rave era as recapitulation of the sixties

[Woebot]

"an act or instance of summarizing and restating the main points of something"

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so having just completed this book on the sixties and health i'm mulling over the connections between the two eras

someone wrote here recently that the beatles had nothing to do with acid house (i think it was in the 808 state "newbuild" thread) and i thought that was wrong.

acid house was essentially a return to the same headspace as, for instance, the grateful dead's ecstatic jams or the early pink floyd's freakout performances at the UFO.

it's a mistake to get too hung up on the differing instruments - in a kind of rockist or non-rockist textureological argument. the early psychedelic music was all about VOLUME (big rigs built by the likes of owsley). the environment of the LIGHT SHOW was the same. the drugs ANY AND MANY was the same - if not MDMA. the REPETITION. DANCING for instance at the fillmore or avalon. and ELECTRONICS - silver apples being the outlier but electronics also as ELECTRICS.

discussions about the centrality of the performer? well in the early OUT days the distinction would have been, yes more marked than the DJ in his booth maybe (though plenty of adulation directed at DJs) but especially the dead and the floyd - the bands were like members of the audience.

this connection bewteen the two eras was definitely recognised at the time. there was much use of the standard grab bag of imagery - repurposed hindu stuff - new age imagery - but also specific images spring to mind - that george harrison portrait as a guru. images of kesey's "furthur" bus.



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but beyond the music to my mind there was a definite re-run of the same ideas. a return to the same "space". i like to think of time being organised not chronologically but in terms of illumination. the future is an illuminated space - that's why, for instance, musical artifacts from the past can be "influential" - because they are actually from this illuminated future. paul mccartney said a cool thing in 1994 about the sixties in this respect:

"I feel like the sixties is about to happen.
It feels like a period in the future to me,
rather than a period in the past."

and the rave era - that was a return to the future too...

 

[luka]

We were talking about this obsessively a couple of years ago.

 

[luka]

We were all framing it basically this same exact way. You shoulda been there! A wave that reached its furthest extension, crashed, recceded throughout and the 70s and 80s then gathered and broke again in the early 90s. This is why dissensus was prophecising the return of the wave in 2020.

 

[Woebot]

We were all framing it basically this same exact way. You shoulda been there! A wave that reached its furthest extension, crashed, recceded throughout and the 70s and 80s then gathered and broke again in the early 90s. This is why dissensus was prophecising the return of the wave in 2020.

ha ha. it's not an "original thought" is it? that's what we were talking about in the nineties

cyclically (thirty years) assuming we're on the cusp of another culturewide encounter with the self.

what's it going to look like? - ketamine clinics?

it can't be called the age of aquarius can it? - what's it going to be called?

 

[entertainment]

We were all framing it basically this same exact way. You shoulda been there! A wave that reached its furthest extension, crashed, recceded throughout and the 70s and 80s then gathered and broke again in the early 90s. This is why dissensus was prophecising the return of the wave in 2020.

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...

And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back"

 

[entertainment]

Went to a rave exhibit last time I was in London and from the point of view of someone who wasn't there, wasn't even born, the story was very analogous to what you hear about the sixties. A special new energy seizing the lives of anyone who came near and everyone who saw it from afar came pilgrimming towards it.

 

[entertainment]

A world being synchronously invented by its music. Out of nothing but sheer necessity. New world imagined by art and willed into being from the energy that art produced.

 

[Turns out HMG was right!]

I recall watching an ITV show marking 20 years since the summer of love. It was a prime time, watched by millions. First time, as a 13 year old, that I'd seen the happenings and tie dye and acid dancing. It may have helped sow seeds more widely.

 

[Turns out HMG was right!]

We were all framing it basically this same exact way. You shoulda been there! A wave that reached its furthest extension, crashed, recceded throughout and the 70s and 80s then gathered and broke again in the early 90s. This is why dissensus was prophecising the return of the wave in 2020.

Parties are illegal for a whole different reason now. Oh god, I hope this doesn't birth zoom raves, that would be tragic.

 

[kumar]

there are loads of zoom raves, my mate sent me some pictures of this queer party he went on which looked great, loads of teenagers sitting on the sofa with their mate wearing jock straps and eating quavers. he also keeps going to aa meetings which end up getting trolled by someone twerking in front of a poster of hitler and things like that.

but yeah the moral value of illegal partying resistance seems to have changed a bit since both summers of love

 

[catalog]

Maybe the age of Aquarius was meant to last a bit longer? Having read those few grapejuice blogs, it's something the lads were trying to bring on in the early 1900s. So I think we are still in it. And it's possibly a mistake to think it's a generational thing alone. It's not just years. It's also weather (I maintain that the summer of 2018 was not the fourth summer of love cos we never got the required 40 days of no rain). And it's the technology to make music. Yes we can't get hung up on the machines, but we have to also be honest and admit that no one has made a new 303. So it's that as well, I think. Like, of course the actual music does not matter, but what does matter is that people are into it. The tech might not matter in the end, might be something else.

Anyway, that's my feelings on it just now. Of course, the pandemic could be the shake/rupture we need. The 60s happened cos of WW2 right? And the 'legitimacy' space that became opened up as a result. We have had 911 and Brexit, but they've not been quite the same as this, in terms of being global and impacting everyday life.

 

[thirdform]

yeah i said that, beatles has nothing to do with acid house, I mean, it does, but only in the way that the beatles has to do with D.A.F or whatever. only incidentally. balearic and normie acid culture sure, but not the hardcore poindexter/clinkstreet era chicago stuff. and acid was hard, dark music. listen to traxx and hieroglyphic being and you will understand. Ron Hardy was my gay dj idle, he would play proper freakout stuff like the residents.

people talk about Joe Smooth promised land as acid house on the BBC or whatever but its not. that's just the much lighter end of things.

 

[thirdform]

this is proper UK house before it went mainstream. you can hear the latin fusion influence here in droves. It's also proto proto UK funky and better than most records in that genre.

 

[Woebot]

The 60s happened cos of WW2 right?

i would definitely agree with that

 

[Murphy]

Parallels perhaps. Dionysian, situationist, an array of sites & venues, alchemical, dance-orientated, embodied, rapturous (or jouissance again), organic/free vs pay party/commercial, Atlantic cross-pollination & Euro madness (eg Germany), surreal, extending out to broader fashions & ultimately reduced to a product before dissipating (unless you’re part of the hardcore continuum). Tape trading opening up “heads”, like the Grateful Dead & then the gazillions of DJ mixes, networks across cities & nations.

I wouldn’t assume a 3rd wave. Social media has decimated the means by which pre-internet, organically derived, cultural coalescing gained traction. Flash mobs or whatever it’s called? Gtfo. Not saying it’s impossible, but rhythm & drum programming may not offer the answers. Psychedelics as therapeutic options for the world we’ve all acquiesced with in creating? Hopefully. My hair is the same length now as it was 30years ago, if that’s any indicator of hope.

The Man does not want you to have fun.

 

[Turns out HMG was right!]

The ending of the Cold War and final evaporation of the threat of nuclear annihilation - that was a significant pressure release, no-future flipped to we're in the future, let's have it.

 

[thirdform]

its not even. beatles fans were steve jobbs type dropouts and venture capitalists. sure you had organised existing crime firms get involved in rave but that was the extent of it. as philosophies they were orthogonal. there was no dropping out in rave, unless you were a goa nutcase. it was about speeding up and rinsing leisure time. hippies wanted more leisure time to slow down.

 

[thirdform]

much more in common with the speedfreaks of northern soul and mods.

 

[thirdform]

the parallel is that deadheads ended up at goa trance.

 

[thirdform]