Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture by Reynolds Simon

Author:Reynolds, Simon [Reynolds, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781593764777
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2012-02-29T22:00:00+00:00

Slaves to the Rave

At Nightmare in Arnhem, I hear a track that seems to sum up gabba’s weird fusion of will-to-power and impotence. Beneath a piteous melody that seems to waver and wilt in mid-air, a robot voice chants a fatigued, fatalistic chorus: ‘We are slaves / to the rave.’ Recorded by The Inferno Bros. for PCP offshoot Dance Ecstasy 2001, this withering piss take of the hardcore rave mentality had evidently become an irony-free anthem of entrapment and zombiehood.

A few days earlier Loftgroover had told me of going to a gabba club in Paris ‘where they handed out straitjackets to the audience!’ It’s a nice joke, the perfect culmination of gabba’s imagery of bedlam and psychosis, but it has a sinister undercurrent. A gabba rave is an asylum. It’s a haven from an intolerable reality, a world that kids find at once numbingly tedious and worryingly unstable. But it’s also a place of confinement where the nutters rage harmlessly; where kids vent all their anger out of their systems, instead of aiming it against the System.

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