Senseless Acts of Beauty by George McKay

Author:George McKay
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1995-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Certain drugs have commonly been associated with different subcultures over the years – speed with mods and punks, acid and cannabis with hippies, for instance26 – but it’s in rave culture that drugs seem to be most centrally placed, and one drug in particular: Ecstasy. Both ravers themselves and reporters and critics on the scene emphasize the centrality of E, whether to praise or demonize it. Both its sixties forerunner acid (LSD: lysergic-acid-dyethylamide) and Ecstasy (MDMA: methylene-dioxy-meth-amphetamine) were synthesized in the laboratories of pharmaceutical companies in the early twentieth century. In fact, MDMA was patented as early as 1912, thirty-odd years before Albert Hoffmann synthesized LSD-25. The underground versions of these drugs of the sixties and nineties vary. Whereas acid commonly comes in the form of tabs, tiny squares of paper impregnated with a dose of the drug and printed with some sort of identifying image – a fly agaric mushroom, Donald Duck, a bolt of lightning, and so on – Ecstasy often comes in the form of pills of varying colour, with embossed motifs such as birds on one side and, like aspirin, a fracture line for ease of halving on the other. Psychedelic effects are used in the visual culture of rave, in its computer-generated graphics on the flyers that advertise events,27 and at raves themselves: both the colour coding of dancefloor lighting with beats per minute (yellow = a cool 116 bpm, red = an energetic 144 bpm28) and, more important, the mutating abstract images generated by computer programmes on giant screens around the dancing areas. It’s surely a significant aspect of the rewrite of the sixties that the use of a new hallucinogenic (or at least psychoactive) designer drug29 is widespread – it’s at least as surprising as the fact that the term ‘acid’ itself survives (as in ‘acid house’, or in the shouts of ‘Acieed!’ across the country that puzzled older people in the late eighties). Harry Shapiro suggests that ‘The very word ‘acid’ sounded hard and dangerous, a corrosive element in society’ in the sixties; ecstasy on the other hand is a state of being, and the word sounds altogether more uplifting, certainly less corrosive.30 Acid and Ecstasy, LSD and MDMA – the parallels across the decades are self-evident (and thus most in need of unpacking).

Ecstasy seems to combine the effects of acid and speed in a more empathic package: mild hallucinations, plenty of energy and an urge to be friendly are all noted by ravers on E. (Other ravers say that, with the loud upbeat dance music, psychedelic visual images and joyous crowds at raves, there’s no need for chemical stimulation anyway.) A raver explains the drug-related effects of rave music’s repetition: ‘You’ sort of lose track and the rhythm is very important in enabling you to lose track because it’s something that moves your body, it’s not something that you have to concentrate on. You have to click into it and get into the groove and the pattern and relax with it, and that is this incredible feeling.

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