echno was invented by a group of Black artists from Detroit in the early nineteen-eighties. The scene and the sound globalized rapidly, but as an American subculture early electronic dance music was characterized by a science-fictional Futurism pursued through experimental sound, social mixing, free-form radio, pride in Blackness and queerness, altered states of consciousness, style, discernment, and technological innovation. The word “rave” to describe a certain style of partying associated with electronic music came into general use in England in the late eighties, after Detroit techno and Chicago house d.j.s began crossing the Atlantic to perform and inspired their British and Continental imitators. There’s no strict definition for what constitutes a rave, but in the past the word connoted an underground gathering, usually at some kind of repurposed space, such as a warehouse, a skate park, or a farmyard. Raves were often illegal in the sense that they violated licensing rules, and because people often used banned substances. Renegade in spirit, they were conceived of in part to engineer an alternative reality for a few hours, a place where ordinary rules of consciousness and comportment would not apply. There was also an expectation of endurance, of a collective experience that would continue through the night and into the morning.
Like many other subcultures, the rave was quickly co-opted. The profits of a denatured, commercially engineered version of the sound enriched a coterie of mostly white male artists who remixed pop hits and played festivals sponsored by corporations. The word “rave” lost meaning, and came to refer to any kind of happening involving a d.j. and a sound system that its organizers wanted to give a frisson of hedonism. Elon Musk threw a nine-thousand-person promotional “rave” at the Tesla factory outside Berlin in 2021. This February, the electronic-pop music producers Fred again.., Skrillex, and Four Tet billed a sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden that ended at midnight as a “pop-up rave.”
In dance music, as in many cultural pursuits, the wrong people have tended to make all the money, but subcultures can also be protected by this kind of misunderstanding. The ersatz version of a scene can siphon off the people who don’t require it for a sense of belonging, as McKenzie Wark puts it in her new book, “Raving,” a monograph about the original, more subversive notion of the rave as she experienced it recently in its revival, over the past several years, in certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. As Wark writes in the book’s first chapter, “The first thing I look for at raves: who needs it, and among those who need it, who can handle their habit?” She clarifies what this need might be: “I’m interested in people for whom raving is a collaborative practice that makes it possible to endure this life.”
Read Full Article »
