the music of the aftermath: drug-comedown culture

My favourite example evah evah evah of a dance music response to its host scene's relationship w/ drugs is that amazing/chilling moment in Hyper-On Experience's uber-grebt 'ardkore track "Lord of the Null-Lines" when the diva suddenly wails "There's a VOID where there should be ECSTASY!" - which has so many potential meanings but all of them are a bit sad and dark and depressing.

"Should note..."
and
"pinpointing that moment within..."

(i knew this would be complicated)

i need to write more on this, but i do think reynolds covers this pretty well (have you read energy flash mark?), if so, its only reiteration on my part really.

er, here is something else i wrote on another thread, which touches on this...

"the interesting thing about rave is that true crossover never
really happened, this was because the scene hyperventilated
and then imploded spectacularly at some point during 1993,
it was as though 500,000 people jumped off a cliff at once,
some had built up 2 years or so too much class a action, i
had been around for maybe 4 months. it was a very young scene,
most people around the same age - which is why most ravers from
the day are still 25-30. it was interesting to see the thing get
really too mental in such a short space of time. reynolds covers
this well, hedonism for hedonisms sake, not even enjoyment towards
the end, then paranoia, fear, overdose, the clubs shut down, the
scene basically put itself into hospital.

then only darkness, cinders, some went back to house music
instead of hardcore, some into retrodance, the darkness scene
faltered on, until in london it eventually became jungle,
and a new scene born, very anti-chemical (pro-dope though)

so, the crossover never really happened, and it remained a
totally populist subculture throughout its entire duration...

...and the breakage of the scene into happyhardcore and jungle
was not due to the novelty tunes, which had dissipated by then.
it was the growing moodyness of the clubs, which began to be
reflected in the darkness scene. i dont think it split into happy
hardcore and jungle immediately either. i think the majority of the
original scene went dark, and the happy hardcore stuff appeared as
reaction to that, and kind of cut itself off (also this was
geographic...mainly in scotland). the implosion of the scene was
quite fast, and HH clubs never really took off in much of the
country, because the numbers dropped drastically, with most people
moving either into house, or the emerging trance/harthouse style
clubs (eg feb93, well before HH, the orbit stopped booking rave
djs overnight, and went totally germany/usa/holland techno and
trance).

and jungle didnt emerge immediately out of rave at all, there was a
long period of darkness stuff that reynolds identifies (although
i think simon misses out totally in that at the same time as this
there were a lot of vibey/twinkly manix/house crew/prodhouse tunes).
so as well as getting darker, there was also a more vibey reaction,
which was also anti-saccharine. jungle then began to emerge from the
shrunken scene"

http://members.aol.com/blissout/mover.htm

anyway,i must have a read of that article
i'll probably post some thoughts on this thread later on...

(disclaimer: do not do any of the above)

ok back to the music

Why didn't we see this in the post rave years? When I read this I got a shock, because I thought they were... and these people were us. Am I wrong?

I'm thinking of the kinds of music writers always mentioned in these parts, most of whom are now writing books or talking on TV whenever a perspective on rave is needed. Perhaps that hisoticisation _is_ part of the rave comedown? Nothing takes the sting out of an idealistic movement more than cold or slightly humorous depth analysis.

Hmmmm. If you don't agree, there's another possibility. Perhaps the impact hasn't been substantial yet because it's still early days? Not five years ago, very few people were really hitting the media and the academic institutions with this subject matter at all. Now we've seen the euphoric coverage/movies/parent scaring siddipate. Poeple son't interview those old hippies in Goa any more, and no-one talks about the kinds of huggy rave ideals like they used to. Maybe in a couple of years there will be a kind of social comedown as the mood slowly filers through.

Not convincing? A third possibility. The rave phenomenon doesn't have an impact on society becuase the media is still largely controlled by baby boomers. I know, I know, it's tired. However, a tired but true proposition is a true proposition.

Just because when myself (or thousands of others) discovered "raves" instead of "rave" doesn't really.

The reason the rave phenomenon doesn't have an "impact" on the media as much as it used to is because time passes, and the media have other cultural events to discuss. It's difficult for me to express my relationship with the halcyon days etc but all I know is a great deal of what is said about them applys fully to my halcyon days, leading me to believe that the only death in rave is the death of the youth/seratonin/dancing shoes of those who had first preached about its birth. I'm not alone in this either, new people are discovering ecstacy/dance music every day, though perhaps "rave" was a more grand concept than "ecstacy/dance music", someone may explain.

Going back to what Geeta said, I disagree somewhat. At least, I think the effects of ecstacy vary sufficiently from person to person, and people vary sufficiently from each other that it's difficult to discuss the nature of comedown. I don't think many people experience major comedown until they've been doing pills weekly for ages. At least I know I didn't.

But the key thing to remember is that like most things in life it's a tradeoff. I may not have experienced comedowns because I was waking up the day after doing Es thinking "that was the fucking greatest night I've ever had" consistently. For about 8 months. Again I suspect this is true for alot of people. Even after my inital run of E use, I can't honestly say I've ever felt totally in the pits of depression or even anywhere close.

I'm not selling the drug or anything here, I just think "comedown" is a very ambiguous and often exaggerated thing. At least, it's very very difficult to say how much is mental and how much is chemical.

I firmly believe as I said that it's a gross/net scenario, the comedown is lessened the better you feel about the night in question in the first place. Hence the worst comedowns I've ever had haven't been "damn I feel terrible, the party's over" but "you fucking idiot, you took pills and drank your head off and acted like a twat!".

OTM. I honestly see no difference in popularity and vibe at clubs/parties between my first clubbing experiences thirteen years ago and last week. Same kind of kids getting into it, same kind of people getting out of it and proclaiming the genre is dead. The whole E mystique might've worn off for people looking at it from the outside or for ex-clubbers, but for those actually clubbing it isn't different at all to what it used to be - use it two or three times and it becomes pretty clear what it does, it doesn't take you those "legendary" five years '88-'93 to get it.

If I stop making sense, say so - it's late, my english is bad and i'm tired. And I know this is off-topic.

"the only death in rave is the death of the youth/seratonin/dancing shoes of those who had first
preached about its birth. "

difficult for me to express my relationship with the halcyon days etc but all I know is a great deal of what is said about them applys fully to my halcyon days

of course! i am not implying otherwise, what i am saying , is that the framework for these experiences is already here, it is happeniong all the time, gradual arrival of more people having epiphany etc, the point i was trying to make was the sociological one, in that the time period i was referring to was one of explosion in terms of numbers of people, basically from nothing at all, and then exponentially rising. and then also the comedown of a scene in its entirety. NO NEW PEOPLE having that epiphany/halcyon days (at least not in any number, because the clubs suddenly started closing, there was moody feeling)

ie, im not saynig this on an individual level, but about a particular scene, and things come in waves.

ie, while this was going on in the rave scene, the house/prog scene was not affected in the same way, and that period of decline for rave in the uk co-incided with expansions in germany and holland, the same implosion didnt happen there, because a different explosion was going on there, the period of death/decline in one place, a period of explosion/halcyon somewhere else. but, you know, frankfurt had its own implosion later on, i mean, its not exactly a clubbing town now is it? compared to rest of germany? and the superclub era of late 90s, a downsizing, a lot of big clubs unable to sustain the numbers where they had only a year before, but thenother things rising

so, i dont think its a constant, at least not in the uk, but rises and falls, and the death of rave/hardcore in 93 is interesting, i think, because of its abruptness, and the lack of continuity, and a strange wilderness period, but also, how this can be heard clearly in the actual music itself (play jonny l - hurt you so, and then boogie times tribe - dark stranger one after the other, and how did that change? or play hixxy alongside doc scott/dj ss, and think how did these 2 sounds co-exist 6 months before)

i wz sorta hoping ppl wd talk abt more than just rave