rave era as recapitulation of the sixties

luka

Well-known member
It's going to be an invitation to look inward for a lot of people who are habitually outward facing. What horrible ghoulies are they going to find?

I've mostly been doing housework and implementing a very small scale fitness regime, no inward looking whatsoever but I do quite enough of that anyway. What I needed to do was get on top of some practical stuff.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
I just remembered my mum has literally been assailed by the return of the repressed. Not getting any sleep. Bombarded by memories of childhood trauma and they way she was treated by her parents. She's in her 70s and retired so you'd think this would have already happened but it does seem that the lockdown a has cleared the space for this to happen.

woah - that's TEXTBOOK.

how fascinating.

it will be happening to alot of extroverts. stuff they buried in the unconscious.

very good for her probably but still painful.
 

luka

Well-known member
Well it's potentially good for her, in the long run. But in the immediate term it's got her threatening to do all sorts of barmy and destructive things
 

Woebot

Well-known member
Well it's potentially good for her, in the long run. But in the immediate term it's got her threatening to do all sorts of barmy and destructive things

:( sorry to hear that. you're well equipped to talk her through it i reckon.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Old and in the Way, Jerry & Merl Saunders, JGB, Reconstruction, plus the Dead. Nearly all of it dance music.

Must. Resist. Posting. Hundreds. Of. Tracks.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
One era seemed weighted against Cold War mutually assured destruction & civil rights, while the other appeared as an almighty hurrah that at least one aspect of the Cold War had passed with the wall coming down, even if nuclear arsenals are still among us.

Speaking of civil rights, anyone get to any of the Reclaim the Streets demos? Systems such as DiY, Smokscreen & various others put a United Systems organisation together to get around the CJB, stack of benefits that did so much good, Smokies even went as far as making a suicide rig from scratch in case of seizure.

However, some aspects seemed doomed to failure, compounded by my own deep mistrust of bongo drum circles & fire/poi jugglers (or “rave spinners” as one mate once described them). Sections of the protest movement seemed overtly provocative, partially exacerbated by a large public school contingent among traveler ranks. They had less to lose overall, so bringing it on top with police played to their wannabe bootstrap radicalism. The music seemed secondary to their desire to turn everything into a circus.

While my experience of the rave era was highlighted by dissolving societal distinctions among this generation, there’s also a more problematic theme of entitled kids just looking to rebel. Trustifarians who, by the late 90’s, were the first wave of property owning buy to renters, with more hypocritical bs spouted about helping a city area regenerate, as opposed to the clear profit motive.

The Mark Kennedy case is an insightful example of policing, the rave era & popular protests. Granted, the group he infiltrated had clearly defined environmental goals closing coal powered stations, you wonder how much provocation was police led with hindsight.

“I was lying because it was my job to lie. I'm not a dishonest person.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...kennedy-undercover-cop-environmental-activist
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I read Ian Maconald's introduction to Revolution in the Head last night. I was fascinated by his thesis that the communitarian aspects of the Sixties were fringe elements compared to the rise of postwar individualism, and that the Sixties (thanks to affluence and technology) in fact paved the way for the New Right.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
And MacDonald is very harsh / dismissive of post 60s pop, disco and electronic/rave music as being substanceless, tailor made for individualistic consumption.

I'd like to know woebots/blissbloggers response to this argument, perhaps they've already expressed that in some blog book or article?
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Surely there was a central tenet of collective joy with both, or was I hallucinating.

I’d disagree with consumption as a valid term. Participation & transportation are more appropriate. Going out with a group of mates, talking complete bollocks to strangers of every class, culture & race, incredible music too. Don?t think this is/was romanticising things.

You can still pinpoint consumption via club entry, paying for drinks, paying for drugs, but then I?m a geriatric free party aficionado where the whole point was to achieve lift off without recourse to the whole individualistic money trap.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
MacDonald doesn't deny that joyfulness, he says that the Beatles music encapsulated there being "something in the air" during this time.

But according to his argument (unless I'm butchering it) for MOST people, that sense of uplift was more to do with having more money to spend and more instant forms of entertainment to enjoy - than an appetite for revolution. But the sense of individual liberty (with the church in terminal decline and respect for the establishment withering away), in this analysis, would ultimately lead to "There is no such thing as society".

Obviously within the hippy movement and politically revolutionary movements at the time there was a sense of collectivism, and ideology, but MacDonaldale is arguing that it wasn't these that caused the collapse in values that conservatives accused the sixties of fostering, but the mainstream "revolution in the head" caused by the atomising influence of technology. He's saying that the 60s is ironically what led to the modern conservancies ideal of a free market ungoverned by collective interest.

I'd need to reread energy flash, which I seem to recall closes with a chapter questioning the ultimate political value or rave - was it revolutionary, or "just" a thrill ride?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Should add that I read his thoughts on rave with a stern, pained frown. So I'm not ESPOUSING his view, but it seemed to be very relevant to this thread.

I recently read Woebots response to the book in the book of Woe but that was more about the books analysis of Beatles songs (which makes sense) than Maconald's assessment of the sixties.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The truth is he was probably just too old and jaded to appreciate what rave was. I wouldn't be surprised if he just heard the records, and didn't attend a rave himself.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I suppose also that there are now critics who view the rave era similarly to how critics of Macdonald's generation viewed the 60s, and are probably missing the point of some new form of music now.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
i think Ian Macdonald's big problem with technorave music was what he saw as the deskilling of conventional musicianship caused by technology, computers - he wasn't a fan of sequenced rhythm and thought the melodic sense in most of the music (that he heard, which probably wasn't exploring deep and wide) was trite and child-like. which it often is, but that's cos the music's about texture and rhythm primarily

the other day researching a Florian tribute i was looking at Ian Mc's epic trilogy of Krautrock pieces in the NME in the early 70s - among the first in depth things on the German thing - and he wasn't terribly impressed with Kraftwerk I don't think. And much later wrote about them and the idea of machine-music with a similar kind of "oh it's so mechanistic and dehumanized" sniffiness - kinda missing the point a bit there.

i think seeing rave from the outside, from a long distance, he would have only have perceived the escapism and hedonism - but the key question might be what are they escaping to, rather than what are they escaping from? You could say "oh they are just hiding from reality", but you could also say "they are building a trial model of an alternative reality"

It's also a rebuke to the joylessness and atomisation of normal life, an implicit critique

and relates to the ambiguity of the word "dream" itself - dreams can be things you shake off as nonsense or idle fantasy, but equally you can't change anything without dreaming it first

lot of dream-themed tunes in rave which play on that very idea, is this all just an illusion or could we really live like this all the time?
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
There is this constant... not even ambiguity, more a tearing apart of the self by the wish to be alone and also together.

At least for me.

Maybe it's more that the ways we can be alone are so addictive, but we're always straining for the collective at the same time.

I think there are relatively few ppl who are really really HAPPY about being an individual atom.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
am just gonna leave this here to rest my case. yes there were dark psychedelic records in the 60s but the darkside was not an integral part of the experience, or more rather, the darkside was not sought out as an avant-garde by hippies. unlike chicago acid/rave. this 91 mix should illustrate it all.

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