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From: bbehlen@soda.berkeley.edu (Brian Behlendorf)
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1993 21:35:14 -0700
X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.3 5/22/91)
To: sfraves@soda.berkeley.edu, ne-raves@gnu.ai.mit.edu, socal-raves@ucsd.edu
Subject: NEW and IMPROVED (Option Magazine, Jan/Feb 1993)
Status: OR

Here's an article I scanned in... share and enjoy.

        Brian

	The Beastie Boys are whooping it up onstage at the Hollywood
Palladium. But to audience members standing on the venue's upper tier,
the focal point is not the group - it's the throngs of bodies slamming,
throbbing and undulating at the foot of the stage.  Now and then, one of
the bodies darts into the spotlight along with Mike D., Ad-Rock and MCA,
then just as quickly hurls spastically off again into the faceless mass.
Likewise, at a pre-Nevermind Nirvana show in Tijuana, Mexico, as the
first three chords of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" ring across the club,
Kurt Cobain and company are only providing a backdrop for the real star
of the show: a member of the audience who has climbed out of the mosh
pit, up two levels of seating, and is preparing to cannonball back into
the pit some 30 feet below.

	The audience-as-headliner is a peculiarly '90s phenomenon.  But
if punk rock gave birth to this do-it-yourself anti-star ethis, nowhere
has it become more ingrained into pop consciousness than at raves, where
those who make the music are no more recognizable than those who clean up
after the shows.  "There are no stars, there are no celebrities at
raves," says Ken Woodard, 26, a filmmaker who is working on a rave
documentary.  "You could say the DJs are the stars, but they probably
would disagree with you."

	Rave culture is the logical outgrowth of the "kill rock stars"
movement that began with punk rock; moreover, in avoiding disco's
narcissism, ravers celebrate the artist in the common man and woman more
than punks ever did.  Rave organizers are more likely to tell audiences to
"join the show; it's about you, not us."  By contrast, veteran punk
rockers Fugazi now lecture their audiences, imploring them to stop
slamming so that others may pay attention to the music.  A year ago in
these pages, Fugazi singer/guitarist Guy Picciotto complained, "It's kind
of frustrating when you just want to play a show and there's all this
other stuff going on." Bassist Joe Lany even suggested that the hardcore
ritual of slamdancing and stagediving is old hat, no longer a radical way
for audiences to xpress themselves.   What the members of Fugazi may not
wish to acknowledge is that this sort of participation, which only a
select few engaged in during hardcore's "good old days," is today as much
a part of the concert experience as the music.   Punk rock, in other
words, has succeeded with its leveler's agenda: in the '90s, the
audience is as important as the performer.

	It's 3 a.m.  on a hidden beach outside of Santa Cruz, California,
and a rave is in full effect.   From a distance, the mass of bodies
jerking about in the laser-flecked darkness looks like a Druidic ritual
dance as reimagined by a Cyberpunk; a computer matrix image ripped right
out of the cathode ray tube and slapped into nature.  Waves pound against
the shore in and out of sync with the cheerfully artificial rhythms and
that ubiquitous big beat.

	"Hey, it's natural to want to change your experience of reality,"
one of the ravers says, his body involuntarily quaking along within the
beat as if the beat itself were a huge, communal heart pumping alien
blood through each dancer on the sand.  "Even little kids like to spin
around to get dizzy," he continues.  "What do you think *that* is?" He
begins to spin around himself, as if to give an example of his argument.
Then he careens off into the buzzing, bobbing flock, his floppy, colorful
clothes whirling after him like a half-human vortex.  Behind him, mutating
computer images dance on a cliff wall.   The other dancers sense his
approach and create a space.  But nobody actually makes eye contact.  The
raver tilts his head back as he enters the space, and his eyes roll up
into their sockets.  Then he disappears into the crowd.

	"Record companies don't know what to do with this stuff," says
filmmaker Woodard.  "They can't package it because there are no faces
attached to it.  Most of the records are done by these kids in their
bedrooms on plain white labels."

	Raves provide the same backlash against '80s stadium bands such
as U2 and Guns N'Roses as '60s be-ins did against '50s teen idols like
Elvis and Fabian.  Yet even the hippie bands had personalities their fans
could identify.  Everyone knew what the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and
Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick looked like, but could you pick Moby or
the Orb out of a crowd? (If not, take a look at the photos in the
accompanying articles.) Rave DJs, unlike rock personalities, are
figuratively "down on the floor with the people, not up above," says
Woodard.  "When you're on a dance floor and there are 400 or 500 other
people, they're the party, they're the focus."  Moreover, rave music
isn't bought and sold like regular pop.  You won't find the cutting-edge,
white-label stuff at Tower Records, or even at so-called alternative
stores.  You find it at stores like Street Sounds on Melrose Avenue in Los
Angeles or BPM in San Francisco.  "About half the house music we sell goes
to the general public, people who heard it at a rave and asked the DJ
what it is and where they could get it," says Eddie Hardesty of Street
Sounds.  The other half is sold to the DJs themselves, who incorporate the
records into their own rave sets.   But L.A.  is unusual, in that until
recently it had a radio station, MARS-FM, which actually programmed house
music.  (In the last year, the station's management pulled the plug on
house and techno.) "We would get lots of people saying they heard it on
the radio," Hardesty says.   BPM, on the other hand, operates without a
local source of airplay, and sells only 25 percent of its stock to
non-DJs .

	Rave music doesn't lend itself to standard radio formats in the
United States.  For instance, the Orb's 40-minute single "Blue Room" hit
the charts in England, but American radio hasn't attempted to play it.
The Orb's own label cut and remixed the song for its U.S.   release; only
the first pressing of the new album, U.F.Orb, offers a bonus CD
containing the full-length version of "Blue Room."

	After shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic for five or
six years, raveculture in the United States is finally clicking into
place.  Its mixed and mashed elements are falling into the sort of sync
that turns a fad into a movement.  It came simultaneously out of several
visions which, while perhaps similar in many respects, are not the same:
the trippy, antinarrative house music scenes; the harsher,
industrial-techno scenes; the virtual reality, create-a-computer-
environment-and-then-live-in-it ideologues; and the hippie, Summer of
Love revivalists.

	The lifestyle fits into the cyclical nature of pop music, but
with a doggedly futuristic twist.  Unlike the punk rock preservationists,
or even the techno-industrial musical anarchists or hip-hop
postmodernists, rave DJs look in smiley-faced awe at the real
possibilities of an information age.  Wanting little to do with what's
come before, save for a few lifted beats and samples, a rave disc jockey
defines a whole new experience from the entire realm of sound.  "That's
why you have the rave," says Brian Hughes.  "The level of experience at a
rave - the amount of information - is astronomical." Indeed, from the
morphing computer images projected onto the walls to the rapidly evolving
house music progressions and carefully calibrated chemical alterations of
the senses through psychotropics, rave audiences are inundated with
information.  The idea of having a band or impresario tell a rave audience
what to experience is like having someone wake you up from a dream just
to tell you what to dream next.

	Raves may take on the air of a '60s acidtest, with their
psychedelic light shows, fanciful outfits, mind-altering drugs and music
that goes on and on, but the members of the audience are hardly Deadhead
throwbacks.  "You wear the same clothes to raves and Dead concerts,"
says 26-year-old Em Normal, whose eyes are gleaming behind a pair of
horn-rimmed glasses, "but there's really not much of an overlap." It's
nine in the morning and Normal is on a bus returning from the all-night
Santa Cruz rave.  Beside her, another raver, who has indulged in nothing
more than spring water all night, sits with his eyes closed.  But he's not
asleep.  His fingers are tapping complicated, fluttering rhythms against
his seat.  Normal seems wide awake, too, her face as bright as the
colorful patterns she wears.  "In a way, they are a lot alike," she
continues, comparing ravers with Deadheads, "because people see them and
they're dressed really colorfully.  The ravers and Deadheads see it as
festive, but other people just think of it as really strange."

	You don't know Ggreg Taylor.  He's not a star.  In fact, his only
distinguishing characteristic is the weird way he spells his first name;
he decided to add the extra "g" because he liked the way it looked.  "It's
all about self-empowerment," Taylor says, between bites of a hamburger
at San Francisco's Baghdad Cafe.  "Nobody tells you what to do - not the
DJs, not the other ravers.  If you do something different, or dress in
some weird way, they'll just come up to you and tell you how great it is
that you did that.  It's a world of total support for anything you want to
do."

	At raves, Taylor suggests, there's no fixed dress code and no
hip, underground rues of behavior.  "It's not the old celebutante trip.
The old club world was a place where nobodies could be somebody - 'I'm
dancing on this box and so it makes me somebody' - whereas at raves,
there are no performers.  It's about being a participant, not about being
famous."

	How did this happen? Within a movement dominated by people still
in their teens and early 20s - a group which historically has demanded
spoon-fed subcultural uniforms - most of these people shun mass media's
pre-packaged attitudes.  It is one thing to hear 26-year-old house music
producer Bryan Hughes say, "Everything in dominant culture is completely
worn out, so we just figure we have to make something completely new for
ourselves," and another to actually watch people at raves operating
without so-called role models, without icons after which to pattern
themselves.  It's even more astonishing to see that they're happy about
it.

	Ggreg Taylor turns an old argument against disco on its head.
Back in the '70s, the "disco sucks" crowd complained that people couldn't
get their money's worth at a disco because there were no performers.   But
Taylor says, "If you go to a regular concert, it costs you 20 bucks and
it's totally non-participatory.  If you go to a rave, the price is the
same, and you're a participant.  It's all around you.  You feel like you
get a lot more than you get at a concert." He waves his hands around,
gesturing at the people crowded around him at the cafe.  "People aren't
going to concerts much.''

	What ravers seem to be searching for is a feeling, an experience.
When they gaze into a set of computer images, they're not marveling at
the imagination of the graphics designer, but entering into the sequence
of effects going off in their own heads in response to the images.  The
sheer privacy of a raver's experience may be confusing to someone trying
to watch it from the outside.  "Oh, ravers don't even really dance," one
observer at the Santa Cruz party scoffs, and his observation is correct.
The Travolta-style acrobatics of the '70s are gone, and so are such silly
dance names as the "bump," the "hustle" or the "pogo." The scene is much
more chaotic: several hundred people gently, yet quickly bounce - in a
manner not unlike the Deadhead shume or the reggae lilt - at a rapid
rate, attempting to match the requisite 120 beats per minute which ravers
call "the sound of your mother's heartbeat." Any movement beyond that may
seem repetitive, often only a slow shifting of weight from one foot to
another, hands held in a pugilistic pose, head tilted gently to the
floor.  It's not a style of dance that's meant to be viewed, it is a
physical movement intended to be experienced .

	In fact, the dancing may have innumerable variations to the raver
that a traditional observer simply cannot see: the upturn of a thumb here
or forefinger there, an arch of the neck Such subtleties in the body
movements are like the musical subtleties hidden deep within the dance
mix.  The problem for older generations, says Bryan Hughes, who music
label Zoemagik Records, is that they haven't learned to listen.  "A lot of
people say house music is just repetitive, that there's nothing going on
That's completely untrue.  The music is incredibly complex, because
there's no repetition, there are no hooks.  It starts, begins changing
immediately, and then ends.  It's incredibly subtle, incredibly complex."

	Although it is more challenging, the music has the same ambient
quality as new age music - and ravers listen to it in quite the same way.
"I just keep the repeat button on my CD player," says Em Normal.   Ravers'
cars tend to be loaded down with Memorex tapes of local DJs' sets, with
hand-made cardboard covers.  Though the major labels have begun to put out
rave compilations, most of them contain shortened, watered-down versions
of music that should be dense and multilayered.   In fact, the idea of a
shortened version of a rave song is blasphemy; to fans, more is
definitely more.

	At another Bay Area rave, a blond, 14-year-old girl is sitting
next to a blazing bonfire, her hair flaring out from under a tie-dyed cap
like a spray of lasers.  The darkness flattens the light around her, making
it appear as if she's dancing inside the flames.  "House music doesn't
tell a story," she says, "it is the story." Of course, she's right.  Just
as the absence of a "performer" turns the eyes of the rave audience back
on itself, the absence of repeated hooks turns the ears inward as well.
"I get disappointed when anything repeats," says the twenty-something
Jonathan Drukman, who works for the rave label Twitch Records and is now
becoming a DJ.  "The songs that don't seem to work - the ones that make
people stop dancing - usually have some kind of chorus-verse-chorus verse
thing going on." Such a traditional visceral response provides an
immediate signal to ravers that they are being spoon-fed a narrative.
And they react negatively.

	There are losses associated with rave culture that disturb some
people who are involved with both the computer and rave scenes.  Brenda
Laurel, a virtual reality specialist, complained in a recent issue of the
cyber-art magazine Mondo 2000 that "there's an utter numbness to personal
culture, family culture and local culture among these people."
Similarly, Joan Didion wrote that the '60s spawned a generation of
"children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts
and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested
and enforced the society's values...  They are less in rebellion against
the society than ignorant of it." Dominant society, she went on, watched
"the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped
children...  create a community in a social vacuum.  Once we had seen these
children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that
the society's atomization could be reversed."
	Didion was wrong.  Dominant culture chose to pretend.  But the
difference between the children of the '60s and those who were born
during and after the Summer of Love is that not only are they so sweet in
the absence of order, but also, it turns out, more equipped to make a new
community.  "Everything around us is so completely corrupted," says Bryan
Hughes, cheerfully.  "We know there is no way it can be salvaged." He
ducks his head and smiles sheepishly, as if he's just stated the obvious.
"So what we have to do is make a new one.  Why do you think so many of us
are forming our own corporations?"

	The information age may have produced a disconnection between
rave audiences and older Baby Boomers that makes the '60s generation gap
look like a bad mood, but the rave audience's needs are deceptively
simple and rational.  They don't want a rock'n'roll guru telling them to
"fight the powers that be," they just wanna dance and experiment with (as
opposed to play with) the newest interactive computer gadgets.  "Rave
culture is about being a participant rather than being a voyeur," says
Ggreg Taylor.  "There's nothing to aspire to, but there is a sense of
belonging."

	On first meeting with a group of ravers, you might think they are
inarticulate.  Even when they have something to say it seems to come out
sideways, as if they're using language to approximate something that
could be better explained visually.  Take Hughes: he'll make a point and
then repeat it in several different permutations, as if showing a sphere
from several different angles; several different flat photographs of the
turning earth to get at its roundness.  Ravers are largely unquotable,
because their remarks make them appear stupid.  But that's hardly the
truth.  Many of them who live in the Bay Area work in Silicon Valley
making upwards of $100,000 a year developing interfaces, extending
computer languages and creating new software.

	As Hughes speaks, he is rewiring a virtual reality board.  "The
original techno-weenie," he explains, "was somebody who was using
technology to escape from society.  Now you've got people who are saying,
'Wow, look at all these great tools; we can make some really cool music
or video images or whatever out of this stuff.' This is really
threatening to the old techno-weenies, who got into it to sort of leave
their bodies behind.  In the rave scene, you've got people who want to
bring their bodies along.  Which is the whole idea behind virtual reality:
How can we bring our bodies into this new computer world? And that's the
rave."