Issue #003 (March 2003) We Are All “Ferals” Now - Rave, post Rave, and a Post-Rave Rave Email this article to a friend Article by Nicholas Gebhardt Amongst music critics and the like there is a good deal of talk about emotions, identities or economic needs finding an outlet in various forms of alternative music. The idea was once the domain of tuberculosis-ridden German romantics and hardcore sociological functionalists, but it’s been happily recycled for extensive use by post-rave pamphleteers and theory-lite cultural analysts. Efforts to treat popular styles as expressive of deeper forces, from ethnicity to alienation, always run the risk of going from the source (let’s say, globalisation) to the consequence (let’s say, a hard techno track) without ever really saying what happens in between, of establishing why the people who make a techno track would do so during a period of globalisation. Sure, the techno producer is probably pissed off that Bush is in the White House (and what self-respecting techno producer wouldn’t be), but why would she or he use that kick-drum sound or that sample (even a sample of George W.)? Not just because there’s a Bush in the White House, surely? Some (very successful) publications have tried to solve this problem by staking out new relations between analysis and manifesto, politics and polemic. Prickly Paradigm Press springs to mind as exemplary in this style. This is certainly the decision of Graham St John of a web-based book on underground dance music, Free NRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor. Not quite fanzine, not quite scholarly text, the not-quite-ness of Free NRG will either bury it or establish a new kind of writing about electronic music and its politics. Like much acid jazz, punk-funk and trip hop, attempts at “crossover” (or, if you’re a jazz fan, “fusion”) makes for a hard road to success. Kenny G did it, but he had a gold body-length jump suit; Sting did it, but his thousand-mile stare lasted all night, not to mention his husky tones and ska credentials. Never quite populist enough, nor serious enough to enter the dusty realms of “a treatise” or “a classic”, the crossover effect has skewered many a fine musician, not to mention authors (one recalls the fate of Philip K. Dick, always snubbed by the establishment). Free NRG is admirable in its efforts to document and explain a scene, and to relate that scene to larger national and international developments, particularly such movements as Reclaim The Streets, the S11 Protests in Melbourne, and the Jabiluka mine protests in the Northern Territory. Throughout the book, the social context for the changes in music are associated with larger changes resulting from globalisation, environmental crisis, and mass disaffection with the mainstream political process; while the forms of resistance to globalisation (the so-called ‘culture of protest’) emerge from a vital engagement with communications technologies, particularly the internet. The overall aim is to assert a new ‘alternative’, heterogeneous global vision, derived from the interaction of world cultures (often marginal), against the homogenising, conservative forces of multinational capitalist institutions, most notably the corporations, and the neo-liberal state. To this end, Graham St. John informs us that ‘the electronic music industry possesses a decentralised legacy. From the early eighties, developments in production and recording technologies permitted a means of access and level of independence which had enabled increasing numbers of young electronic (or techno) musicians to assume ownership and control over the means of music production (in their own homes) and distribution (through informal channels and independent micro-labels), despite efforts by the transnational entertainment industry to assimilate such activity. In Australia, the operations of this high-tech cottage industry, complimented by developments in digital recording, the internet and multimedia arts, has reinforced a grassroots sensibility potentiating creative interventions beyond that achievable by rock, punk or rave.’ Likewise, Kathleen Williamson maintains that: ‘Within DiY media culture the distinction between producer and consumer is fuzzy, as the culture thrives on a participatory horizontal network which assists in breaking down the commodity relationship of regular commercial publishing, as participants share zines and ideas with each other.’ For contributors such as Peter Strong, from Oms Not Bombs, this radical DiY culture (Do It Yourself, for any unreconstructed communists out there) operates in a global space out of which ‘a new society is developing based on non-hierarchy, liberationist principles, and shifting the chains of knowledge and respect back to the custodians of the land. Collective dreaming towards a free energy future is setting an amazing new precedent for a fear-free place for new generations to live in.’ The potential of these post rave events, as St. John calls them, is that they ‘become rites of passage into new states of being. Interactive ritual-theatre installations built into doof foundations borrow from a cornucopia of floating signifiers and iconographical traditions. The panorama of Indigenous and “traditional” belief systems and practices which inspired what “zippie” Frazer Clark had called a “shamanistic inspired anarchy” or “shamanarchy”, seems to have provided similar inspiration for the Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Company’s Labyrinth installations. Designed by Chaos Magician Orryelle—who once proclaimed, “Fuck the Patriarchy; Fuck the Matriarchy; Let’s just have An -archy!” — the Labyrinths were interactive ritual initiation cycles weaving “a multi-cultural and multi-subcultural tapestry of ancient mythologies and modern technology.”’ The overall effort to assert the novelty and value of rave and post-rave culture in contemporary Australian life, to demonstrate its political credentials, and define its spiritual powers, results in an eclectic text, uneven in tone and argument, but entertaining, optimistic and informative nevertheless. You almost feel like you’re at a rave (the ups, the downs, the weird conversations), and the final essays by Chris Gibson, Susan Luckman, Kurt Iveson and Sean Scalmer should definitely be read at the recovery party. Which brings me back to my initial point: in following a cultural process from a source to a consequence, the authors all make the mistake of reducing music to an elaborate cry of either ecstasy (in both senses of the word) or, if linked to subsistence or alienation, a cry of pain (in the usual sense). If, however, a musical event is, to borrow a phrase from Lloyd Warner, a symbol system in its own right, existing within the complexities of the larger system or structure, then the question of how underground techno, hiphop, drum n bass, etc., and social events are related has to be treated as an ideological one. An explanation for music cannot be referred backward to the social context that it is supposed to mirror, nor forward to the social reality it supposedly transforms. All the authors, however, fall into this trap. They invoke rave/post-rave culture as a new social form, radically transforming human relations across the planet, breaking down old barriers, hurtling us into a new future of sonic experience. Fair enough. The thing is, their paradigm reproduces an old ideology — individuals, doing it for themselves (with apologies to Aretha Franklin), making hay while the sun shines (or the lights are on), and gettin’ all religious into the bargain. The ‘communal effervescence’ they dream of, what Perry Anderson recently called the “emergent global catallaxy”, is the result of a thoroughly metropolitan-centred vision of individual agency (bio-power, for example) and its relation to the world’s cultures (the American melting-pot writ large). To demonstrate how rave and post-rave scenes are not merely augmenting the imperial powers they oppose (we are all “ferals” now), and how the very structure and meaning of music itself is at stake in all of this, requires a more careful analysis of the kind of world we live in and music’s significance within that world.