Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (84 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Within the context of a fatigued dance culture, nu-wave is refreshing, irreverent, a reason to go out again. It is already the Next Big Thing in this corner of the world (electronic music). But there are doubts whether it has what it takes to go all the way and become the next big thing in mainstream pop. Nu-wave is catchy enough to seem poppy in in the melody-deficient world of tracky techno and semi-songful house. But it’s alarming how so many of the genres most memorable tunes are covers: Fischerspooner’s version of Wire’s ‘The 15th’, Tiga’s reinvention of ‘Sunglasses At Night’ (originally by Canadian eighties pop star Corey Hart), WIT’s nu-wave take on New Wave hit ‘Just What I Needed’ by The Cars. On the whole, nu-wave producers seem superior at beats and textures, and rarely as good at songwriting and pop arrangement as their inspirations. It’s not clear if anyone has the sheer pop genius flowing through their veins to write a song like The Human League’s ‘Love Action’ or Numan’s ‘Cars’. The scene’s roots in techno come through in the fact that some of the biggest and best tunes are instrumentals: Legowelt’s impossibly stirring and portentous ‘Disco Rout’, the magnesium majesty of Vitalic’s ‘Poney Part 1’ (as if glamour somehow abandoned its human husks and became a free-floating ectoplasmic incandescence, a brilliantine trembling and aching of the air itself), the cold glimmering beauty of Der Zyklus II’s ‘Elektronisches Zeitech’. Then there’s the question of stellar singers, and whether the scene really has any. Beyond its rather overused and distinctly tired robot-chic, the excessive deployment of vocoder and similar electronic distortion effects suggests this is a convenient ruse for masking the absence of really top-quality vocalists. One exception is Linda Lamb on ‘Hot Room’, whose haggard and baleful grandeur suggests some unholy hybrid of Marianne Faithfull, Nina Hagen and Kim Carnes. Then there’s Solvent’s amazing ‘My Radio’, which uses vocoder not as a robo-gimmick but to communicate an unearthly and angelic sense of awe and devotion.
If these tracks achieve a sonic gloriousness that propels them beyond the ‘retro’ trap, too much nu-wave seems trapped by its tongue-in-chic irony. It feels like there’s some indefinable line that’s yet to be crossed before this genre transcends period pastiche and tackles the challenge of somehow being more about
now
than
then
. Because if it is about then . . . well, the eighties classics remain impossible to beat.
TWENTY-THREE
 
CRISIS AND CONSOLIDATION
 
AN OVERVIEW OF
RAVE CULTURE’S
SECOND DECADE
 
Signing off on
Energy Flash
the first time round, I used the idea of ‘a pause for breath’ to describe the feeling in 1998.
You’ve Come A Long Way Baby
is how Fatboy Slim titled his album of that year, and there was a palpable feeling that rave, having travelled so far so fast, was now stopping to take stock, looking back at the journey to date. But, I argued, the forward surge would resume soon, there were still new frontiers to conquer.
This turned out to be wishful thinking. What happened next is that the scene got even bigger, yet the music stayed stuck, its development arrested. Then the boom turned to bust, while the music underwent a kind of implosion. Replacing revolution with involution, it plunged deep into its own vast accumulated history, working through the sprawling sonic legacy through a series of internal hybrids and subtle renovations.
Dance culture reached its absolute peak in popularity and mass cultural hegemony during the three-year period 1998 – 2000. The reigning genres – big beat, filter disco, fluffy trance – were unabashedly poppy. Tracks by leading artists in those genres – Fatboy Slim and Chemical Brothers with big beat; Stardust, DJ Spiller and Modjo with filter; Paul Van Dyk and ATB in trance – hit the toppermost reaches of the charts across Europe and many other territories in the world. Electronic dance was so hot, Madonna leapt on two successive techno bandwagons, assimilating trance with 1998’s
Ray of Light
and aping Daft Punk-style French house on 2000’s
Music
.
These were the years when superDJs charged obscene amounts for remixing singles by pop groups and for a few hours spinning records in a club. The years of massive dance festivals and superclubs with grandiose plans of turning themselves into shopping-mall-like leisure complexes. A time of hubris and complacency, stoked by a blizzard of cocaine. The culture kept on swelling: in the boom’s swansong phase, Fatboy Slim drew 250,000 people to a free outdoor party on Brighton’s seafront, with disastrous – and for Norman Cook – bloody expensive consequences. But the music no longer hurtled forward.
In a literal sense, it had stopped hurtling – the exponential escalation of b.p.m. had halted when drum and bass and gabba reached the outer limits of speed circa 1997. While small tribes of headstrong maniacs pushed the tempos even faster (deep into the Zone of Fruitless Intensification) dance culture as a whole took a step sideways. What’s striking about the late nineties is the across-the-board rediscovery of house music, a strategic downshift in tempo and embrace of a warmer, more organic palette of sounds. Oh, house in its crasser and tamer forms (handbag, tribal, funky) had stayed popular throughout the nineties; it was clubland’s default option. What I’m talking about is the adoption of the house template by artists who’d hitherto been in the vanguard of innovation, and by consumers who were the leading edge of hip taste.
The London hardcore continuum was one of the first places the shift registered: in 1997 the bulk of the scene abandoned drum and bass for speed garage, a drop of approximately 30 b.p.m and a switch from chopped-up breakbeats to the pump-and-pound of four-to-the-floor house. But a similar let’s-go-back impulse surfaced in other areas of the late nineties dance culture. Robert Hood and Dan Bell, for instance, talked about wanting to restore an ‘original “jack” element’ – meaning a Chicago house feel – that had been expunged from minimal techno (a genre they’d helped to instigate) in its remorseless pursuit of reduction and rigour. Another example is electronic experimentalist Matthew Herbert (aka Dr Rockit, Radio Boy, et al), who we last glimpsed in the ‘Fuck Dance Let’s Art’ chapter. In 1996 he decided to fuck the art and dance, opening up a new house-oriented alter ego, Herbert, for the album
100 Lbs.
Actually, what he really did was
fold
the artiness into house’s groove matrix. 1998’s
Around the House
showcased Herbert’s newly subtle approach to avant-gardism. Topped with exquisite jazzy vocals from Dani Siciliano, the album sounded like a voluptuous condensation of the textural/rhythmatic innovations of American deep-house producers like Mood II Swing and Masters At Work. But the lush ‘musicality’ was really
musique concrete
disguised, because many of the spongy textures and glitch-riffs were derived from the sampled sounds of household objects being used (
Around the House
, geddit?).
It wasn’t just producers who fell in love with house, it was punters too. Hipsters who’d never had much direct experience of house as a clubbing culture, whose point of entry into rave had been hardcore/ drum and bass, or Aphex Twin/art-techno/IDM, suddenly discovered the delights of house, the amazing richness of its legacy and diversity of its sound-spectrum. This shift in allegiance was partly a response to the way that drum and bass and techno had driven themselves down anorectic, self-desiccating dead ends of punitive purism and hair-shirt minimalism. House signified a return to pleasure and pleasantness.
But the new blood entering house in the late nineties weren’t content to be humble neophytes, listening respectfully to the sage advice of deep-house connoisseurs. Many of them wanted to reform and expand the genre, bringing back an earlier ideal of house as a catholic and aesthetically flexible genre (hence the term ‘house-not-house’ that circulated for a while). In this view of house history, the true spirit of the genre was fundamentally opposed to fundamentalism of any sort, including that of the deep-house custodians (a curmudgeonly and snobbish lot, on the whole) who tried to freeze the style and keep it ‘pure’ (i.e. changeless). The opposing view held that house’s true anti-essence was
im
purist, a pragmatic openness to outside influence. Rather than getting paranoid about stylistic contamination like, says, the nineties Detroit techno cultists did, these new school house producers of the late nineties slyly assimilated rhythmic and texturological tricks from the overtly experimental forms of electronica, then craftily resituated them within house’s pleasure-principled context. Producers like Daft Punk, Armand Van Helden, Green Velvet and Basement Jaxx revitalized house by working in elements of hardcore rave aggression, industrial techno bombast, jungle’s marauding bass-science, and art-techno’s twitchy glitcherie.
Leaders of a French scene that included Bob Sinclar, I:Cube and Alan Braxe, Daft Punk pioneered a monstrously popular yet hipster-credible style of disco-flavoured house. Their 1996 debut album
Homework
ranged from kitschy retro-tinged hits like ‘Around The World’ and ‘Da Funk’ to gratingly raw drug-noise like ‘Rollin’ & Scratchin” and ‘Rock ’n’ Roll’. Falling somewhere in between those extremes was the classic ‘Musique’, a loop-da-looping disco cut-up that precociously featured a technique known as the ‘low-pass filter sweep’, an effect that makes riffs or vocal samples seem like they’re receding tantalizingly into the background before surging back in full ecstatic force. Sounding like a cross between panning and phasing, the low-pass filter sweep combines a spangly, spectral unearthliness with a teasing, suppressed-sounding quality. A fabulously effective trigger for the E-rush, filter FX soon became the basis of an entire genre. Thomas Bangalter, one half of Daft Punk, collaborated with Alan Braze to create the defining filter-disco anthem, Stardust’s 1998’s ‘Music Sounds Better With You’, a two-million-selling smash built from an astonishing woozy-oozy male vocal (sung by Benjamin Diamond), cocaine-crisp Chic-style rhythm guitar, and a snatch of strings. The audio equivalent of a glitterball, ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ was widely interpreted as a love song to the Mitsubishi brand of E.
Another UK Number One filter smash was Armand Van Helden’s ‘U Don’t Know Me’. Featuring Duane Harden’s imploring falsetto, this orchestral disco stampede was an unusually ‘deep’ outing for Van Helden, better known as sole inheritor of New York’s rough and ready hip-house tradition. Like Todd Terry’s proto-hardcore anthems of the late eighties, Van Helden’s tunes were huge in the UK. All wooshing dark-diva vocals and jungle-style wah-wah bass, his ominously erotic revamp of Sneaker Pimps’s ‘Spin Spin Sugar’ was a formative influence on speed garage. Collaborating with underground rappers like Company Flow’s MC Ren, throwing in gunshots sounds and generally flexing his ruffneck credentials, Van Helden sometimes seemed to be overcompensating for the fact that his genre was one that most hip hoppers still regarded as ‘gay’. Ironically, his biggest and best tunes have been the least macho – like the languorous, lovesick ‘Flowerz’ and ‘U Don’t Know Me’ itself, whose don’t-judge-me lyrics slot into a gay disco-house tradition of anthems that defiantly demand respect from a hostile world. Still, if he wasn’t so conflicted, Armand ‘I Am A Raw Individual’ Van Helden wouldn’t make such compelling records.
Just as ferociously impurist, Basement Jaxx probably did more than anyone to awaken outside interest in house at the close of the nineties. Their 1999 debut
Remedy
, full of audacious hybrids like the ragga-driven thug-house of ‘Jump ’N’ Shout’, drew a huge amount of attention towards a genre that the Jaxx, ironically, had every intention of leaving behind. Having started out in the UK purist house scene alongside Idjut Boys and Faze Action, Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton quickly tired of that milieu’s smug piety and decided that the best way to honour house’s spirit was by vandalizing its forms.
Early Jaxx tracks like ‘Fly Life’ and ‘Set Yo Body Free’ took what Ratcliffe called ‘the untouchable sexiness and polish of American deep house’ and roughed it up with English aggression, attitude and noise. The duo incubated their style, which they punningly dubbed ‘punk garage’, in the cramped and rowdy basement of a Brixton pub called George IV. ‘That’s where our chaos came from,’ Ratcliffe recalled. ‘There was always feedback, records jumping, things going wrong. But people cheered because there was a real vibe – it wasn’t clinical.’ The duo became obsessed with colliding musicality and anti-musicality (the ‘ugliness’ and ‘wrongness’ of early Chicago house, hardcore rave and so forth). The punk aspect came to the fore on
Remedy
’s stand-out tune ‘Same Old Show’, which pivoted around a baleful sample from New Wave ska band The Selecter, then blossomed on
Rooty
with the headbanger house of ‘Get Me Off’ and ‘Where’s Your Head At’, the latter sampling a doomy Gary Numan riff and featuring an Oi!-like jeering hooligan chorus. But there was a whole other vein of Jaxx tracks that recalled Prince circa
Sign O’ the Times
– insanely detailed production, warped vocal multitrackings, maximalist-not-minimalist extravagance (ideas that other producers might spin out for entire tracks occurring as sonic singularities, gratuitous one-offs). A good rubric for the Jaxx sound would be the Prince-echoing moniker ‘The Genre Formerly Known As House’.

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