rave era as recapitulation of the sixties

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
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Maybe it's more that the ways we can be alone are so addictive, but we're always straining for the collective

This reminds me of that particular pleasure of being in solitude but knowing you?re wanted. Being upstairs at a party and hearing people ask where you are. Or being alone in the office in complete silence when your mates are waiting for you in the bar. Same feeling playing hide and seek as a child. The comfort of solitude, away from the complications and demands and performance of social interaction but also having the security of connectedness, there if you want it. Bliss.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
As a complete antithesis to this thread - or is it? - has anybody read this?


Housekeeping’s underlying ideology appears to be summed up in this passage from a 2018 profile on the group: “After all, house music was created right here in North America... it was always supposed to be about fun and wild escape, about losing yourself without caring, and about loving your neighbour – or fellow dancer, as it were – no matter their race, gender or class.”

With that last line, house’s roots in marginalised identities are quietly eroded, along with others’ responsibility to tread carefully around those historical associations. A notional equality, imposed by the bearers of extraordinary privilege on cultural and musical forms created by queer working-class people of colour, is no form of equality at all. When Taylor and his crew talk elsewhere about the hedonism of their parties, they’re invoking a spiritual heritage drawn not from Ron Hardy or Stonewall, but from the polo fields of Harrow, the members’ clubs of Mayfair, and the post-2008 bank bailout.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
well no what's funny about the housekeeping lot is they are making music that wouldn't sound out of place in a deep tech set that blackdown would cum in his pants for circa 2014.

house as counterculture (excluding the free parties obvs) was broadly dead when james palumbo opened ministry of sound in 91.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Take the Raymond Williams interpretation on counterculture with House over an exaggerated example like James Palumbo. That's like writing off Hardcore & Jungle because of Colston-Hayter. Doesn't hold, but i see & appreciate the funny.

The commercialisation angle could be dangled with various figures & realms, earlier, later. There were more than enough small scale nights, indoor, outdoor, that pushed on well past 91. The distilled anarchy of Back II Basics, Full Circle with Frankie Knuckles slaughtering a Sunday pub in Berkshire, Bounce nationwide, Zap in Brighton, anywhere Weatherall played, plus many, many, many more. Stacks of US folks worth listening to had been coming over for a while before the elephant in the castle.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Take the Raymond Williams interpretation on counterculture with House over an exaggerated example like James Palumbo. That's like writing off Hardcore & Jungle because of Colston-Hayter. Doesn't hold, but i see & appreciate the funny.

The commercialisation angle could be dangled with various figures & realms, earlier, later. There were more than enough small scale nights, indoor, outdoor, that pushed on well past 91. The distilled anarchy of Back II Basics, Full Circle with Frankie Knuckles slaughtering a Sunday pub in Berkshire, Bounce nationwide, Zap in Brighton, anywhere Weatherall played, plus many, many, many more. Stacks of US folks worth listening to had been coming over for a while before the elephant in the castle.

this is true, and what i said was an exagerrated example, but both house and jungle eventually did fill Palumbo and Colston haytar's premise, most mainstream house ending up as ibiza plink plonk rubbish, and most commercial dnb ending up as cringey midrangey jump up.

Some of the best house sets ive heard UK wide have been from people like John Heckle (or nick wilson/ncw) to pub basements for less than 300 people, or Lil Louis from the States playing to a couple of hundred nutters at 7 AM, where the promoters lost more money than they made. as an economic strategy, true underground counterculture is not sustainable (capitalism ABC and so on.) That's why I tend to reject most peoples conception of 'the underground'

Saying not everything is for everyone isn't elitism, and that's where hardcore continuum historiography fails. in prioritising the anthems, Eventually you just become a liberal apologist for music. This is a big comradely contradiction between the tension of Simon as a post-punk head and a jungle head, he was not too impressed with DJ Krust going to alienating boffin levels of experimentation. but actually the exact inverse happened in dnb a couple of years later, it became more like hard house than it did Surgeon or Cristian Vogel.

Certain things and experiences have to be sought out.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Rewatched a program last night, Festivals Britannia, appalling but saved by Rick from DiY toward the end. He articulates the rush of an event within an era like Castlemorton really well, the all encompassing absorption of music for focus and fun, the beauty of it and the antithesis of clubbing with a lot more. Rick/Grace Sands has been one of the most consistent UK jocks too, walks the walk. You don't have to like House to be won over by the enthusiasm.

DiY slugged it out if you compare parts of the rave-era to the wave breaking like the 70's did. As close as House got to a collective like the Grateful Dead, without the gimpy associations. Ripe for a book. DiY full crew were a force. Yes, caning sessions, but they shaped House in ways that have rarely been credited.

Could do with a serious trim down but Pete Woosh who has been ill with cancer turned up on this and i'm honour-bound to give the man full courtesy

 

ehg

New member
As a complete antithesis to this thread - or is it? - has anybody read this?


At the risk of making my first post on here wildly self-important, there's actually more of a connection here than you might realise: I wrote this, and worked on the Jeremy Deller film discussed upthread. They're very much part of the same thought process, at least for me.

Also in case anyone's interested, the main reason drugs didn't really feature in the Deller thing was the school setting. It was something we wanted to cover, but we couldn't find an approach to it which met their safeguarding requirements and still felt narratively satisfying, so we dropped it. I think the space that created to talk about other stuff was a decent tradeoff, but then I'm bound to be a bit biased.

Loads of really interesting stuff in this thread. Hadn't thought of Mark Kennedy / spy cops specifically in relation to raves before, but it makes perfect sense, particularly in terms of the CJA and all of that.
 
Also in case anyone's interested, the main reason drugs didn't really feature in the Deller thing was the school setting. It was something we wanted to cover, but we couldn't find an approach to it which met their safeguarding requirements and still felt narratively satisfying, so we dropped it. I think the space that created to talk about other stuff was a decent tradeoff, but then I'm bound to be a bit biased.

I liked that aspect. If it was the first ever rave doc or positioned itself very authoritatively the omission would be annoying but the classroom setup opened things up in a way

ps. Wildly self important is the expectation round here! Welcome
 

borzoi

Well-known member
WashYourHands it's cool to me that you're into the dead being from the uk (if i read correctly), cos they're THE quintessential american band to me and i almost feel like its a pointless exercise to sell them to people outside america who weren't bought in. you have to have driven through a canyon or 2.

i grew up in san francisco and went to high school across the bay in marin county where all that stuff was going down, saw bob weir getting coffee all the time and stuff, and i HATED the dead and all the hippie shit at the time but i got way into them right after i graduated college a few years ago. and i think it was basically an unavoidable process for me partially bc of the psychic weight of the landscape and its association with all my memories deeply intertwined w/ them immediately forcing itself on me when i moved away from it.


like to me there is no separating the dead and this specific drive which i've done 100s of times. and i always felt like they were some sort of embodiment of america both in the ultimately kinda shitty individualist aspects (you can sadly find a lot of maga deadheads these days) and the beautiful collective moments, esp in conjunction w/ nature and the sublime.

"a revision of Manifest Destiny, a psychedelic Americana with Walt Whitman and Neal Cassady taking the place of Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett at its core. It’s about as patriotic as I get these days, but it feels really good when it happens."
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Still need to go through the tunes posted in version's greatful thread and click with 'em. Something tells me once I do it'll be all I listen to for a month or two
 

borzoi

Well-known member
yea, it's a difficult thing to get i think. like i know exactly how it feels to hear tuneless hippie mush, terrible melodies, white blues cheese. the stars have to align for you to grasp it. but i'm pretty sure when i grasp it/when they do it's real and i haven't just fooled myself.

i always feel like a fool telling ppl to watch a 4 hour documentary to get into a band but long strange trip on amazon is genuinely fantastic.

come for the rave discussion, stay for the deadhead apologia.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen

soundtrack to the video only because it's Pigpen on a quest and just short enough


yea, it's a difficult thing to get i think. like i know exactly how it feels to hear tuneless hippie mush, terrible melodies, white blues cheese. the stars have to align for you to grasp it. but i'm pretty sure when i grasp it/when they do it's real and i haven't just fooled myself.

i always feel like a fool telling ppl to watch a 4 hour documentary to get into a band but long strange trip on amazon is genuinely fantastic.

come for the rave discussion, stay for the deadhead apologia.

Long Strange Trip was outstanding. Glad it got made, succinct storytelling too. Knew Garcia was a junk fiend, but his bio in LST was so fucking stark. A brutal fall which he never really recovered from. 53 going on 85.
 

version

Well-known member
Rewatched a program last night, Festivals Britannia, appalling but saved by Rick from DiY toward the end. He articulates the rush of an event within an era like Castlemorton really well, the all encompassing absorption of music for focus and fun, the beauty of it and the antithesis of clubbing with a lot more. Rick/Grace Sands has been one of the most consistent UK jocks too, walks the walk. You don't have to like House to be won over by the enthusiasm.

DiY slugged it out if you compare parts of the rave-era to the wave breaking like the 70's did. As close as House got to a collective like the Grateful Dead, without the gimpy associations. Ripe for a book. DiY full crew were a force. Yes, caning sessions, but they shaped House in ways that have rarely been credited.

Could do with a serious trim down but Pete Woosh who has been ill with cancer turned up on this and i'm honour-bound to give the man full courtesy


 
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