Discographies

Dance, Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound

Jeremy Gilbert, Ewan Pearson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134698912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Experiencing disco, hip hop, house, techno, drum 'n' bass and garage, Discographies plots a course through the transatlantic dance scene of the last last twenty-five years. It discusses the problems posed by contemporary dance culture of both academic and cultural study and finds these origins in the history of opposition to music as a source of sensory pleasure.
Discussing such issues as technology, club space. drugs, the musical body, gender, sexuality and pleasure, Discographies explores the ecstatic experiences at the heart of contemporary dance culture. It suggests why politicians and agencies as diverse as the independent music press and public broadcasting should be so hostile to this cultural phenomenon.

1
THE TRIBAL RITES OF SATURDAY NIGHT Discos and intellectuals

Sometimes I get the feeling that they were intellectuals from the high bourgeoisie who wanted to discover another world. They have always been fascinated by discotheques and girls, and coming from the sort of social background and education they did, music was the only way.

Paul Allesandrini, on Kraftwerk¹

They came to dance, but ended up getting an education.

Advertisement for the film Thank God it's Friday (1978)²

Sorted? Writing dance music culture after acid house

June 1995.Ten years after the release of Jamie Principal's ‘Waiting on Your Angel’ and J.M.Silk's ‘Music is the Key’ —the prototypical records of Chicago house— Pulp, a pop band from Sheffield on the cusp of success after an eighteen-year career, are playing their most prestigious gig thus far, headlining at the Glastonbury Festival. They premiere a new song, a forthcoming single about the rave scene called ‘Sorted for E's and Wizz’ which reflects wryly on the comedowns of the second ‘summer of love’. In the opening lines, frontman Jarvis Cocker asks the crowd of several thousands of people gathered within the grounds of organiser Michael Eavis's farm in Wiltshire ‘Oh is this the way they say the future's meant to feel? Or just 20,000 people standing in a field?’³ When released some weeks later, amid much tabloid invective concerning its title (exacerbated by the fact that the sleeve bore a step-by-step illustration of how to construct a wrap, the paper container used to house doses of powdered drugs such as speed and cocaine), it was a hit, entering the UK Top Forty at number two.

Though several newspapers predictably frothed with rage at the drug references — ‘E's’ and ‘Wizz’ being slang for ecstasy and amphetamines—the song itself was hardly guilty of glamourization or even celebration. Although not a cautionary tale in the mould of the tragic teen pop of the late 1950s and early 1960s, it pointedly evoked the bewilderment and sense of disorientation that accompanied the ecstasy comedown:

‘You want to phone your mother and say “Mother, I can never come home again ’cause I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire.”’ The press was not of course interested in the content of the lyric but in reviving the hysteria that dogged acid house and its attendent drug cultures during their heyday in the late 1980s. In such an atmosphere, as Gavin Hills pointed out, ‘every aspect of dance culture, even its satire, is considered controversial.’⁴ The controversy did not end there, however. For those who were listening, the song's ambivalence towards its subject invited feelings both of identification—the shared acknowledgement that when chemically piloted, emotions could go down as well as up—and unease: here was a new pop icon making dark comedy out of what many considered one of youth culture's great positives, a cross-cultural movement that had made a difference.

However one chooses to gloss its evocation of rave, the release of ‘Sorted For E's and Wizz’ coincided with the beginning of a period of historicization and reflection, a process of mediation within which one would see the term ‘sorted’ gaining new meanings beyond its limited scope as a euphemism for being on ‘E’.The more widespread slang usage, from which the drug term was derived, abbreviated the phrase ‘sorted out’, connoting that something had been satisfactorily effected or organized to a state of completion or finality. The expression ‘sorted’ only resided within the drug lexicon for a short period during 1988–92: by 1995 it was already dated. Like ‘loved-up’, ‘on one’ and other such euphemisms it had become a rave archaism, utilized lyrically to give a sense of ironic specificity to the song's subject. Yet the term refused to be consigned to the realm of historical linguistics. Later that same year it was resurrected once more for both the subcultural edification of parents and the moral education of the youths who were considered to be at risk from the drug cultures associated with dance. Printed this time on black hoardings in bold white capitals, next to a smiling picture of an eighteen-year-old girl, this fleeting piece of drug argot was transformed into a terrible pun for the nation at large. ‘Sorted’ became the slogan in the anti-drug poster campaign which followed the death by dilutional hyponatrema (water intoxication) of teenager Leah Betts in November 1995.⁵

Since, if not because of, Leah Betts’ death (one teenager dying as a result of taking Ecstasy was never going to trigger this kind of major reassessment: by 1995 up to sixty deaths had been attributed to Ecstasy use in the United Kingdom⁶) the sense of an ending, or at the very least, a reckoning of what has preceded, has characterized much coverage of British dance culture. The term ‘sorted’ has taken on further resonance: since 1995, a great deal of ‘sorting’ has been going on, as journalists, writers and cultural commentators labour to gather, arrange and anthologize their various accounts of the baptisms and oblivions, the scams and the epiphanies which unfolded on dancefloors and in fields across the UK.The various mediators of British youth culture have been dealing with a historicizing impulse accompanying the passing of a decade since 1986, the year Chicago house first arrived on British shores and entered both the clubs and the charts. But the celebrations and reconsiderations have not ended there. Each subsequent year after 1995 marks the passing of a decade in which some key moment took place in the history of dance culture; and with each anniversary, music and style magazines have mounted detailed retrospectives, celebrating, glossing and generally picking over the cultural debris. From the mid-1990s onwards, numerous books on the subject have been published: collections on graphic design and visual culture; rave fiction; short story collections and novels; biographies; taxonomies; and cultural histories. At the time of writing, the ever accelerating quantity of historical and critical texts concerned with dance (to which this book is a further contribution) seems unlikely to peter out.

Inherent in both these senses of the term ‘sorted’, suspended between the sense of conclusion, and the sense of ordering and arranging which characterizes the anthologies, re-issues and greatest hit collections, the histories and the narratives, there is a feeling of anxiety over the attribution of meaning to the acid house and rave movements which were credited with having such an influence. The inlay to Pulp's single, ‘Sorted…’, carried the following text:

The summer of ’89: Centreforce FM, Santa Pod, Sunrise 5000, ‘Ecstasy Airport’, ride the white horse, the strings of life, dancing at motorway service stations, falling asleep at the wheel on the way home. There's so many people—it's got to mean something, it needs to mean something, surely it must mean something.

IT DIDN't MEAN NOTHING.

The ambiguity found here in the double negative— ‘It didn't mean nothing’ — encapsulates the kernel of doubt at the centre of many responses to instrumental dance and music cultures; where a culturally-inherited insistence that value inheres in attributable meaning collides desperately with a sense that dance and dance music have traditionally resisted or negated familiar modes of communicating either value or meaning.

Simon Reynolds, in his article ‘Rave Culture: Living Dream or Living Death?’,⁷ alludes both to the sense of an ending and a rising scepticism as to the meanings that have been attributed to musical moments like rave. He takes his titular image of the inspirational music culture turned zombie from Greil Marcus’ ‘Note on the Life & Death and Incandescent Banality of Rock ’n’ Roll’.⁸ Marcus excavates repeated diagnoses of the death of rock, made ‘because rock ’n’ roll—as a cultural force rather than as a catchphrase—no longer seems to mean anything. It no longer seems to speak in unknown tongues that turn into new and common languages, to say anything that is not instantly translated back into the dominant discourse of our day’.⁹ This is transposed by Reynolds on to a British dance culture drained of cultural meaning. As a formalist music critic, Reynolds is positive: he sees dance music changing, profligating, renewing itself—creatively in no danger of stagnating or ossifying. The caveat is that as rave fissures into many musical sub-genres, its political promise of new collectivity, of a unifying cultural movement ebbs too: ‘Talk of the death of rock or the death of rave refers not to the exhaustion of the music's formal possibilities, then, but to the seeping away of meaning, the loss of a collective sense of going somewhere.’¹⁰ For certain commentators the all-too fleeting glimpse of a new social formation, which quickly passed, was a bitter disappointment. Hence Reynolds’ quoting of John Lydon's words at the Sex Pistols’ final gig in Rosewood, in the States: ‘Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?’

So why the anxiety? Over ten years on from the advent of house, it is tempting to suggest that this is an inevitable period of comedown, the downswing of a pharmaceutical arc experienced by a generation now learning that ‘pleasure is not without its consequences’.¹¹ Matthew Collin has stated that ‘the typical cycle of Ecstasy use can be mapped culturally’¹²: coming up, followed by the high which cannot be sustained without continual increases in dosage (which must inevitably be relinquished), and a difficult period of comedown, eased by the promise of greater maturity and self-knowledge for those who have not fallen by the wayside. Such a ‘pharmacological narrative’ does often seem to shape the stories and histories of acid house (and other dance cultures). But this is just one narrative, and not a new one at that: it echoes a familiar mythic structure, the rise and fall which marks the tales of the Great Men of History, or the Bildungsroman, the novel form which charts the journey of a youthful hero from innocence to experience. Indeed the sheer familiarity of this model should give us pause before invoking it once more; it is too easy to map such a loaded (in several senses) chemical micro-narrative of euphoria and comedown on to the complexities of cultural history. Just as pharmacological usage and experience varies among the constituencies of youth, and its various club cultures, so too the models that code and are coded by those experiences need to be recognized and considered in all their complexity.

It might be suggested that the ten-year delay in producing the histories of acid house marked an awareness that too many rash promises had been made and too many hopes invested in the sweat-soaked, serotonin-washed moments of 1988–92. There are no doubt many commentators who have reconsidered some of the predictions and analyses which they made at the time: from the end of football hooliganism (inspired by the temporary collision of football terrace and ‘E’ cultures¹³), to the suggestion by the NME dance journalist, Jack Barron, that MDMA (Ecstasy) could end the war in Northern Ireland.¹⁴ Yet however naive both suggestions might seem with the benefit of hindsight, they were inspired by concrete manifestations of rave culture. Nicholas Saunders cites statistics that suggest a statistical drop in football violence did coincide with the spread of E-use on the terraces.¹⁵ Similarly, the late blooming of house clubs in Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland opened up non-segregated leisure spaces within which historical and cultural divisions were displaced, if not healed: where identity came second to the temporary pleasures of dance.¹⁶

In this sense, the mid- to late 1990s should represent not a moment of comedown, but rather the final stage in the pharmacological narrative: a calmer and wiser space from within which one can reassess the preceding rollercoaster ride. The problem with this notion of ‘perspective’ is that it privileges an epistemology which places the reliable narrator outside that which he or she describes. This is a familiar characteristic of the western episteme; the notion that the telescopic power of discourse to inscribe and describe inheres in a vantage point some distance away from the object of scrutiny. The only narratives that can be trusted are the ones that position themselves at a safe distance from the objects and activities which they are describing.

The problems of location for those attempting to describe, evaluate or analyse dance cultures are several. Ironically many accounts provided by those with significant cultural capital invested in the era, with some of the best credentials, are characterized by the considerable care taken not to label their stories as definitive. Perhaps aware of some of the inadequacies and discursive priorities of those accounts which have traded on the metaphysics of presence, commentators like Matthew Collin, a former editor of i- D and the most accomplished historian on the UK's Ecstasy culture, are sure to preface their histories with disclaimers:

The story of Ecstasy culture is itself a remix—a collage of facts, opinions and experiences. Differing outlooks and vested interests combine to deny the possibility of a history that everyone can agree as truth; some things are forgotten, others are exaggerated; stories are embellished, even invented, and the past is polished to suit the necessities of the present. Behind one narrative are hundreds of thousands of unwritten ones and who is to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1: The Tribal Rites of Saturday Night Discos and Intellectuals
• 2: Music, Meaning and Pleasure From Plato to Disco
• 3: The Metaphysics of Music
• 4: Take your Partner by the Hand Dance Music, Gender and Sexuality
• 5: Metal Machine Musics Technology, Subjectivity and Reception
• 6: No Music, No Dancing Capitalist Modernity and the Legacy of Puritanism
• 7: The Politics of Popular Culture
• Bibliography