, though, was the return of vocals. The first neo-electro had been almost entirely instrumental (give or take the odd terse one- or two-word vocoderized robot chant), and thus still compatible with a minimal techno vibe. The real break with techno came with the blatant pop appeal (and pop ambition) of 1998’s ‘Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass’ by I-f, an artist from Den Haag in Holland. This track featured a vocoderized voice singing an actual honest-to-goodness tune. Ersatz Audio – home base for neo-electro pioneers Le Car and Adult. – signposted this major shift in techno sensibility with their EP ‘Oral-Alio: A History of Tomorrow’. This medley of voice-based, eighties-flavoured synthpop songs was intended as a mini-manifesto, a critique of techno’s ‘language barrier – [its] fear, or reluctance, to incorporate vocals’. But this rediscovery of vocals, melody and lyrics, was actually going on across the dance-culture spectrum, from Green Velvet’s black-humorous monologues to The Horrorist’s folk tales for ravers and 2step’s vocal science.
tones
than
tunes
: minimal techno, especially, was an anorectic style that stripped itself down to ‘just rhythm and texture’. Bored by its austerity, producers started harking back to the pocket-calculator jingles of electro and the aching romanticism of eighties synthpop, with its soaring tunes and ‘intricate interlocking keyboard lines’. The decisive turning point that pointed ahead to the eighties-inspired resurgence of nu-wave, though, was the return of vocals. The first neo-electro had been almost entirely instrumental (give or take the odd terse one- or two-word vocoderized robot chant), and thus still compatible with a minimal techno vibe. The real break with techno came with the blatant pop appeal (and pop ambition) of 1998’s ‘Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass’ by I-f, an artist from Den Haag in Holland. This track featured a vocoderized voice singing an actual honest-to-goodness tune. Ersatz Audio – home base for neo-electro pioneers Le Car and Adult. – signposted this major shift in techno sensibility with their EP ‘Oral-Alio: A History of Tomorrow’. This medley of voice-based, eighties-flavoured synthpop songs was intended as a mini-manifesto, a critique of techno’s ‘language barrier – [its] fear, or reluctance, to incorporate vocals’. But this rediscovery of vocals, melody and lyrics, was actually going on across the dance-culture spectrum, from Green Velvet’s black-humorous monologues to The Horrorist’s folk tales for ravers and 2step’s vocal science.
What the nu-wave contingent of I-f and Adult. specifically were doing was rolling the history of techno back all the way to its very dawn: its bizarre, still not quite fathomable origins as a Black American imitation of English synthpop. ‘I always get a kick when people say the first “techno” record was Cybotron’s “Alleys Of Your Mind”,’ says Adam Lee Miller of Adult. ‘That 7-inch single was 1981. To me, it was just a New Wave record. It sounds particularly close to “Mr X” by Ultravox. I think people called it techno simply because Juan Atkins was black.’
This seems a good point at which to ponder: when we listen to something and identify it as ‘eighties’, what exactly are we responding to? What is the ‘eighties’-ness in this music? It’s an aggregate of attributes (coldness and cleanness of synth-sound, squareness and stiffness of groove and rhythm) and absences (obvious example: the absence of R & B influences, jazziness, ‘blackness’ of feel, makes the music sound European). There are specific hallmarks that seem to evoke the early eighties: the arpeggiated sixteenth-note basslines (endemic in eighties music from New Order to Italo-Disco to industrial groups like Nitzer Ebb), the dispassionate sung-spoken monologues on records like Miss Kittin’s ‘Frank Sinatra’, and the android-like vocoderized vocals.
Vocoder-mania is a curious quirk of today’s electropop vogue: it’s become the privileged signifier of ‘eighties’, but it wasn’t actually
that
popular in the real eighties, give or take the odd Telex or Kraftwerk record or Giorgio Moroder solo album. In fact, from Divine and Depeche Mode to The Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres, the hallmark of first-wave synthpop was the deeply human and often distinctly fallible singing on the records – Marc Almond’s torrid, pitch-erratic vocals in Soft Cell being a classic example, not forgetting the slightly unwieldy baritones of Dave Gahan and Phil Oakey, and the gauche ’n’ gawky singing of the girls in The Human League. It’s also hard to work out what the Miss Kittin-style bored-rich-girl monotone is referencing (Grace Jones circa ‘Warm Leatherette’ and ‘Private Life’? Forgotten electronic ice-queens like Gina X or Regine Fetet of Hardcorps?). Both the deadpan vocal and vocoder trends show the way that retro movements always reinvent and fictionalize the past. Even when they try hard to be meticulously faithful and purist, they inevitably amplify certain aspects and suppress others.
that
popular in the real eighties, give or take the odd Telex or Kraftwerk record or Giorgio Moroder solo album. In fact, from Divine and Depeche Mode to The Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres, the hallmark of first-wave synthpop was the deeply human and often distinctly fallible singing on the records – Marc Almond’s torrid, pitch-erratic vocals in Soft Cell being a classic example, not forgetting the slightly unwieldy baritones of Dave Gahan and Phil Oakey, and the gauche ’n’ gawky singing of the girls in The Human League. It’s also hard to work out what the Miss Kittin-style bored-rich-girl monotone is referencing (Grace Jones circa ‘Warm Leatherette’ and ‘Private Life’? Forgotten electronic ice-queens like Gina X or Regine Fetet of Hardcorps?). Both the deadpan vocal and vocoder trends show the way that retro movements always reinvent and fictionalize the past. Even when they try hard to be meticulously faithful and purist, they inevitably amplify certain aspects and suppress others.
The keyword crystallizing everything simultaneously appealing and problematic about the nu-wave explosion is ‘retro-futurist’, that seemingly self-contradictory concept. Producers are reaching back to recover that lost sense of electronic music as bracingly new, startling, alien (as opposed to what electronic sounds had become by the late nineties – an omnipresent but barely noticeable thread in pop’s fabric). That lost futurity is signposted by stiff mechanistic rhythms and synth-sounds that are cold (meaning deliberately artificial-sounding, not corresponding to traditional acoustic instruments like horns, strings, piano). This ‘machine-music and proud of it’ stance is a dissident gesture in a context where a lot of temporary electronic producers strive for ‘warmth’ and ‘musicality’, prizing organic textures like the Rhodes electric piano and using digital technology to simulate hands-on human feel and jazzy swing by programming slight rhythmic imprecisions. Renouncing that played-not-programmed feel of suppleness and subtlety, nu-wave electro ‘flaunts its synthetic nature’, as Warren Fischer of Fischerspooner put it.
The nu-wave’s coldness isn’t just sonic, though: it relates to the emotional spectrum of the music, which encompasses numbness, alienation, neurosis, isolation. Lyrically, songs echo the man-machine imagery and fears about technology’s dehumanizing and controlling effects that pervaded the first wave of electropop: early John Foxx-fronted Ultravox, Gary Numan, The Normal (aka Daniel Miller of Mute Records). The Normal’s 1978 single ‘Warm Leatherette’ is a particularly seminal reference point and was covered by Chicks On Speed in the early years of the electro revival. Inspired by J. G. Ballard’s novel
Crash
, it’s a catchy ditty about the eroticism of car accidents: ‘The handbrake penetrates your thigh/Quick, let’s make love before you die.’ Its flip side ‘TV OD’, about a cathode-ray junkie who sticks the aerial into his veins, anticipated David Cronenberg movies like
Videodrome
with their grisly meshing of the organic and machinic.
Crash
, it’s a catchy ditty about the eroticism of car accidents: ‘The handbrake penetrates your thigh/Quick, let’s make love before you die.’ Its flip side ‘TV OD’, about a cathode-ray junkie who sticks the aerial into his veins, anticipated David Cronenberg movies like
Videodrome
with their grisly meshing of the organic and machinic.
Of all the nu-wavers, Adult. have most zealously pursued the themes of anomie and modernity. On songs like ‘Human Wreck’, ‘Lack of Comfort’, ‘Silent Property’ and ‘Dispassionate Furniture’ the sonic textures – sterile yet abject – conjure a mood of desolate decadence: lost souls stranded in sleek luxury, with commodity fetishes and kinky machines as their only companions. Dopplereffekt were also pioneers here, with songs like ‘Porno Actress’ and ‘Plastiphilia’ evoking voyeurism and perversion, deflections of desire from its ‘natural’ course. The frigid pulsations of ‘Porno Actress’ suggest love action so emotionally numb, the protagonists get freezer-burn when they fuck.
Dopplereffekt play it dead straight, but with most of the nu-wave groups, the hollow-inside pose is sluiced through a fair amount of campy humour. A key reference point for the Berliniamsburg milieu is the 1982 cult movie
Liquid Sky
, a bizarre, low budget science-fiction film set in downtown New York, where nihilistic death-tripping drug fiends and fashion freaks are preyed on by aliens. Adult. covered ‘Me And My Rhythm Box’, a song sung in a
Liquid Sky
nightclub scene by a performance artist. ‘If there’s one movie that really identifies this whole new look that you get at Berliniamsburg and the As Four parties, it’s
Liquid Sky
,’ says Larry Tee. ’Because the fashion in that film is so
wrong
. It wasn’t even eighties style, it was their idea of futuristic fashion. That film is the bad mistake of the eighties, so horrible, yet so weirdly watchable now.’
Liquid Sky
, a bizarre, low budget science-fiction film set in downtown New York, where nihilistic death-tripping drug fiends and fashion freaks are preyed on by aliens. Adult. covered ‘Me And My Rhythm Box’, a song sung in a
Liquid Sky
nightclub scene by a performance artist. ‘If there’s one movie that really identifies this whole new look that you get at Berliniamsburg and the As Four parties, it’s
Liquid Sky
,’ says Larry Tee. ’Because the fashion in that film is so
wrong
. It wasn’t even eighties style, it was their idea of futuristic fashion. That film is the bad mistake of the eighties, so horrible, yet so weirdly watchable now.’
What
Liquid Sky
tapped into, and what the whole electroclash/nu-wave sensibility reactivates, is a futuristic update of late nineteenth-century decadence à la Oscar Wilde and
Against Nature
, J. K. Huymans’s late nineteenth century novel about a dandy aristocrat who dedicates himself to artifice and monstrosity. Wilde declared that sincerity was the enemy of art, and in this spirit electroclash rejects wholesome authenticity in favour of all things synthetic and fake. The motto: ‘Keep it
un
real.’ The Electroclash Festival celebrated self-reinvention and artifice – from the porno-punk theatrics of Peaches to the performance art spectacle staged by Fischerspooner, with their costume changes, choreographed routines, props and backdrops, and cast of more than ten performers. Fischerspooner pitched themselves as the vanguard of a New Pretentiousness movement. ‘Our goal is to indulge and embrace the superficial and not to get too wrapped up in issues of integrity,’ frontman Casey Spooner said. ‘We’re completely, unabashedly and absolutely prepared to say that we’re pretentious and superficial.’ Or as My Robot Friend sing it on ‘The Fake’, another Berliniamsburg anthem, ‘We are the fake/No hearts for you to break/ The fake machines/Pretend to live on TV screens.’
Liquid Sky
tapped into, and what the whole electroclash/nu-wave sensibility reactivates, is a futuristic update of late nineteenth-century decadence à la Oscar Wilde and
Against Nature
, J. K. Huymans’s late nineteenth century novel about a dandy aristocrat who dedicates himself to artifice and monstrosity. Wilde declared that sincerity was the enemy of art, and in this spirit electroclash rejects wholesome authenticity in favour of all things synthetic and fake. The motto: ‘Keep it
un
real.’ The Electroclash Festival celebrated self-reinvention and artifice – from the porno-punk theatrics of Peaches to the performance art spectacle staged by Fischerspooner, with their costume changes, choreographed routines, props and backdrops, and cast of more than ten performers. Fischerspooner pitched themselves as the vanguard of a New Pretentiousness movement. ‘Our goal is to indulge and embrace the superficial and not to get too wrapped up in issues of integrity,’ frontman Casey Spooner said. ‘We’re completely, unabashedly and absolutely prepared to say that we’re pretentious and superficial.’ Or as My Robot Friend sing it on ‘The Fake’, another Berliniamsburg anthem, ‘We are the fake/No hearts for you to break/ The fake machines/Pretend to live on TV screens.’
If post-rave club culture is organized around Ecstasy-emotions – empathy, cuddly sentimentality, mass fervour – nu-wave is predicated on removing the Ecstasy vibe (by definition, uncool – all about warmth and flow). Initially, it’s refreshing to enter a club like Berliniamsburg, where the whole night isn’t organized around a monolithic mood-sensation (Ecstasy). Not that it’s necessarily a temple to clean living or anything like that. The venue Luxx is round the corner from a notorious spot for copping cocaine. Larry Tee says that if there’s a drug vector to the scene, ‘It’s circled back to the old disco drugs of the seventies, minus the Quaaludes.’ The shift to ego-burnishing powders is signposted by tunes like Vitalic’s ‘You Prefer Cocaine’ or Kittin & Hacker’s ‘Frank Sinatra’ with its allusion to ‘sniffing in the VIP area’. Australian dance critic Tim Finney described DJ Hell as ‘a cocaine producer. It’s all treble sounds and big personalities. International Deejay Gigolos are trying to engage with a certain experience of dancing as a culture that was all about elitism and snootiness and music-as-fashion versus music-as-music.’
Nu-wave rewinds to the pre-E era when clubbing was all about clique-ishness and ‘the beautiful people’: an aristocracy of larger than life characters dedicated to standing out from the faceless herd of nonentities. ‘I am legendary/You are not’ declaims the chorus of Hungry Wives’ ‘It’s Over’. Kittin & Hacker’s ‘Frank Sinatra’ is half satire, half celebration of the velvet-rope superiority complex of the rich and famous. Nu-wave is all about the cold glitter of glamour’s impenetrable surfaces. Its aura of hierarchical hauteur connects back to the gay New York tradition of vogueing, with its fashion-magazine-derived imagery and rampant Europhilia. Larry Tee’s many exploits include co-writing the hit song ‘Supermodel’ for transvestite star RuPaul. In the early nineties, he was also involved in the superfreaky New York clubland milieu centred around the notorious Michael Alig, America’s answer to Leigh Bowery. From early eighties New Romantics at Blitz to the grotesques and poseurs at Bowery’s Taboo, from Alig’s decadent Limelight scene to the cross-dressing queens of vogueing, there’s a common ethos that is pure glam rock: intensely hierarchical, fiercely competitive, bitchy as hell. The Berliniamsburg scene is just the latest iteration of this tradition. Tee’s stable of protégés includes performers with movie-star names like Tobell Von Cartier and Sophia La Marr, whose Berliniamsburg favourite ‘Useless’ starts with the regal and deliciously preposterous proclamation: ‘I’m Catherine Deneuve!!!’. Elsewhere in nu-wave, you get imagery of executive lifestyles and jet-set glamour – Kittin & Hacker’s ‘Stock Exchange’, the formal businesswear look and sterile office environments used by Adult. and Ersatz Audio in their artwork. This echoes the imagery of early eighties groups like Heaven 17, whose sleeve for 1981’s
Penthouse and Pavement
depicted the group as corporate executives discussing business plans and negotiating deals on the telephone.
Penthouse and Pavement
depicted the group as corporate executives discussing business plans and negotiating deals on the telephone.
In reaching back to the early eighties, nu-wave is also looking to a time when rock and club culture were closer and had a lively conversation with each other. This explains why Larry Tee will praise Adult.’s version of ‘Me And My Rhythm Box’ as ‘just so
shattered
and so rock ’n’ roll’ and why he stresses how he’ll throw some rock ’n’ roll into the mix during his Berliniamsburg DJ sets, tunes like Andrew W. K.’s ‘Party ’Til You Puke’. It’s why My Robot Friend’s ‘Fake’ wields the promise/threat ‘our rock ’n’ roll will kill you dead.’ And it’s why International Deejay Gigolos use the famous photograph of Sid Vicious ironically flexing his puny arm muscles and wearing McLaren and Westwood’s outrageous ‘two cowboys with their cocks hanging out’ T-shirt. Groups like Le Tigre and Peaches, who come from a more punky riot grrl background, are big on the scene. Fronted by grrl icon Kathleen Hanna, Le Tigre is New Wavey dance-pop with a lo-tech garage punk aesthetic, all spiky riffs and feminist sloganeering, while for all her brain-bashing techno beats Peaches has more in common with Joan Jett, Billy Idol, or Suicide singer Alan Vega than anyone in dance culture. In an echo of punk, attitude and charisma are considered more important than production finesse or beat-science. There’s a nostalgia for a time when pop was full of freaks and weirdos, people like Prince or Boy George.
shattered
and so rock ’n’ roll’ and why he stresses how he’ll throw some rock ’n’ roll into the mix during his Berliniamsburg DJ sets, tunes like Andrew W. K.’s ‘Party ’Til You Puke’. It’s why My Robot Friend’s ‘Fake’ wields the promise/threat ‘our rock ’n’ roll will kill you dead.’ And it’s why International Deejay Gigolos use the famous photograph of Sid Vicious ironically flexing his puny arm muscles and wearing McLaren and Westwood’s outrageous ‘two cowboys with their cocks hanging out’ T-shirt. Groups like Le Tigre and Peaches, who come from a more punky riot grrl background, are big on the scene. Fronted by grrl icon Kathleen Hanna, Le Tigre is New Wavey dance-pop with a lo-tech garage punk aesthetic, all spiky riffs and feminist sloganeering, while for all her brain-bashing techno beats Peaches has more in common with Joan Jett, Billy Idol, or Suicide singer Alan Vega than anyone in dance culture. In an echo of punk, attitude and charisma are considered more important than production finesse or beat-science. There’s a nostalgia for a time when pop was full of freaks and weirdos, people like Prince or Boy George.
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