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Essay for anyone interested..
Thu Jan 25, 2007 2:57 pm
My essay from music as popular culture (with contribution from Steffan..)
How does the significance of dance vary between different musical cultures? Discuss with reference to at least two specific examples.
Punk Styles and Moshpits
“At gigs worldwide fans literally hurl themselves into a pit - the mosh pit. The result is a mass of seething bodies where fierce physical contact provides a brief, exhilarating escape from everyday life. The mosh pit means random sexual encounters as well as haphazard violence... and occasionally, I soon found out, it can lead to encounters of unexpected tenderness too.” Joe Ambrose; Moshpit Culture; 2001
The origins of punk rock are hazy, and the truth of them may have been lost completely in the mythical discourse of its well-documented history. Many contemporary accounts argue that the movement originated in America, through the music of bands such as Television and The Ramones, and the New York garage scene; and was imported to the UK with the aid of Malcolm McLaren (McNeil 1996 in Sabin 1999). This view is contended by others who say that the inextricability of class politics from the movement mean that “It could only have begun at one time and in one place: Britain in the late 1970s.” (Sabin 1999).
What can be said for sure is that punk is a musical style that emerged in the later part of the 1970s in both Britain and the US, and was the soundtrack for the ‘subcultural’ punk youth movement which spread throughout both countries and the rest of the world after its birth, and is still manifested in a diversity of modern ‘scenes’ worldwide (Sabin 1999, 4). Punk and its offspring have always defined as ‘subcultures’ by, apart from the music, a number of distinctive codes of appearance, most obviously dress codes but also in many cases distinctive routines of hygene, or lack thereof; codes of belief, such an anti-establishment philosophy and, at least a claim of, liberal left wing politics; and codes of behaviour, such as a disregard for the instructions of authority figures, the physical collection of music - an ironic practise of consumption, and, key for this essay, attendance at gigs, and participation in a ‘mosh pit’ (Gilbert and Pearson 1999, 23-24). Although there are now a multitude of types of pit to reflect the diverse range of musics which sprang from punk, including circle pits at ska gigs and wrecking pits for psychobilly, I will use moshing and mosh pit as umbrella terms to refer to all of these forms.
The custom of the mosh pit began with the ‘slam dancing’ practised at hardcore punk gigs. Hardcore was the most important punk ‘offshoot’ in America in the 1980s, and eventually begat the commercially successful Grunge movement (Sabin 1999, 4). The term ‘mosh’ is sometimes said to have come from the ‘mash’, as it was pronounced that way in the song ‘Total Mash’ by Scream of Washington DC in 1982 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosh_pit)
As the quote I began with describes, mosh pits are a fierce physical practise where group contact provides “a brief, exhilarating escape from everyday life” (Ambrose 2001). In his interesting book ‘Children of Chaos’ (1997), Douglas Rushkoff semi-academically attempts to apply contemporary mathematical developments including chaos theory to instances of contemporary youth culture. He compares the turbulence of the mosh pit to a dynamical system, saying that the dancers are engaged in “A group enterprise: the creation and sustenance of a resonating organism” (p156). In ‘Rock Over the Edge’ (2002), Jason Middleton says that “Participation in shows is meant to encourage a breaking down and rendering fluid of the subject positions of both performer and audience, which would then lead to the forging of new collective grounds of experience” (Middleton in Beebe et al. 2002, 348). For Middleton, taking part in the gig, by physical contact and singing along together, is how punks establish and then reinforce their own ideals as represented by the music, and their identities as members of the punk community.
Dance Music and ‘Rave Culture’
History
The origins of dance music seem better documented than those of punk, but this may only be because the developments took place more recently. The ‘true’ story of dance music, as has happened with punk, may be falling into the domain of unreliable utopian myth (Gilbert and Pearson 1999, 1-7). However there is fairly little dispute about how the diffusion and convergence of musical forms lead to the modern diversity of electronic dance music.
Disco, which emerged primarily from the black gay New York club scene in the 1970s, was the main influence for the house music which emerged in Chicago in the later half of the 1980s (Gilbert and Pearson 1999, 28-29). Disco was the first occurrence of beat-lead, dance-oriented music, where heterogeneous, unstructured club dancefloors choreographed only by the DJ were preferred to the packed crowds of traditional rock gigs. For these reasons, it was disconcerting for many members of the public as it represented the alienation of modernisation, as well as having fundamental homosexual associations which were at odds with the homophobic ideals of the ‘mainstream’ at the time (Hughes in Ross and Rose eds. 1994, 150).
House carried on disco’s culture of the dancefloor in Chicago, and it evolved still further when the music migrated to the UK and emerged as the famously controversial acid house.
The acid house movement received considerable negative media attention in Britain in the early 1990s, and a discourse quickly emerged representing the acid house movement as the rebellious anti-establishment subculture of the nineties, a modern equivalent of punk. All this publicity lead to the massive proliferation of acid house into the UK ‘rave’ movement, echoed in different ways worldwide according to local laws. (Ahmed et al. 2006; http://www.fantazia.org.uk/Scene/press/magazines.htm)
The Criminal Justice Act 1994 was a move by the Conservative Government to, among other things, restrict the rights of ravers to organise the free parties that had been occurring all over the country and causing more and more clashes between youth and the authorities over the issue of ‘Freedom to Dance’. (Hutnyk in Sharma et al. 1996, 156-157)
After passing of the Act dance music increased in commercial popularity and mass acceptance throughout the rest of the 90s, trance tracks such as DJ Sammy’s ‘Castles in the Sky’ achieving massive chart success, with much derision from ‘true’ ravers who seemed to value the subcultural capital of the underground in the same way as the punks had done before them (Thornton in Ross and Rose 1994, 177). Quite apart from this these ‘top ten trance’ tracks were often of questionable quality.
At the same time as club culture was permeating every aspect of UK nightlife in the late nineties, the illegal free party scene gradually disappeared from the mass media until many probably thought that the parties had stopped altogether. The return of sensationalist anti-rave news coverage this summer brought the reality that the movement never really did ‘fizzle out’ into the public sphere. (Hartley in The Sun online, 01/09/06 www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006400495,,00.html; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=402494&in_page_id=1770)
The Dancing in ‘Dance Culture’
For a number of reasons, not a huge amount has been written about the actual relevance of the dance for dance music culture/s. In their excellent ‘Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound’, Gilbert and Pearson offer a number of reasons for this, most importantly that academic discourses tend to favour ‘critical distance’ of observers from their subjects (7, 18-19); and that, being hard to define in terms of meaning, dancing does not fit in well with the subcultural framework most often used to analyse dance music (22-23).
However, understanding the dancefloor itself is the key aspect to understanding rave subcultures: their fashions, their philosophy and, to a certain extent, their politics. The dancefloor is the place where ‘ravers’ are created, where they establish and then reinforce their own ideals as represented by the music and their identities as members of the rave community, just as the mosh pit is for punks. It is the reason they are willing to travel huge distances and sometimes risk arrest just to attend events, and the origin of the feelings of community which are central to the dance ‘underground’. This deep link between the enjoying of music and the community was summed up perfectly by ‘Steffan’ - a member of ‘Festival Weather, ‘Home of the Party Community’, an online community of ravers, DJs and dance music lovers which I am an active participant in. This was part of his response to a thread I started asking for users’ lived opinions of dancing and music:
“I go to raves because of the community, the feeling that everybody around me enjoys the music for the same reason I do - that it sparks off a feeling of being free.”
‘Steffan’, 19/01/07, 4.39pm
(http://festivalweather.com/forum/posting.php?mode=quote&p=167224)
This first hand testimony describes the significance of feelings of community for ravers’ enjoyment, and how they spark from the shared experience of physical liberation brought on by the music.
The dance is how the raver expresses their innermost emotions, their frustrations with the world, their happiness and sadness, victories and defeats. The chance to be completely free from the everyday restrictions of convention on our physical activity, which are a symptom of what Foucault would call ‘bio political’ societies (1978, 142-3), offers an opportunity for what Barthes would call ‘Jouissance’: “A pleasure that can never be precisely described as it is pre-linguistic, pre-subjective” (Gilbert and Pearson 1999, 65). Obviously the widespread use of MDMA (‘ecstasy’) and other psychedelic and stimulant drugs at raves contributes to this communal feeling of jouissance, and many newspapers, especially the tabloids, have tried to create an impression in the past that it would not exist without them.
This may be because the hypnotic beats and groovy basslines of most dance musics would not be considered threatening or intimidating by the audiences of many of these newspapers. When the media were attempting to generate moral panics around punk, the various media institutions covering it had no need to focus as extensively on the frequent of use of speed at punk gigs. The music itself, the discourses of the lyrics, and the overall fiercely anti-establishment ideology of the ‘movement’, not to mention the custom of the moshpit and its subsidiaries, were fuel enough for a moral panic. This began with ‘The Daily Mirror’ publishing an issue with the headline ‘The Filth and the Fury’ following the Sex Pistols manic first television appearance. This attitude of total derision of punk and punks became a trend which has continued, to some extent, ever since (http://www.oxfordstudent.com/tt2002wk5/Music/rotten_to_the_core; Brown 2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2029291.ece).
Media institutions attempting to generate a similar moral panic around the emerging dance music scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s could not focus on the threatening nature of the music, as it did not have one; they could not focus on violence at raves, as there was very little, none until the authorities became involved; and they certainly could not use the movement’s peaceful, progressive and community based ideals. These have a lot in common with the ‘hippy’ movement of the late 1960s, so it is perhaps not surprising that the media again chose to focus its attack against the use of drugs which were represented as producing anti-establishment sentiments in youth. The Sun story headlined ‘Evil of Ecstasy’, which ran on October 19th 1988, was the first such article, and ‘Spaced Out!’, as well as many others, soon followed. (http://www.fantazia.org.uk/Scene/press/magazines.htm)
The recent Sun Online article “Squatters Wreck Mansion” (Hartley, cited earlier), which contains such rhetoric as “They say drug-taking is rampant at the illegal parties, which have been likened to the acid house music raves of the 1990s”, shows that negative coverage of rave parties in the popular media has not changed its emphasis much, if at all. (www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006400495,,00.html)
As a raver of about three years, who is currently taking a break from the established routine of chemical consumption before dancing, I can say that for myself that the use of drugs is not essential to attaining a feeling of jouissance on the dancefloor.
“The parameters of one’s individuality are broken down by the shared throbbing of the bass drum” (Gills in Gilbert and Pearson 1999, 64)
The shared experience of hearing and feeling the sound and vibration of the music with everyone else can be experienced just by being present, and the physical liberation of unrestricted freeform dancing can be experienced by anyone who is free enough from self-consciousness to just move. The need for MDMA before they feel liberated enough to dance is a condition of individual ravers, it is not a prerequisite of the events. Similarly I have never found Speed consumption necessary to enjoy participating in a moshpit, although my experience of these is somewhat more limited.
The aesthetic differences between the moshpit and the rave dancefloor are obvious to even the least informed observer. The differences in fashion and music are the clearest, as well as the modes of performance and types of venue. The codes of behaviour may make these two practices seem like bi-polar opposites: one favours violent dancing where uninvited physical contact is encouraged; the other the opposite: if a raver is dancing hectically, he would be expected on most dancefloors to try his best to avoid transferring this physical ferocity to others. However, in the final section of this essay I will attempt to analyse the common ground between the pit and the rave, and in what ways they are motivated by the same desires as one another, and fulfill the same needs.
The Space of Collective Expression: Common Ground between the Pit and the Rave
“The idea that disco is punk’s antithesis has been difficult to dispel… ever since Disco Sucks became punk’s call to arms in the 70s” (Clarke 18/03/05; www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A3803474)
“A more advanced version of the moshpit is the rave, the dance event consciously and intentionally designed by kids to promote the colonial experience in a purposefully spiritual context.” (Rushkoff 1997, 159)
At most raves you would be extremely upset and annoyed if a flailing hand punched you in the face while you were trying to dance. At the same time, it would not be a good idea at all to stand in a bit of space at the front of a punk gig and scold all those who bumped in to you.
This does not mean that the pit and the rave are inconsolable exercises in group physicality. For me they represent different manifestations of the same desire: a desire to be free from the physical routine of living in a bio-political society, where the life itself is never threatened but rather restricted and directed through an ever-increasing bureaucracy of law (Foucault 1978). Rushkoff’s comment about the moshpit being a group exercise in the creation of a resonating organism (1997, 156), could easily be mistaken for a clichéd description of a rave if taken out of context.
Similarly, the Barthian concept of jouissance discussed earlier could be applied to the group physicality of the moshpit and produce much the same conclusions: it is another form of non-verbal, hedonistic group interaction. The increased physicality of the moshpit is merely aesthetic: the rave transcends the need for actual physical contact between all members of the group, as the basslines broadcast through huge soundsystems physically penetrate our bodies, uniting us physically in time with the beat just as punks in the pit unite into a ‘resonating organism’.
“Warning: Mash Pits”
‘Luke Vibert’ Audiovisual Show, Glade Electronic Dance Music Festival 2006
As a final thought I will briefly discuss an experience of mine which I believe illustrates how physically felt basslines serve the same ‘communitising’ purpose as the moshpit.
It happened at a rave in Ipswich, near the end of August 2005. We arrived at about midnight, when there was only one soundsystem present. It was playing gabber techno, a punishing, beat defined style of dance music popular on the modern free party scene, and had a crowd of maybe fifty people dancing in front of it. As the night progressed, a number of new rigs showed up, many a lot louder than the first. By about 4am the original rig, though it was playing by far the most ‘hardcore’, aggressive style of music, was being drowned out by the competition.
Rather than abandoning their gabber for something louder but ‘softer’, the crowd at this rig, still about fifty strong and including myself, began crushing in against the speakers as one mass of human bodies in the style of a moshpit. As in moshpits, directed physical action against one another was not the intention: myself and others were picked up when we fell down. The intention was to retain the sensation of all feeling the bassline travelling through us, to regain the group physicality. Deprived of the modern technology which usually now provides us with this, we turned to the more archaic methods of the pit.
Posted By: TommyKc 0 bits of advice criticism will amuse me
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keeping a blog up to date: is it really worth the effort???
Tue Aug 22, 2006 1:14 pm
[  Mood: Confused ] [ Currently: typing and thinking.. of course.. ]
so i havn't posted in here since just after Easter, i've done many many fun and strange things since then as well as having some pretty awful shit happen, and (i like to think) have changed and grown as a person.
Now, i could spend a couple of hours trying to organise my thoughts and memories into something coherent and hopefully entertaining to put up on here, but would anyone actually ever see it? Does anyone read other people's blogs?
If anyone would like to read about the highs and lows of my last 5 months, mingled in with a bit of my philsophy and a few dirty jokes, stick it in the comments.
If not i could just post the dirty jokes?
Posted By: TommyKc 2 bits of advice criticism will amuse me
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ALI PALI!!!!
Mon Apr 17, 2006 11:49 am
[  Mood: Distorted ]
Went to Tranz-mission at Alexandra Palace Saturday nite, ohmygod what a fucking event..
first time in ages i've felt like i can just totally let go and have it, spent about half the night wandering round looking for my mates and chatting to randoms. we got the coach up so we were in and coming up by about ten, eight hours of raving!! (i kno you can get more at free parties but for a slammin vinyl rave that's impressive)
the setting was just amazing too, massive view out over london from the queue and then once you got in there, jesus. huge huge rooms, incredible lights shows, masses of chill space with pretty unintrusive bouncers (esp. considering it was a slammin vinyl event) - one of them even gave my mate back his mandy after catching him making bombs..
The tunes were quality too, spent all night moving around. Normally i can't stand nu-school hardcore but all the sets were real dark'n'dirty, without too many cheesy breakdowns or girly vocals. Raindance wicked as always, quite a bit of breaks and jungle got played as well as trad oldskool 
Frantic.. well you know what you're gonna get with frantic, and that was what you got. hard hard sounds with twisted buildups and earsplitting beats. Rare appearance from Yoji Biomehanika on his usual form, used a weird violin-style synth thing at one point in the set 
Everyone go next year.. Fuck Easter..  
Posted By: TommyKc 2 bits of advice criticism will amuse me
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Messiness
Tue Mar 28, 2006 5:54 pm
havnt added to this for ages as stil only have 'net access at uni, and waste enough work time just through occasional bouts of posting.. but i'm struggling with a bit of work on feminist discourse (looks too much like feminine discharge and keeps making me snigger) so i thought i'd put a little update to distract me from the looming deadline..
had quite a few messy weekends on the trot now, been gradually building up again since the woods party in Feb when i broke my face (too much K)
Went to clubs friday nites for a couple of weeks after that but it didnt really do much for me, most excting thing that happened round then was taking K thinking it was mandy and falling asleep in the middle of a party.
Things started to gather momentum again around the start of march. Went back to Southampton to see Si vs. Slipmatt, which i thought'd be olskool vs. new hardcore.. it turned out to be all new stuff, lame as.. so i got really wasted and found myself pissing the weekend away.
Went to supercharged in the next week to see Freq Nasty, got really pissd and was apparently wandering round in a daze then just left. The next weekend was down to Exeter to see the Freestylers and Fresh. Same aas the one before, loads of mandy friday nite followed by drink and smoke all weekend.
Weekend before last went to Zapback oldskool nite and was practically the only guy in oldskool cyber gear (thought it'd be a laugh) so.. got really wasted to avoid self-consciousness.. pissed/stoned all weekend.
Then there was the weekend just gone. Took it to another level. Started a shroom trip at about four in the evening, forgot i had mates coming down from home later. Had a really mad trip, we accidentally ended up outside EDO at one point and found a fallen tree covered in vines that looked just like snakes. Tried to drink that off from about 8 til about 1am, when my mates arrived, plus one extra. Friction between housemates and mates from home was sketchy and unexpected.
Took some mandy, we went from house to house for a bit, ended up in some halls of residence as it was getting light. Everyone else started taking K so i decided it was time to go home, couldnt of handled it at that stage. Slept for a bit, housemate was tryin to keep me up for some reason.
Drank and smoked all next day, for some reason decided to do a gram of shrooms first thing too. Didnt trip but they made things go pretty fuzzy.
That nite went to probably the sketchiest party i've ever been to. In a squatted abatoir, blood on the walls, needles on half the floors, about a million tiny rooms and a gennie that kept running out every half an hour. Wicked mcrowd though, and one guy had plenty of nos so it went well.
Got home about nine (it was only like five minutes from my door) did another gram of shrooms, wasnt even sure why at this stage. My mate norm fell asleep in the fuckin bathroom for a good hour, had to do some serious shouting to get him out, and that day just kind of dribbled by in a haze of t4.
Brain feels pretty well disassembled this week, and i'm in the doghouse at home. One of my housemates took K for first time friday nite, feels messed up and kind of blames me (wasn't involved, didnt even do any myself) and the other one brought his parents in on monday with the house in a complete state. It wasnt in a good state before my mates came round and he didnt give me a heads up about the visit, but the state i was in monday i didnt have a leg to stand on when he started hassling me. The housemate i get on best with's in spain til thursday. and i've stil got this presentation on feminist discourse to do for friday.
Still, mad weekend though..
Posted By: TommyKc 45 bits of advice criticism will amuse me
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bad ending
Fri Feb 17, 2006 5:14 pm
getting within half an hour of leaving this place forever and i'm starting to think i'm not even gonna get a decent goodbye.. sure i've only been here four weeks and i havnt got to know anyone too well but i've tried.. its hard to break join in with technobabble..
the fact that i've made them two pieces of graphic design and an animation that they're going to use to promote products they expect to make several grand off should mean i at least get bought a beer, but at the moment i dont think i'm even gonna get that  
i'm glad i've spent 90% of my time on here 
aahh feel better now they gave me some book vouchers.. 
right, i'm off. dunno when i'll be online again, hopefully not too long.. dont forget me 
Posted By: TommyKc 1 bits of advice criticism will amuse me
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giving up cigarettes
Fri Feb 17, 2006 11:47 am
right so our housemate that gave up toking over the summer and got pretty uptight has now decided he's gonna give up fags as well.
as for some reason he's also stopped drinkin during the week he has been a fucking nightmare these past two nites. i mean its done my head in since september the way he now looks down his nose at us just because he's not a stoner any more, but last nite we couldn't even relax he was bouncing around so much, moaning under his breath about mess he had a more-than-equal share in making and giving us dirty looks for doing what he knows full well we do every night.
maybe we should be being supportive but he never does anything for anyone apart from himself, and its hard to sympathise when he's going through shit as he gets in fuckin ugly moods where you dont wanna talk to him because you cant tell how he'll react. 
(ok rant over. just needed to unload that somewhere, there's no point taking it home)
Posted By: TommyKc 1 bits of advice criticism will amuse me
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About TommyKc
Joined
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South-bloody-hampton. Hopefully not for long!
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lost, directionless graduate.................................
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making sounds, looking for jobs, firespinning, watching and listening to stuff and dancing
(looking for love too i guess, but who isn't?)
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