Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Berlin’s rave scene in 1996
Berlin’s rave scene in 1996. Photograph: Ullstein bild via Getty Images
Berlin’s rave scene in 1996. Photograph: Ullstein bild via Getty Images

Rave On: Global Adventures in Electronic Dance Music by Matthew Collin – review

This article is more than 6 years old
A scholarly account of how dance music migrated from the margins to the multibillion-dollar mainstream is illuminating

Where you stand on today’s dance culture might actually have a lot to do with where you stand (or, in my case, stood) on the dancefloor itself. For thrill-seekers who came of age during the late-80s rave boom or earlier, the dancers were the focus, and the repetitive beat the lodestar.

The vinyl being spun could still trace its lineage back to gay and African American subcultures. The most dedicated clubbers were kaleidoscope-eyed margin-walkers rejecting the grind for a more egalitarian, smiley-faced existence, in what the anarchist writer Hakim Bey has termed “temporary autonomous zones”.

Nowadays, the international dance music business is worth something to the tune of $6.2bn a year – a figure cited in a report seen by CNN in 2014; Forbes has a ready reckoner of DJ richesse from the same year. In this lucrative leisure racket, customers face not one another, but the huge pyrotechnic rig at front, paying homage to the almighty superstar DJ (virtually always white and male). In Las Vegas pleasure domes, clubbers are segregated according to entry fee; in Shanghai, the dancefloors are tiny, to fit in more tables where the super-rich can pose. Ibiza, too, has gone yacht class. The word “rave” is never uttered by party organisers in the US, thanks to Senator Joe Biden’s Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy legislation, subsequently passed as the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act in 2003.

It takes until page 159 for dance journalist turned editor turned author turned foreign correspondent Matthew Collin to mention “bro-step”, the epithet by which some of the most meat-headed US electronic dance music (EDM) is known. Before the 90s, electronic music was held – at least, by straight white US guys – to be the music of girls, gays and Europeans. Somehow, the “transglobal gnostic sect” of techno became the stuff of shirts-off bonding, of easyJet stag dos and Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents.

In Collin’s first book, Altered State (1997), he produced an eloquent account of how ecstasy and acid house changed club culture. Here, across 10 chapters, Collin tries to understand (among many things) how impromptu M25 raves and Goan full moon parties and Ibizan beach bliss-outs became playpens with table service for the 1%, or festivals where branding is king.

That isn’t his main thrust, however. Here are 10 x-rays of dance culture in 10 global hotspots that lovingly trace the history of each locale’s sound through its DJs, promoters and proponents, taking into account the solipsism of hedonism and the counterculture’s political impetus. Both scholarly and intimate, Rave On delves deep into how divided cities such as Detroit and Berlin produced seminal records and committed scenes (well-documented stories, but grippingly retold here). His ode to Berlin’s no-cameras, no-sponsorship Berghain club nails rave’s escapist impetus: “Berghain was one of the few remaining places in western Europe where you could exit the matrix.”

Collin’s quest is never short of illuminating – CDs dumped in China as plastic waste in the 90s actually fed a hungry black market for foreign sounds. Inevitably, it switches between two themes. First, the lost Eden. Collin is quick to note that the pervasive belief that everything was always better a generation or two ago, when the “spirit” of a scene was at its apex, is probably as old as hedonism itself.

The second theme is perhaps the more fascinating: how serious aficionados create organic scenes in unlikely places, and how poor kids with a pirated copy of digital audio workstation FruityLoops (now known as FL Studio) are still creating new genres. Collin travels to South Africa to document kwaito and gqom – punishing, irruptive, granular DIY forms – and to Abu Dhabi and Dubai, where refugees from more repressive Islamic regimes have created a microcosm of social liberalism and good times in modest basements. He ends up back in New York, where a young generation of voguers – it’s now called kiki – are renewing that city’s reputation for fun as asylum. “If anyone wanted to know whether dance culture still really meant something in the turbo-capitalist EDM era – well, for these ballroom girls and boys, it really did.”

Rave On: Global Adventures in Electronic Dance Music by Matthew Collin is published by Serpent’s Tail (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed