From sfraves-request@medisg.Stanford.EDU Fri Mar 5 15:23:14 1993 Received: from medisg.Stanford.EDU by soda.berkeley.edu (5.65/KAOS-1) id AA28830; Fri, 5 Mar 93 15:23:01 -0800 Received: by medisg.Stanford.EDU (4.1/1.34) id AA18887; Fri, 5 Mar 93 14:20:22 PST Received: from soda.berkeley.edu by medisg.Stanford.EDU (4.1/1.34) id AA18883; Fri, 5 Mar 93 14:20:21 PST Received: from ns.PacBell.COM by soda.berkeley.edu (5.65/KAOS-1) id AA20509; Fri, 5 Mar 93 14:18:19 -0800 Received: from srv.PacBell.COM (mother.srv.PacBell.COM) by ns.PacBell.COM (4.1/PacBell-02/22/93) id AA10311; Fri, 5 Mar 93 14:20:11 PST Received: from pbssi.srv.PacBell.COM by srv.PacBell.COM (4.1/SMI-4.0) id AA26350; Fri, 5 Mar 93 14:20:09 PST Received: from lizard.srv.PacBell.COM by pbssi.srv.PacBell.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA10813; Fri, 5 Mar 93 14:23:23 PST From: lxfogel@srv.pacbell.com (Lee Fogel) Message-Id: <9303052223.AA10813@pbssi.srv.PacBell.COM> Subject: KEYBOARD Techno article (sigh) To: sfraves@soda.berkeley.edu Date: Fri, 5 Mar 93 14:26:48 PST X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11] Status: OR The April issue of Keyboard has an article on "Techno". It is long, somewhat informative, extremely opinionated, and very disturbing. I've typed in some excerpts here for yopur entertainment. I may be writing a letter to the editor to respond to some of the more ludicrous points of the article, but I'm not sure I would even know where to begin, or whether I should even take this article seriously, considering how amazingly idiotic it is. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Synth-Rock Apocalypse? Disco With Smart Drugs? The Next Wave? The Last Rave? TECHNO Catch The Buzz. Eat The Beat. Tune In, Turn On, Boot Up. by Mark Dery Techno. The name sounds at once monolithic and impersonal, the acronym of multinational conglomerate, and toylike, as in brightly colored plastic Lego blocks. It is retrofuturist, heading in opposite directions at the same time: forward, to the seductive dystopia of Blade Runner's Los Angeles, 2019, and backward, to the psychedelic utopia of the "Summer of Love." At its best, itextinguishes the individual ego in the all-consuming beat, a sensation somewhere between orgasm, Buddhist nirvana, and the momentary blackout of a fighter pilot pulling G's at supersonic speed. At its worst, it pummels the brain to mush with its locomotive rhythms and monorail melodies - melodies as enjoyable as a car alarm at four A.M., and not nearly so musical. {history of house music scene up to the crackdown in England deleted.} The Triffid spores have since taken root in California. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, acid culture cross-pollinated with the traditions represented by Haight-Ashbury and Silicon Valley to create what P-Orridge calls "hyperdelic" culture. Others have dubbed this emergent movement "cyberdelia," and its members have been called "zippies", defined by Encyclopedia Psychedelic a as "a combination of a '60s hippie and a '90s technoperson." [Anyone who has seen "The Day of the Triffids" knows that the analogy is not complimentary. I personally have never heard the term 'zippy' before, except with the comic strip Zippy the Pinhead. -L] {typical lame description of a rave deleted.} Though the underground press has already conducted the last rites for rave culture, techno may very well be the Next Big Thing. In fact, premature reports of a genre's death in cloisters of cool are often a sure barometer that it is about to be found, alive and well, in the maintstream... ...But Tony Fletcher, writing in Spin, sounds a cautionary note. "For all its newfound popularity, techno looks destined to stay underground in the U.S. Dozens of 12-inch are released worldwide every week, but few of the producers and musicians - there is usually no band - use the same name twicel they form short partnerships, release a couple of tracks, and move on. None seem worried about fame and fortune; the 'image' of the music is transported from the music's creator to its consumer, who, when dancing... becomes a star. It's a revolutionary concept, but a record company's nightmare." [...] Techno is the end of natural law in pop music: the end of harmony, of melodic development, of album-oriented marketing, of live performance...of the star, of message, of meaning. [The rest of the article takes on a truly horrible twist. This is easily the ugliest distortion of raving I have ever come across. Brace yourselves. -L] A rave, to use black leather theorist Hakim Bey's term. is a "temporary autonomous zone," a pirate utopia, a centrifuge in which social gravity is artificially suspended, like the student rebellion in Paris in 1968, a group grope, or Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Or a lynch mob. Because the suspension of mores and norms that permitted Woodstock also created, in the flash of a knife, Altamont; the road to utopia can end in Plato's Republic or Jonestown. Raves, which address the utopian yearnings of cynics and true believers alike, transcend societal strictures by subsuming the individual into the amoebic mass, a technique equally useful in the generation of communitarian "families" and teenage wolf packs, out for a night of wilding. Heads a Love-In; tails, a Two Minutes' Hate, one of the orgies of loathing in Orwell's 1984. [He digs up the following quote from a "young raver"] "We're not wearing fucking daisies in our hair and all walking around shouting 'karma fucking peace man.' Fuck that. We like the violence, we like getting off our heads, we like the dancing, the sweat." [This was the only time the article ever referenced input from anyone who actually goes to a raves. Not what I would call a fail representation. But wait, it gets better. -L] "Getting off our heads": The obliteration of rationality, and endgame played by the anarchic and avant-garde...was, ironically the avowed goal of National Socialism. Tha anti-rationalism of Nazism is evident in the book- burnings, gobbledygook Teutonic primitivism Then, too, the hypnotic effect of drumming has proven useful in deranging the senses, switching off the reasoning mind, since time immemorial. It is not without significance that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, frequently referred to Hitler as a drummer. [Wow, Hitler with a drum machine, can you just imagine the groovy beats? -L (desperately trying to keep a sense of humor)] This linkage of electronic dance music and Nazism is admittedly alarmist. Even so, the techno aesthetic cannot be viewed in a vacuum. It lives on contested ground, bordered on one hand by the skinhead rockers in Germany who sing...[inane lyrics deleted. -L] and on the other by cyberdelic ravers who have negotiated a detente between ecotopian longings for a prelapsarian paradise and cyberpunk's unshakable faith in the liberating powers of street tech. Techno, claims Reynolds [author of Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock], signals "the death of the Song, to be replaced by the...unresolved, infinite... track; the brain-rotting vortex of quick-cutting in video and TV; the supersession of narrative, characterization, and motivation by sensational effects. Blip culture means the death of sequential, linear thought, an erosion of people's ability to plan and manage their lives. There is only a NOW that is either blissed-out or dreadful." Sometimes, it is both. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- So there it is, another fine example of media mutilation. The rest of the article covers LFO, Orbital, T99, The Orb, Third Eye, and The Shamen. Zieg Heil!, er, I mean, Rave On! - leg of eel