Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (9 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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In house, there’s a divide between finding yourself (through becoming a member of the house) and losing yourself (in solipsistic hallucinatory bliss). The split in house between finding an identity/expressing your self and losing self/losing control could be mapped on to the tension in gay culture between the politics of pride, unity and collective resilience, and the more hardcore ‘erotic politics’ of impersonal sexual encounters, ‘deviant’ practices and drugs. House offered a sense of communion and community to those who might have been alienated from organized religion because of their sexuality. And so Frankie Knuckles described The Warehouse as a ‘church for people who have fallen from grace’, while another house pioneer, Marshall Jefferson, likened house to ‘old time religion in the way that people just get happy and screamin”. Male divas like Daryl Pandy and Robert Owens had trained in church choirs.
In ‘deep house’, the inspirational lyrics often echo the civil rights movement of the sixties, conflating the quest for black civic dignity with the struggle for gay pride. Joe Smooth’s ‘Promised Land’ and Db’s ‘I Have A Dream’ both explicitly evoke Martin Luther King; the first promises ‘brothers, sisters, one day we’ll be free’, the latter dreams of ‘one house nation under a groove’. The Children’s ‘Freedom’ is a fraught plea for tolerance and fraternity. The spoken-word monologue beseeches ‘don’t oppress me’ and ‘don’t judge me’, and asks, bewildered and vulnerable: ‘can’t you accept me for what I am?’ The name ‘The Children’ comes from Chicago house slang: to be a ‘child’ was to be gay, a member of house’s surrogate family. ‘Step-child’ was the term for a straight person accepted by gays.
In other house tracks, religious and sexual rapture are fused in a kind of Gnostic eroto-mysticism. Jamie Principle’s ‘Baby Wants To Ride’ begins with a prayer from Principle, and then the Voice of God declaring that it’s time to relate ‘the Revelation of my Second Coming’. But the ‘coming’ is revealed to be decidedly profane: an encounter with a dominatrix, who strips him and makes him beg on bended knees, then rides him through a porno-copia of sexual positions. Principle revels in the passivity of being a plaything, a (sexual) object, feyly gasping: ‘She took me . . . She made me scream.’ A Prince obsessed androgyne, Principle – née Byron Walton – told
Melody Maker
: ‘Men always want their women to scream when they’re having sex. But the men aren’t meant to scream or wouldn’t admit to doing it. But I can’t accept that male role. If a woman makes a man scream, I think that’s just as important, just as much a success. If I want to scream, I scream.’ Not content with blasphemously conflating SM with the Book of Revelation, ‘Baby Wants To Ride’ adds politics to the liberation theology: Principle exhorts the South African government to set his people free, disses AmeriKKKa as a ‘bullshit land’, and complains it’s hard to ride ‘when you’re living in a fascist dream’.
In Fingers Inc’s ‘Distant Planet’, this longing for sanctuary from racial and sexual oppression takes the form of cosmic mysticism,
à la
Sun Ra. The distant planet is a place ‘where anyone can walk without fear’; if you’re treated like an alien, you wanna go where the alien feels at home. Eerie and trepidatious, the track has a mood of desolate utopianism. The musical brains behind Fingers Inc, Larry Heard, is an interestingly conflicted house auteur. With its nimble-fingered fluency and over-melismatic Robert Owens vocals, most Fingers Inc output reflects Heard’s background as a jazz/R & B drummer and keyboardist reared on fusion and progressive rock (George Duke, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Genesis, Rick Wakeman). Songs like ‘Mysteries Of Love’, ‘Another Side’ and ‘A Path’ are the electro-blues of a seeker. Heard declared: ‘Jack means nothing to me’. But ironically, his most thrilling music took the form of the brutally dehumanized and machinic tracks – ‘Amnesia (Unknown Mix)’ and ‘Washing Machine’ – he released under the alias Mr Fingers. ‘Washing Machine’ – an interminable brain-wash cycle of burbling bass-loops and jarringly off-kilter hi-hats – is a mantra for a state of mindlessness.
Everybody
Needs
a 303
 
The machinic, trance-inducing side of house exemplified by ‘Washing Machine’ took another turn in 1987, when jack tracks evolved into ‘acid tracks’: a style defined by a mindwarping bass sound that originated from a specific piece of equipment, the Roland TB 303 Bassline. The Roland 303 was originally put on the market in 1983 as a bass-line synthesizer designed to partner the Roland 606 drum machine, and targeted at guitarists who wanted basslines to jam off. It was singularly unsuited for this purpose, and by 1985 Roland ceased manufacturing the machine. But a few Italian disco producers discovered the 303’s potential for weird Moroder-esque sounds: Alexander Robotnik’s ‘Les Problemes D’Amour’, released in 1983, was a huge ‘progressive’ hit in Chicago, selling around twelve thousand import copies. A few years later, house producers, already enamoured of Roland drum machines and synths, started messing around with the 303, discovering applications that the manufacturers had never imagined.
The 303 is a slim silver box with a one-octave keyboard (but four octave range), plus six knobs which control parameters like ‘decay’, ‘accent’, ‘resonance’, ‘tuning’, ‘envelope modulation’, and ‘cut off frequency’. Having programmed a bass-riff on the keyboard, you tweak the knobs to modulate the pitch, accent, and other parameters of each individual note in the bassline. The result is bass patterns that are as complex and trippy as a computer fractal, riddled with wriggly nuances and glissandi, curlicues and whorls.
In early 1988, Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk told me the 303 was ‘an obsolete, old-fashioned piece of technology that no one had ever thought of using that way before’. At the time, this reminded me of the then indie-rock vogue for the cheesily overstated effects of late sixties and early seventies guitar pedals. As Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis put it, these quaint effects units appealed because they provided ‘harsh-eties rather than subleties’. Similarly, the 303 and similar analogue synthesizers were rediscovered by house artists because their gauchely moderne sounds, once laughable, suddenly seemed otherworldly and futuristic again. They were also cheap, as musicians and recording studios sold them to make space for the new digital synths and samplers.
The first Chicago 303 track, Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’, was released in 1987 but recorded a couple of years earlier. DJ Pierre, Spanky and Herb Jackson were messing around with a 303, hoping to get a conventional bassline for a Spanky rhythm track. ‘The acid squiggle was there to start with,’ Pierre has said. ‘The machine already had that crazy acid sound in it that you were supposed to erase and put your own in, because it was just some MIDI gerbil. But we liked it.’ Marshall Jefferson, who produced the track, confirmed the accidental origins of this revolutionary house genre, telling David Toop: ‘“Acid Tracks” wasn’t pre-programmed, man . . . DJ Pierre, he was over and he was just messing with this thing and he came up with that pattern, man . . . So we were listening to it, getting drunk man. “Hey, this is kinda hot, man. This is a great mood, man. Let’s put it out. What the fuck?”’
Eleven minutes and seventeen seconds long, ‘Acid Tracks’ is just a drum track and endless variations on that bass-sound: somewhere between a faecal squelch and a neurotic whinny, between the bubbling of volcanic mud and the primordial low-end drone of a didgeridoo. The 303 bassline is a paradox: it’s an amnesiac hook, totally compelling as you listen, but hard to memorize or reproduce after the event, either as pattern or timbre. Its effect is mental dislocation; after the mania for acid tunes went into overdrive, Marshall Jefferson complained that artists weren’t using the 303 to create moods but for ‘disrupting thought patterns’.
Having recorded the session, Pierre, Jefferson and Co gave a tape to Ron Hardy. The track became such a sensation at The Music Box that it was known as Ron Hardy’s Acid Trax, a reference to the rumour that the club’s intense, flipped out vibe was caused by the promoters’ putting LSD in the water supply. Subsequently, acid producers have striven to distance the music from hallucinogenics. In early 1988, Tyree told me, ‘It has nothing to do with drugs, it’s just a name that fits because the music’s crazy, it’s weird and wired. But it affects you like a drug, it takes you over. People go into a trance, they just lose it! It makes everything seem so fast, it’s like an upper.’ Another story circulating by mid-1988, and probably intended as a whitewash, was that ‘acid’ came from ‘acid burn’, Chicago slang for ripping somebody off, and specifically, for sampling somebody else’s sound. But since sampling didn’t play a major role in acid house, this was never really plausible.
Wary of seeming to condone drug use, Phuture liked to point to the anti-cocaine song on the flipside of ‘Acid Tracks’. In some ways even more eerily brilliant than ‘Acid Tracks’, ‘Your Only Friend’ personifies the drug as a robot-voiced Slavemaster, who introduces himself at the start with the words – ‘This is Cocaine speaking’ – then proceeds to relate just how far he’ll debase you: ‘I’ll make you lie for me / I’ll make you die for me / In the end, I’ll be your only friend.’ In the background, ectoplasmic wisps of hideously fey, enfeebled falsetto moan and whimper wordlessly, representing the addict languishing in the throes of withdrawal.
‘Your Only Friend’ is one of a number of tracks of this era that have the disorientation and sinister, fixated quality of acid house, without actually employing a Roland 303. The It’s ‘Donnie’, a collaboration between Larry Heard and vocalist Harry Dennis, is the fever-dream of a love-junkie; Dennis’s stuttering vocals sound like he’s wracked by spasms and deep-body shudders. The lyrics present a fantastically melodramatic scenario of abandonment and betrayal, a girl called Donnie having run off with another man despite all the diamond rings, furs and Cadillacs he showered upon her; ‘I can’t quite understand’, gibbers the singer, disorientated by his dejection. By the end, Dennis is commiserating with a double-tracked doppelganger of himself, who’s even more aggrieved: ‘She ain’t even given me a chance to give her what I
wanted
to give her.’ Then there was Sleezy D’s ‘I’ve Lost Control’, whose creator Marshall Jefferson has said he was trying to achieve a mood similar to old Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin records. Consisting of nothing but simmering percussion, stray smears of flanged sound, and deranged screams, groans and madman’s laughter from the reverberant recesses of the mix-scape, ‘I’ve Lost Control’ does indeed sound a bit like the famous ‘ambient’ mid-section of ‘Whole Lotta Love’, where Robert Plant writhes in orgasmic agony. And the metallic, man-machine vocal, impassively intoning ‘I’m losing it . . . I’ve lost it’, also recalls Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’. The Sleezy D persona sounds like his subjectivity is literally disintegrating in the acid maelstrom.
‘I’ve Lost Control’ and ‘Donnie’ got carried along by the
après
Phuture deluge of 303-based acid tracks: Laurent X’s ‘Machines’, Armando’s ‘Land of Confusion’, Mike Dunn’s ‘Magic Feet’, Bam Bam’s ‘Where’s Your Child?’, Fast Eddie’s ‘Acid Thunder’, and scores more. Adonis and The Endless Poker’s ‘Poke It’ features a series of terse injunctions – ‘poke it’, ‘house you’, ‘work’ – so distorted they sound like a dog barking, which are offset by real canine woofs.
Ironically, it was the genre’s pioneer, DJ Pierre who – after recording a few more acid anthems like Pierre’s Pfantasy Club’s ‘Dream Girl’ and ‘Fantasy Girl’ – was one of the first to abandon the sound. Explaining his shift away from ‘tracks’ to songs, he said ‘It’s kinda soul-less . . . There’s no emotion that goes with it apart from jumping up and down and making you want to dance.’ In fact there
is
an emotion to acid house, it’s just that it’s one that seems to stem from some infra-human domain – the passion of sub-atomic particles, the siren-song of entropy, an ‘Om’ emanating from the belly of Mother Earth.
Although the acid fad petered out by 1989, the Roland 303 has endured, securing a permanent place in the arsenal of house and techno producers, and enjoying periodic revivals. In some ways, it’s like the wah-wah guitar: instantly recognizable, yet capable of infinite variations and adaptations, and forever drifting in and out of fashion.
Paradise Lost
 
By 1988, house music was having a massive impact in Britain and Europe, but Chicago itself was in decline. The previous year, the authorities had begun to crack down on the house scene, with the police banning after-hours parties and witholding late-night licences from clubs. WBMX went off the air in 1988, and sales of house records slowed, eventually dwindling down to an average of 1500 copies, a mere tenth of sales at Chicago’s peak. Many of the scene’s prime movers became inactive, disillusioned by bad deals. Others spent most of their time in Europe, where financial prospects were better. Some left town for good. Frankie Knuckles moved back to New York. And DJ Pierre moved to New Jersey in 1990, and became a major exponent of New York’s song-oriented deep house sound, ‘garage’.
Garage’s roots go back to New York’s early seventies disco underground. Mostly gay black and gay Hispanic, this scene characterized by a bacchanalian fervour was fuelled by acid, amphetamine and the Ecstasy-like downer Quaalude. It was in this milieu – clubs like The Gallery, Salvation, Sanctuary, The Loft, The Ginza, and DJs like Francis Grosso, David Rodriguez, Steve D’Aquisto, Michael Cappello, David Mancuso – that Frankie Knuckles and his colleague Larry Levan learned the art of mixing. Garage is named in homage to the DJ-ing sensibility and sensurround ambience Levan developed at his legendary club The Paradise Garage, but as a style, it only really took shape after the club shut its doors in late 1987.

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