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Authors: Simon Reynolds
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BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Even without physical activity, Ecstasy raises your body temperature; dehydration and non-stop dancing can push it as high as 108° F, at which point the blood forms clots. Because this uses up the clotting agent – normally at work sealing the myriad miniscule abrasions that occur inside the body – the result can be internal bleeding, followed by collapse. The solution is to drink plenty of fluids (safe-raving counsellors recommend a pint an hour), and take regular chill-out breaks. But the problem is that MDMA affects the subjective awareness of body-temperature: those in danger often feel like they’re cool. Cash-restricted ravers would often rather spend their money on the ‘essentials’ (more drugs) than outrageously overpriced soft drinks. Club owners have been known to turn off the cold-water taps, in order to increase bar takings. Such cynical practices have declined, as more clubs adopt the harm-reduction policies devised by safe-raving pressure groups. Ravers also know more about how to take care of themselves. But a little bit of education can also be dangerous. Take the case of Britain’s most famous Ecstasy fatality, Leah Betts, who died in 1995 at her own eighteenth birthday party. Feeling unwell, and having heard that water was the remedy, she appears to have drunk too much too rapidly; the inquest revealed that she died by drowning. The problem was that the drink-lots-of-fluids advice applies only to intense aerobic activity, and wasn’t appropriate in her circumstances. MDMA also seems to have affected her body’s capacity to process the liquid.
Although there have been a few cases of people dying after taking just one pill because of a statistically remote allergic reaction, most Ecstasy-related fatalities have involved bingeing, over-exertion and mixing of drugs (sometimes the more toxic amphetamine; sometimes alcohol, which dehydrates the body). Because of all these co-factors, it’s hard to ascertain exactly how dangerous MDMA is. Ecstasy apologists often compare the chemical favourably with other drugs, legal and illegal. In the UK there are around 100,000 deaths per year from tobacco-related illnesses, 30 – 40,000 from alcohol-related illnesses and accidents, and 500 from paracetamol. On average, heroin and solvent abuse each claim about 150 lives per annum, while amphetamine’s death-toll is about 25. In the first ten years of British rave, Ecstasy has been implicated in approximately 60 deaths: an average of six per year. Given the vast number people taking the drug during those eight years (conservative estimates put it at half a million per weekend in Britain), Ecstasy appears to be relatively safe – at least compared with such socially sanctioned leisure activities as mountaineering, skiing and motorbiking. Statistically, you’re more at risk driving to the rave than being on E at the rave. Driving home under the influence is another matter altogether, given E’s deleterious effect on co-ordination and reaction-time.
As with liquor in America in the twenties, prohibition has created a climate in which Ecstasy is more hazardous than it might be if the substance was legal. Prohibition actually made drinkers get drunker (black market moonshine often had a dangerously high alcohol content), and it created a climate of lawlessness. Similarly, because the overwhelming majority of early experiences with Ecstasy are so rewarding, punters become curious about other banned substances, and get drawn into the culture of polydrug usage. MDMA’s positive aura has rubbed off on other, far less deserving chemicals. This is the flaw in a drug policy that conflates all ‘drugs’ as a single demon, and fails to distinguish between different levels of risk and reward.
From the consumer’s point of view, the worst thing about illegalization is that you don’t know what you’re buying. The illegal drug market in Britain has given rise to an ever-expanding range of brands of Ecstasy, distinguished by their colouring or by tiny pictograms stamped into the tablet, and varying widely in content: Brands like Doves, New Yorkers, California Sunrises, M&Ms, Dennis the Menaces, Rhubarb & Custards, Snowballs, Burgers, Flatliners, Shamrocks, Swans, Swallows, Turbos, Phase Fours, Big Brown Ones, Refreshers, Love-hearts, White Calis, Riddlers, Elephants,
ad infinitum
(and in some cases,
ad nauseam
). Ravers become connoisseurs of their differering effects and how they interact with each other or with other drugs.
ad infinitum
(and in some cases,
ad nauseam
). Ravers become connoisseurs of their differering effects and how they interact with each other or with other drugs.
Although the purity of Ecstasy fluctuates, the general rule today appears to be that you have about a 10 per cent chance of buying a total dud (usually containing decongestants, antihistamines or harmless inert substances) and about a 66 per cent likelihood of getting a variable dose of pure MDMA. The slack is taken up by pills that contain MDMA-related substances (MDA, MDEA), or amphetamine, or cocktails of drugs designed to simulate MDMA’s effects (e.g. amphetamine + LSD). Instead of making ravers more cautious, the uncertainty of supply seems to have the opposite effect. Ravers eagerly assume that they’ve been sold an inferior product, and take more pills to compensate; hence the perennial mantra ‘E’s are shit these days, you have to take five of them to get a buzz’. Often the ‘weakness’ of any given Ecstasy pill is caused by the serotonin-depletion effect; the bliss-deficit is in the raver’s brain, not the tablet. If E was legally available in doses of guaranteed purity and fixed levels of MDMA content, it would be easier for users to monitor their intake, to realize when they’re overdoing it.
Excessive, routinized use combines with Ecstasy’s diminishing-returns syndrome to form a vicious circle, a negative synergy. The individual’s experience of Ecstasy is degraded; on the collective level, Ecstasy scenes lose their idyllic lustre and become a soul-destroying grind. This utopian/dystopian dialectic intrinsic to rave culture demands the coining of some new quasi-pharmacological terms:
vitalyst
(‘vitalize’ + ‘catalyst’) and
obliviate
(oblivion + opiate). These terms describe drug
experiences
, rather than intrinsic and immutable properties of the drugs themselves; the same drug, abused, can cross the line between positive and negative. Ecstasy starts out as a ‘vitalyst’: you feel more alive, more sensitized, more
human
; on the macro-level, rave scenes in their early days buzz with creativity and we’re-gonna-change-the-world idealism. But with regular, rampant use, Ecstasy can become just another ‘obliviate’, like alcohol and narcotics: something that numbs the soul and transforms rave scenes into retreats from reality. This utopian/dystopian shift from ‘paradise-regained’ to ‘pleasure-prison’ is a recurring narrative experienced by successive Ecstasy generations all across the world. For seemingly programmed into the chemical structure of MDMA is the instruction:
use me, don’t abuse me
.
vitalyst
(‘vitalize’ + ‘catalyst’) and
obliviate
(oblivion + opiate). These terms describe drug
experiences
, rather than intrinsic and immutable properties of the drugs themselves; the same drug, abused, can cross the line between positive and negative. Ecstasy starts out as a ‘vitalyst’: you feel more alive, more sensitized, more
human
; on the macro-level, rave scenes in their early days buzz with creativity and we’re-gonna-change-the-world idealism. But with regular, rampant use, Ecstasy can become just another ‘obliviate’, like alcohol and narcotics: something that numbs the soul and transforms rave scenes into retreats from reality. This utopian/dystopian shift from ‘paradise-regained’ to ‘pleasure-prison’ is a recurring narrative experienced by successive Ecstasy generations all across the world. For seemingly programmed into the chemical structure of MDMA is the instruction:
use me, don’t abuse me
.
ONE
A TALE OF THREE CITIES
DETROIT TECHNO
,
CHICAGO HOUSE
AND NEW YORK
GARAGE
,
CHICAGO HOUSE
AND NEW YORK
GARAGE
‘Kraftwerk was always very culty, but it was very Detroit too because of the industry in Detroit, and because of the mentality. That music automatically appeals to the people like a tribal calling . . . It sounded like somebody making music with hammers and nails.’
– Derrick May, 1992
To promote Kraftwerk’s 1991 remixed ‘greatest hits’ compilation,
The Mix
, the group’s American label Elektra came up with an amusing advert: the famous one-and-only photo of blues pioneer Robert Johnson, but with his suit filled by a robot’s body. The visual pun was witty and eyecatching, but most importantly, it was
accurate
. Just as Johnson was the godfather of rock’s gritty authenticity and wracked catharsis, Kraftwerk invented the pristine, post-human pop phuture we now inhabit. The story of techno begins not in early eighties Detroit, as is so often claimed, but in early seventies Dusseldorf, where Kraftwerk built their KlingKlang sound-factory and churned out pioneering synth-and-drum-machine tracks like ‘Autobahn’, ‘Trans-Europe Express’ and ‘The Man-Machine’.
The Mix
, the group’s American label Elektra came up with an amusing advert: the famous one-and-only photo of blues pioneer Robert Johnson, but with his suit filled by a robot’s body. The visual pun was witty and eyecatching, but most importantly, it was
accurate
. Just as Johnson was the godfather of rock’s gritty authenticity and wracked catharsis, Kraftwerk invented the pristine, post-human pop phuture we now inhabit. The story of techno begins not in early eighties Detroit, as is so often claimed, but in early seventies Dusseldorf, where Kraftwerk built their KlingKlang sound-factory and churned out pioneering synth-and-drum-machine tracks like ‘Autobahn’, ‘Trans-Europe Express’ and ‘The Man-Machine’.
In one of those weird pop-historical loops, Kraftwerk were themselves influenced by Detroit – by the adrenalinized insurgency of the MC5 and The Stooges (whose noise, Iggy Pop has said, was partly inspired by the pounding clangour of the Motor City’s auto factories). Like the other Krautrock bands – Can, Faust, Neu! – Kraftwerk were also inspired by the mantric minimalism and non-R & B rhythms of the Velvet Underground (whose John Cale produced the first Stooges album). Replacing guitars and drums with synthesizer pulses and programmed beats, Kraftwerk sublimated the Velvets’ white light/ white heat speed-rush into the cruise-control serenity of
motorik
, a metronomic, regular-as-carburettor rhythm that was at once post-rock and proto-techno. ‘Autobahn’ – a 24-minute hymn to the exhilaration of gliding down the freeway that sounded like a cyborg Beach Boys – was (in abbreviated form) a chart smash throughout the world in 1975. Two years later on the
Trans-Europe Express
album, the title track – all indefatigable girder-beats and arching, Doppler Effect synths – segues into ‘Metal On Metal’, a funky iron foundry that sounded like a Luigi Russolo Art of Noises megamix for a Futurist discotheque.
motorik
, a metronomic, regular-as-carburettor rhythm that was at once post-rock and proto-techno. ‘Autobahn’ – a 24-minute hymn to the exhilaration of gliding down the freeway that sounded like a cyborg Beach Boys – was (in abbreviated form) a chart smash throughout the world in 1975. Two years later on the
Trans-Europe Express
album, the title track – all indefatigable girder-beats and arching, Doppler Effect synths – segues into ‘Metal On Metal’, a funky iron foundry that sounded like a Luigi Russolo Art of Noises megamix for a Futurist discotheque.
‘They were so stiff, they were funky,’ techno pioneer Carl Craig has said of Kraftwerk. This paradox – which effectively translates as ‘they were so white, they were black’ – is as close as anyone has got to explaining the mystery of why Kraftwerk’s music (and above all ‘Trans-Europe Express’, their most dispassionately metronomic and Teutonic track) had such a massive impact on black American youth. In New York, Kraftwerk almost single-handedly sired the electro movement. Africa Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force’s 1982 smash ‘Planet Rock’ stole its doomy melody from ‘Trans-Europe’ and its beatbox rhythm from Kraftwerk’s 1981 track ‘Numbers’.
But while the body-popping, electric boogaloo era passed quickly (with New York hip hop pursuing a grittier, Seventies funk direction), Kraftwerk had a more enduring impact in Detroit, where the band’s music plugged into the Europhile tastes of arty, middle-class blacks. From Cybotron’s 1982 ‘Cosmic Cars’ to Carl Craig’s 1995 ‘Autobahn’ homage
Landcruising
, Detroit techno still fits Derrick May’s famous description: ‘like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator with nothing but a sequencer to keep them occupied.’
The Techno RebelsLandcruising
, Detroit techno still fits Derrick May’s famous description: ‘like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator with nothing but a sequencer to keep them occupied.’
‘When I first heard synthesizers dropped on records it was great . . . like UFOs landing on records, so I got one,’ Juan Atkins has said. ‘It wasn’t any one particular group that turned me on to synthesizers. But “Flashlight” [Parliament’s Number One R & B hit from early 1978] was the first record I heard where maybe 75 per cent of the production was electronic – the bassline was electronic, and it was mostly synthesizers.’
Atkins was then a sixteen-year-old living in Belleville, a small town thirty miles from Detroit, and playing bass, drums and ‘a little bit of lead guitar’ in various garage funk bands. Three years earlier, he had befriended two kids in the year below him at junior high school: Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. ‘In Belleville,’ remembers Saunderson, ‘it was pretty racial still at that time, ’cos it was a decent area. You had to have a little bit of money, the houses were off lakes, and there wasn’t a lot of black people there. So we three kind of gelled right away.’
Atkins became May’s musical mentor, hipping him to all kinds of weird shit, from Parliament-Funkadelic to Kraftwerk. Says May, ‘I’m telling you, man: Juan was the most important person in my life, other than my mother. If it wasn’t for Juan I would never have heard any of this shit, I don’t know where I’d be if it wasn’t for him.’
Although the music they were into was all dancefloor oriented, the Belleville Three brought an art-rock seriousness to bear on what rock fans then dissed as mere ‘disco’.
‘For us, it was always a dedication,’ says May. ‘We use to sit back and philosophize on what these people thought about when they made their music, and how they felt the next phase of the music would go. And you know, half the shit we thought about the artist never even fucking thought about! . . . Because Belleville was a rural town, we perceived the music a little bit different than you would if you encountered it in nightclubs or through watching other people dance. We’d sit back with the lights off and listen to records by Kraftwerk and Funkadelic and Parliament and Bootsy and Yellow Magic Orchestra, and try to actually understand what they were thinking about when they made it. We never just took it as entertainment, we took it as a serious philosophy.’
Through Atkins, May and Saunderson were exposed to all manner of post-Kraftwerk European electropop (Gary Numan, Giorgio Moroder’s
E = MC
2
), alongside quirky American New Wave like the B52’s. Why did this cold, funkless European music strike a chord with black youth from Detroit and Chicago? Atkins attributes it to ‘something about industry and the Midwest. When you read the history books of America, they tell you that when the UAW – the United Auto Workers – formed, this was the first time that white people and black people came together on an equal footing, fighting for the same thing: better wages, better working conditions.’
E = MC
2
), alongside quirky American New Wave like the B52’s. Why did this cold, funkless European music strike a chord with black youth from Detroit and Chicago? Atkins attributes it to ‘something about industry and the Midwest. When you read the history books of America, they tell you that when the UAW – the United Auto Workers – formed, this was the first time that white people and black people came together on an equal footing, fighting for the same thing: better wages, better working conditions.’
Atkins, May and Saunderson belonged to a new generation of Detroit area black youth who grew up accustomed to affluence. ‘My grandfather worked at Ford for twenty years, he was like a career auto worker,’ says Atkins. ‘A lot of the kids and the grand-kids that came up after this integration, they got used to a better way of living. It’s funny that Detroit is now one of the most depressed cities in America, but it’s still the city that has the most affluent blacks in the country. If you had a job at the plant at this time, you were making bucks. And it wasn’t like the white guy standing next to you is getting five or ten dollars an hour more than you. Everybody was equal. So what happened is that you’ve got this environment with these kids that come up somewhat snobby, ’cos hey, their parents are making money working at Ford or General Motors or Chrysler, been elevated to a foreman, or even elevated to get a white collar job.’ The Europhilia of these middle-class black youths, says Atkins, was part of their attempt ‘to distance themselves from the kids that were coming up in the projects, in the ghetto.’
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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