Second Summer of Love goes Radio 2

The most comfortable and establishment piece of rave nostalgia yet. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, seeing as you have to been pushing forty to have been "there" in 1988- but I am anyway. Somehow i never imagined cosy reminiscences of coming up on a rhubarb and custard in some field off the m25 to be sandwiched inbetween Janice Long and Terry Wogan. I realise that this is the second or even third (more?) time round in the last forty years an oppositional and/or drug culture has been sold back to us minus the rough edges...but it still seems a strange fit. I suppose I should expect high court judges to be choosing Acid Trax along with The Lark Ascending on desert island discs in a few years? Anyway i am intrigued as to what the "listen to the band" dance music special is going to offer. presumably "Acid Brass" a la Jeremy Deller...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/events/danceseason/
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
n.t.a.h.

'sold back'

The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation

http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr93.html
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr94.html
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr95.html
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr96.html
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr97.html
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr98.html
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr99.html

"There were all these activists, you know, Berkeley radicals, White Panthers … all trying to stop the war and change things for the better. Then we got flooded with all these ‘flower children’ who were into drugs and sex. Where the hell did the hippies come from?!” - Abbie Hoffman

I know most of you hep cats will be aware that intelligence agencies got involved in the 60s counter culture but there's some very interesting details being brought together here.
 

Logos

Ghosts of my life
This just shows Radio 2 understand who their demographic are (and what they were up to 20 years ago before the wife, kids, people carrier etc). In some ways its heartening from a public service perspective that they would do this sort of thing but then also profoundly depressing, though not particulary suprising - its uncontroversial to note that dance music has been recuperated by mainstream society in the UK since the early 90s anyway.
 

swears

preppy-kei
noel emits:

"The question that we will be tackling is a more deeply troubling one: “what if the musicians themselves (and various other leaders and founders of the ‘movement’) were every bit as much a part of the intelligence community as the people who were supposedly harassing them?” What if, in other words, the entire youth culture of the 1960s was created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray? And what if the harassment these folks were subjected to was largely a stage-managed show designed to give the leaders of the counterculture some much-needed ‘street cred’? What if, in reality, they were pretty much all playing on the same team?"

I want this to be true so bad, but you can tell it's batshit.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
I want this to be true so bad, but you can tell it's batshit.
It's a bit hyped because it's at the beginning of that guy's story but I'd suggest reading more of the whole thing before deciding you can 'tell'. I'm not sure what to make of his angle yet, still going through it, but there's certainly some details I hadn't read before and it looks like a big old web of synchronicity if nothing else. But then 'synchronicity' can act as a cover too, what a handy meme that one is.

Don't a lot of aspects of 'youth' culture, hippie, rave, whatever, look exactly like the kind of sick debased parody of a genuinely forward thinking movement that you can imagine being dreamed up by intelligence assholes?

And where did the present demolition of civil liberties really begin in earnest? Oh yes, in 'response' to the dangerous rave movement. :)
 
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This just shows Radio 2 understand who their demographic are (and what they were up to 20 years ago before the wife, kids, people carrier etc). In some ways its heartening from a public service perspective that they would do this sort of thing but then also profoundly depressing, though not particulary suprising - its uncontroversial to note that dance music has been recuperated by mainstream society in the UK since the early 90s anyway.

Beyond all this it unavoidably feels like this is an attempt to create an "official version"...to own or even transmute a piece of recent history that was supposedly genuinely democratic. elements of this culture are still judged to be more than problematic in law so it's peculiar to see its genesis "celebrated" by a public broadcaster in such a denatured way.
 

mms

sometimes
Beyond all this it unavoidably feels like this is an attempt to create an "official version"...to own or even transmute a piece of recent history that was supposedly genuinely democratic. elements of this culture are still judged to be more than problematic in law so it's peculiar to see its genesis "celebrated" by a public broadcaster in such a denatured way.

well yes a personal experience - or a living culture which dance music is to alot of people isn't a series of lists or talking heads from experts.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
"Searching for the generation that refused to grow up, Chris Coco discovers the last youth culture movement to make a social impact - Acid House."

"Smiley faces, repetitive beats and party nights that never seemed to end, sum up the halcyon days of Acid House in 1988. Twenty years later dance music is still hedonistic, but the early pioneers are now part of the establishment, with families of their own."

It's just all wrong isn't it. But what makes this so different from other air-brushed portrayals of the dance thing like Human Traffic? And it's by no means the first effort at historicisation. There was a book I think, can't remember the name right now...

I already experienced this queasy vertiginous sense of being recuperated, at a slight remove, when there were jokey TV adverts for some Madchester compilation about five years ago, maybe more. Not that I was deeply baggy or anything but you live through something and you know it does mean a lot to people, and there it is neatly shrink-wrapped in Woolies, and way before the 20 year cycle is up too.
 
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well yes a personal experience - or a living culture which dance music is to alot of people isn't a series of lists or talking heads from experts.

Exactly. and it feels like a lot of the real oral history is already dying. People HAVE died, burned out...etc...but probably not in this version.

it's like a fuzzy echo of the sensationalist tabloid coverage of the time.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
It's a silly post in the style of silly internet posts. Forgive me, it's Sunday.

But the point is that as she's done the first of these programs it is worth noting that although it's on Radio 2, she's not exactly Gloria Hunniford and does actually have some first hand knowledge of the subject, is what I mean.
 

bassnation

the abyss
It's a silly post in the style of silly internet posts. Forgive me, it's Sunday.

But the point is that as she's done the first of these programs it is worth noting that although it's on Radio 2, she's not exactly Gloria Hunniford and does actually have some first hand knowledge of the subject, is what I mean.

do you think having sex with djs is enough to qualify someone as a worthy journalist for the history of dance music?
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Yeah you're right, I doubt she's ever been to a rave or a club in her life. :rolleyes:

I'm not passing comment on the content of the actual show though because I haven't listened to it.
 

bassnation

the abyss
Yeah you're right, I doubt she's ever been to a rave or a club in her life. :rolleyes:

I'm not passing comment on the content of the actual show though because I haven't listened to it.

i was being whimsical, but surely you need more than just being a pill monster dj-shagger to do this - like an obsessive interest in dance music perchance? theres lots of clubbers who aren't really that arsed about the music, certainly wouldn't be standing them in front of the camera.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
My post above was whimsical too as I hope is obvious.

But still I do think it's fair to say that at least she's someone who has some first hand knowledge of the subject, maybe more than you realise. And she may not be the world's saddest train-spotter, but since when was that an absolute prerequisite for understanding or participating in rave culture? And then again she's a presenter, other people will have been involved in writing this. Probably people from the government dictating the officially approved history I shouldn't doubt ;)
 

bassnation

the abyss
My post above was whimsical too as I hope is obvious.

But still I do think it's fair to say that at least she's someone who has some first hand knowledge of the subject, maybe more than you realise. And she may not be the world's saddest train-spotter, but since when was that an absolute prerequisite for understanding or participating in rave culture? And then again she's a presenter, other people will have been involved in writing this. Probably people from the government dictating the officially approved history I shouldn't doubt ;)

yeah, and thinking about it, maybe an obsessive train spotter would be an even worse idea. wood for the trees, and all that.

however, i accidently caught a kiss fm acid house anniversary fronted by oakenfold, which wheeled out the same old tired mythos. worse than that, the speed it accelerated to shite trance on his shite label was both astonishing and inaccurate. ok house music just by itself (and by that i mean excluding future developments) is a complex beast and they've only got so long. but why does it start with those south london wide boys on holiday, listening to music (balearic) which isn't bloody house anyway. mawkish synths with flamencos is so far away from my awakening it doesn't even seem synonymous.
 
but why does it start with those south london wide boys on holiday, listening to music (balearic) which isn't bloody house anyway. mawkish synths with flamencos is so far away from my awakening it doesn't even seem synonymous.

haha. whenever i hear people reminiscing about "balearic" it sounds awful!

there's a weird tho i suppose inevitable exclusivity about these "early days" reminiscences- the idea that this was a beautiful thing until the masses got hold of it. whereas an alternative history might be that that's when things became interesting- at least musically speaking.

by the time i went to raves in the early 90s there was already this sense that we had missed out on the important part. i very much felt that at the time! the official line doesn't seem to have moved on from there. its just sort of solidified. very little mention of anything as dirty as drugs in this kind of coverage, the real history would be one of criminality as much as anything.
 

Client Eastwood

Well-known member
i listened to one program last week and it was a bit light on the early chicago 'jacking' sounds, played strings of life, voodoo ray and was very generic. There was a better effort by channel4 a few years ago which is probably on youtube.
 
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