rave era as recapitulation of the sixties

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
by leaving drugs and delirium completely out of the story, Deller makes raves seem as saintly as the Durham Miners Gala

public assembly, reclaiming public space, 'there IS such a thing as society, Margaret' etc etc

as if the scene wasn't at least partly driven by crime, the ultimate in c******ism

and the other thing, the bizarre attempt to make out London had nothing to do with it happening

Sure, I agree with all of that. my point was why would you want the bbc to talk about criminal activities and look to fetishise them. either you'll get deller type boring inanity or hypermoralistic bourgeois condemnation. noone is arguing that rave is saintly here, but also don't let the saints through the door? the pious can never truly be corrupted.

I mean we're talking about the cunts here who deliberately faked the 1950s bbc radio lessons on the 1926 general strike. its hardly been known to possess integrity hasn't it?
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It's not wanting discussion about drugs for the sake of it. It's useless trying to describe such drug experiences without it appearing trite, immature & conceited. There's also the folly of youth & excess, balanced with experienced knowing.

The British Isles i grew up in had a mushroom cult more as a rite of passage than a hippy dream. Post-industrial transitioning gone occult, no cliche stinking of human despair. Yosser Hughes types in every pub, inevitable sound of breaking glass & stabbings. Blue lights. Gigs of long coats & speed. Too many rival football firms to count, jellies on script & so much smack. HIV waves. Total assault. Yes, knife crime is no joke, but neither is a dozen casuals stamp-jumping your head in. Ferociously grim.

The role of industrial figures like Richard H Kirk form a temporal bridge in a few ways; Chris & Cosey, Coil, even Temple Records & TOPY, all pushed into this confluence. So much good music from their world, for a while Richard H Kirk soared. Added a distinctive visual tone to live proceedings, Cabs with video cabs. Long coat heaven. Acid, speed & rain. Always rain. Damp bricks & moss. Dead rivers. Bombings. Violence everywhere. School drills for nuclear war & fallout.

Then the wall came down. The impossible inverted, Millwall @ Venus. I hope the same happens if & when Covid clears & this joke govt finally gets decapitated.

Sure, you just [prove my point here. E was not *the main drug* not for a while. It was acid and speed, which when taken together are much more deranged and disorientating. E is quite a lightweight drug, it can easily be co-opted into bbc vernacular. If Deller wanted to do a docu featuring the centrality of drugs he'd have to overplay E and go down that whole balearic chelsea knobheads going to ibiza root. the fact is even in London Shoom is just but a footnote and has been overinflated, because the real acid music like at heaven, dungeons, trade etc etc was confrontational, punishing and unforgiving.
 

version

Well-known member
Washyourhands, have you been here before, under different names? Your rambling, anecdotal style, your affiliations and sympathies, your taste and your age all feel very, very familiar.

I thought it might be Beagle deciding to play nice.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
trying to find that reynolds retro post where he talks about this now

Revisionism a la Carl Wilson's Celine Dion book, generalism with its gaze prised off of the present and focused backwards in time, this surveys 20th Century American popular music with a view to correcting the neglect and salving the slight inflicted by Rockism to various forms of "light" music that (it's darned well proved!) were what the majority of punters actually listened to, danced to, enjoyed, as opposed to, oh rock'n'roll and bebop and Motown and what have you. So it's basically everything that would be left out of Greil Marcus's list at the end of Stranded, or banished from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul greatest singles ever book. There's certainly value and interest to coming up with a different shape for the past, the disorientation of an up-ended perspective. But then you also have to wonder what it is about the Rock(ist) Narrative that is so compelling that it made people A/ bring it into existence in the first place and B/ keep on sustaining it with a torrent of critical writing, books, fan discourse, etc. It's not just generational narcissism, I don't think, or a case of "history gets written by the victors" (are they really victors here, and if so what are their spoils?). What I'm getting is, nothing was stopping people writing histories about the other stuff, Doris Day or Pat Boone or Engelbert Humperdinck or whatever… Same as nothing ever stopped anyone from writing a history of electronic dance music in the Nineties that made trance or handbag house the central narrative. That those people haven't come forth tells you something about the motivating power of certain kinds of music, their ability to generate Myth.

Exactly. our music generates myth. thats what's so brilliant about it, but anything resembling rave in the future will not come from our part of the scene. we were a minority back then and are a minority now.

you guys can't notice the hopeless contradiction within a democratic analysis of music.

http://blissout.blogspot.com/2009/08/when-acquaintances-make-books-bit-of.html
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
there's a reason why rave couldn't have directly come from the EBM and post-punk scenes even though sonically they A) were basically techno by the early 1980s B) directly influenced all music to come. and that's because the music had a myth in the UK. It's why sometimes you'll get a load of 1988 acid house (honestly guv!) hoolies on oldskool rave and soulboy and footie forums coming out with send the muslims back home crap. American imported music did not have the same mythology that our own synthpop did, esp as it was played in a 12 inch and not an artist context. Those who know too much about music are doomed to be confined to the avant-garde or the periphery. I'm quite happy with that personally, but then I've never thought that a lot of mainstream club music has been all that good after the first wave of vocal house. after 1990 it's all about the mindfuck for me.
hard to top this, it is quite sad, none of that happy clappy nonsense that came later. and by happy clappy nonsense I mean eurohouse and that kind of lightweight stuff, not happy hardcore which at its best can hit the extremities of noise music, but in a different way. so much euphoria it can actually be painful. Love that.

 
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Mellsman

Well-known member
by leaving drugs and delirium completely out of the story, Deller makes raves seem as saintly as the Durham Miners Gala

public assembly, reclaiming public space, 'there IS such a thing as society, Margaret' etc etc

as if the scene wasn't at least partly driven by crime, the ultimate in c******ism

and the other thing, the bizarre attempt to make out London had nothing to do with it happening

I enjoy the purported connection between the Brinks Mat bullion heist and the first wave of E to hit the UK.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
as if the scene wasn't at least partly driven by crime, the ultimate in c******ism

is the implication that the market-orientated aspects of rave were in some ways unethical by virtue of being criminal?

this was the law which said "unruly" congregation, taking and selling drugs not approved by the government, loud repetitive music and sampling were forbidden...

and i suppose many people made money in this era perfectly legally.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
is the implication that the market-orientated aspects of rave were in some ways unethical by virtue of being criminal?

this was the law which said "unruly" congregation, taking and selling drugs not approved by the government, loud repetitive music and sampling were forbidden...

and i suppose many people made money in this era perfectly legally.

sure, and its the biggest open secret in the industry that it's usually other clubs which call old bill to shut down illegals. after all, they never have to disclose the tip offs.
 

luka

Well-known member
No. It's because you have t been here long enough to have 'routines' that have been rolled out countless times like the rest of us do. I've seen virtually every post on here a million times before, including my ones. It makes me sick
 
There's reticence around the fact I feel most of what I'll add has been thunk and ripped apart already. Conspiracy stuff, jungle stuff, why music doesn't thrill as much etc,
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i listened to your youtube recs of the dead washyourhands and they were all uniformly boring for me.

I think bluesy rock and indie-y rock are just so easy to do to a competent degree without any serious swerves to the left. it's like tech house in that regard, the late 90s south london stuff. really accomplished music that plays it safe.

soz, at least I tried. I'm sure you won't be a fan of my speedcore.
 
the dancing plague

the bands were like members of the audience.

we're on the cusp of another culturewide encounter with the self.


Collectivity and co-creation over artistry and authorship

Centrality of performer will play out in an interesting way over the next year or two with few live events

I think the fact we’re all contained, restriction on lifestyle, means lifestyles aren’t so sellable, and so the value comes back to the art in a more direct way

There’s already plenty of chat about the decline of the influencer even before lockdown, that’ll be much steeper now. The logical next step in the breakdown of trust of authority

We’re all together in this grim present that looks forward to a future where we can return to the old ways. In terms of where we escape to, for many it will be virtual but also look at current prostest in Ohio and many places across the US, the disobedient aspects of rave and 60s counterculture are interesting in this respect. This containment and pressure from economic hardship resulting in a creative eruption

And then there’s literal dance mania, the dancing plague, epidemic hysteria . Theorised by some as a response to stress and trauma

Numerous sources discuss how dancing mania, and tarantism, may have simply been the result of stress and tension caused by natural disasters around the time,such as plagues and floods. Hetherington and Munro describe dancing mania as a result of "shared stress"; people may have danced to relieve themselves of the stress and poverty of the day,and in so doing, attempted to become ecstatic and see visions

Possible reason? Stress-induced psychosis. Having suffered severely from famine, and in many cases wiped out and reduced to begging, the region was in an ongoing crisis. Many had died of starvation. The area was riddled with diseases, including smallpox and syphilis. Waller believes the stress was intolerable, and hence a mass psychological illness resulted.
It was a superstitious time. From the sound of it, these people didn’t have much left in their lives but superstition.

Interesting to think about in an age of conspiracy and misinformation and extreme stress

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/258521#ixzz6KAfbq7MI
 
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