Saturday, Jul 19, 2008
Did a Rhino rave compilation kill the subculture? Sure, except that it was never a subculture to begin with.
Mar 14, 2000 | It was probably inevitable from the moment disco met European electro-music in a Detroit warehouse that Rhino, the K-Tel of the '90s, would one day issue an electronic dance music compilation. Still, it's easy to remember a time when rave devotees believed such a collection -- a coffin nail for the scene, if ever there was one -- was impossible.
Techno, remember, was supposed to destroy the cult of the artist. Ideally, dance tracks are created by anonymous studio tweakers with a dozen aliases. Even then, the compositions are merely building blocks for a pseudonymous DJ to create a set. But big best-of collections demand brand names like Moby, the Chemical Brothers and Kraftwerk. Electronic music was supposed to be something else, the end of songs having a beginning and ending, the end of the star, an inversion of everything that rock stood for -- except for the part about subculture and rebellion. Of course, now that the rave subculture has been fully consumed by the mainstream, it's baffling to remember that it once seemed, to those inside of it, utterly anti-commercial.
It would be easy to dismiss Rhino's double-disc "Machine Soul: An Odyssey Into Electronic Dance Music" as tacky and inauthentic, full of songs no self-respecting club kid would ever allow to course through her Walkman. And there's some seriously corny stuff here, like Prodigy's bombastic "Charly" or L.A. Style's "James Brown Is Dead." Other songs are fine in themselves, but have been played so many millions of times that hearing them yet again is more painful than nostalgic: Gary Numan's "Cars," M/A/R/R/S's "Pump up the Volume," The Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds." Even when "Machine Soul" gets it right, it does so only in the most clichid way, including the epochal "Strings of Life" by Rythim Is Rythim (aka Derrick May) and "Planet Rock," by Afrika Bambaataa, songs that monks in Bhutan could probably identify as seminal dance-music moments.
Still, "Machine Soul" is but one of many indications that rave has gone fully mainstream. There are also Phillips commercials featuring Talvin Singh's bhangra jungle, buzzed-to-the-hilt summer movies like "Groove" and "Human Traffic," and books that, even when they're excellent (such as Simon Reynold's "Generation Ecstasy"), have the effect of turning the subject into history. Perhaps most incisive of all is the liner-note message in the recent mix album by Goldie, once the figurehead of drum 'n' bass, one of electronic music's most subterranean permutations. In it, he pretty much implies that dance music made a great springboard, and that now he's ready to soar in the ether of generalized fame -- like playing the villain in the recent James Bond movie. "For a guy whose been making music for a very short time I've had a great run. I do feel very happy in myself; in how I can move on with it," he writes. "Maybe I'll turn into some prolific actor-cum-director, some old man in a barn sculpting large pieces of rock." He knows his scene's stock is falling, and he's reinvesting his cultural capital.
Still, the point isn't that rave has "sold out," but that it was never really subversive in the first place. That idea, it seems now, was folly, one based on an outmoded set of assumptions about what rebellion means. What Tom Frank wrote of the '60s counterculture in "The Conquest of Cool" is even more true of dance culture: "[T]he prosperity of a consumer society depends not on a rigid control of people's leisure-time behavior, but exactly its opposite: unrestraint in spending, the willingness to enjoy formerly forbidden pleasures, an abandonment of the values of thrift and suspicion of leisure that characterized an earlier variety of capitalism." Rave didn't challenge the ideology of the mainstream, it mirrored it.
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