DANCING
ON THE EDGE
director's cut, Index magazine, 2001
by
Simon Reynolds
Centro
Fly, Manhattan, Winter 2001. Tonight the club's mainfloor hosts a night called
GBH--shorthand for Great British House. If the night was actually based in the
U.K., the name would be mildly amusing--it's the abbreviation for
"grievous bodily harm," an indictment roughly equivalent to
"assault". There's also a faintly amusing echo of the veteran punk
band GBH.
This club, though, couldn't be more harmless, less punk. The music
chugs along efficiently, a cautious composite defined mostly be what it's not
(not too deep, too druggy, too gay, too hard, too organic, too anthemic).
Groove Armada's "Superstylin'" comes on, and the residual tang of
"vibe" in the dancehall vocal only serves to emphasize how
deracinated and over-processed the rest of the track is. As for the crowd,
they're smartly dressed but not flamboyantly styled, and impossible to gauge in
terms of subcultural affiliation; their
celebration never reaches the level of abandon, let alone frenzy.
I'm
actually here for what's going on in the basement, the 2step night Drive By
(where UK rave veterans Shut Up and Dance are spinning) but on a strange
impulse I climbed the stairs to monitor the vital signs of house culture. And
I'm ambushed by an unexpected fury of disgust, unable to understand why I find
GBH's sub-Dionysian bustle so snugly smug, such a personal affront. And from
there it's a short step to wondering: how come I ever got the idea that dance
culture was meant to be an arena for danger in the first place? Right now, none
of the styles of postrave floor fodder that rule the
clubs--"progressive," trance, filter house, tech-house, hard
house--substantiate the notion of dance-with-edge.
Flash
back, ooh, 23 years. Disco is still at
its height, and although discophobes are calling for its death, it actually
seems, in 1978/79, that rock is the one that's ready for last rites. Out of
those mobilized by punk, the smartest minds are arguing that traditional
rock'n'roll is exhausted and the way forward involves embracing the rhythms and studio techniques of
disco and dub. This
"anti-rockist" vanguard--Public Image Ltd, Talking Heads, Gang of
Four, James Chance, Pop Group, A Certain Ratio, to name just a few--share David
Byrne's belief that "black dance production is a bigger revolution than
punk."
But
they don't want to simply copy black dance music as closely as possible, in
that time-honored, over-reverential white bluesman/blue-eyed soul/wigga
tradition; they want to mutate it, warp it, infect its upfulness with angst, militancy, and political despair.
Two
songs from this punk-funk moment seem especially emblematic, and could be said
to have changed my life. PiL's "Death Disco" was actually a UK Top 20
hit in the summer of 1979, and I can vividly recall the pained expression on
the presenter's face as he announced the group's appearance on Top of the Pops
(England's equivalent to American Bandstand).
"Death Disco" shattered the show's merry light entertainment
atmosphere: over Keith Levene's soul-flaying guitar and Jah Wobble's
dark-surging disco-style "walking
bassline", ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon howled muezzin-style as he anatomized
the horror of looking into his mother's
eyes as she lay on her deathbed.
The
other funk noir tune is "Dance of the Screamers" by Ian Dury &
the Blockheads, who weren't generally thought of as part of the post-punk
vanguard. Indeed by 1979's Do It Yourself they'd crossed over as massively
popular entertainers in the UK: the once-menacing Dury clasped to the British
public's bosom as the chirpy Cockney king of comedy-rock. "Dance of the Screamers," that
album's stand-out song, is no barrel of laughs though. The sound is slick disco
(the Blockheads were shit-hot, session-quality funkateers) but the lyric devastates
the party vibe, reimagining the dancefloor as a killing field for social
cripples and lost 'n' lonely losers desperate for love. Eventually Dury
abandons words altogether, his hoarse howls of agony sparring with Davey
Payne's freeform sax-blasts.
Dancing
in the dark (figuratively and literally) to "Death Disco" and
"Screamers"--this was my introduction to dance music. Later I fell
for the punk-funk paroxysms of Delta 5 and Gang of Four, the polyrhythmic panoramas of Talking Heads'
Remain In Light, the dark absurdist "mutant disco" of Was (Not Was),
the Chic-for-sociopaths of Defunkt. The latter, hailed at the time as funk's
very own Sex Pistols but now almost totally forgotten, was formed by James
Chance's estranged horn section (New
York between 1979-82 was a hotbed of groups based around the notion of
dance-with-edge). Leader Joe Bowie defined the group as a revolt against the
sedative culture of disco: "We've got to wake up again and Defunkt
are part of that resurgence of thought."
By
1983, though, the notion of avant-funk or punk-funk had run out of steam,
trapped itself within its own cliches: sub-Miles trumpet-heard-through-fog,
neurotic slap-bass, guttural pseudo-sinister vocals, Ballard and Burroughs references. The leading
edge of white alternative music recoiled from the dancefloor. Groups as diverse
as The Smiths, Husker Du, REM, Jesus & Mary Chain, restricted their
influence-intake to the whitest regions of rock's past: The Byrds folk-rock,
Velvet Underground, rockabilly. Still, the core contention of the punk-funk
project--that rock's hopes of enjoying a
future beyond mere antiquarianism (the Cramps, the White Stripes) depends on
assimilating the latest rhythmic innovations from black dance music--never
entirely disappeared.
What
happened was that the next-wave of postpunk groups, like Scritti Politti and
New Order, fully embraced the latest black dance styles (electro, synthfunk)
and their tools (drum machines, sequencers, Fairlight samplers), infiltrating
their doubt or dread into the mix via the lyrics and vocal approach, but not
tampering with the music to any great degree.
Other ex-punks (Paul Weller's Style Council, Simply Red) just took on
blackness wholesale: the music, the lyrical language, the soul style of
vocalisation. And for quite a long period in the Eighties, this was the
consensus: that the best white artists could do with black music was try not to
fuck with it, for fearing of fucking it up. Emulate, not mutate.
This
"soulboy" consensus was rudely shocked by the arrival of acid house
in 1987. Gospel-influenced song-based house was highly palatable (Weller even
made a deep house record) but the harsh futuristic attack of the Roland 303
acid bass was greeted with appalled incomprehension: "it's so cold, so
mechanistic---where's the soul?!?!". To which my response, was
"exactly, exactly, and who cares?", Hearing the early Chicago acid
tunes was like the totally unscheduled resurrection of avant-funk,
half-a-decade after its demise, and half-a-world away from its birthplace in
Britain and Germany. In songs like Phuture's "Your Only Friend" and
Sleezy D's "I've Lost Control", you could hear uncanny echoes of PiL,
Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo: the inhibited and coercive treadmill rhythms, the
constipated basslines, the desolate dub-space. Even the imagery evoked by the track titles or
stripped-down vocal chants--trance-dance as control, a sinister subjugating
form of hypnosis; scenarios of mindwreck, abduction, paranoia---was just totally
1981. And as it happened, some of the
acid house pioneers were influenced by the early avant-funk and synth
experimentalists, from Throbbing Gristle to German outfits like DAF and
Liaisons Dangereuses (both huge on Chicago's early Eighties dancefloors).
It was
only right and proper, then, that the pan-European subcultural upsurge
triggered by acid house allowed many original avant-funkers to resurface.
Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk formed Sweet Exorcist and made some of era's
classic "bleep techno"; Graham
Massey, 808 State's musical genius and future Bjork collaborator, was formerly
of minor avant-funk outfit Biting Tongues. Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV's
Genesis P.Orridge, Soft Cell's Dave Ball, Youth from Killing Joke, 400 Blows's
Tony Thorpe, Torch Song's William Orbit, Quando Quango's Mick Pickering....
there's an endless list of avant-funk veterans whose dormant careers were
instantly revitalized by the new context created by the synergy of house and
Ecstasy. The concept of "rave" itself, with its multiple connotations
of madness, fury, and deranging euphoria, seemed to me like pure punk-funk in
spirit: the ultimate merger of aggression and celebration.
Between
1991 and 1993, as rave turned to hardcore, hardcore to jungle, it really did seem like the
reactivation of the avant-funk project, except on a mass scale. This was a
populist vanguard, a lumpen bohemia that weirdly mashed together the bad-trippy
sounds of art school funk-mutation with a plebeian pill-gobbling rapacity that
recalled the vital vulgarity of Oi! (In the early Eighties, your 23 Skidoo art
students and your Oi!-punk proles would have been deadly class enemies). In
particular, the transitional sound of "darkside"--febrile hyperspeed
percussion, ominous basslines, dizzy sensations of harrowing bliss, a haunted/hunted
vibe of spooked-out paranoia---was uncannily redolent of the soundtrack of my youth: Death Disco, Pt
2. Indeed "darkside"'s reflected a moment circa 1992-93 when Ecstasy
abuse was starting to exact its heavy toll, transforming many into braindead
zombies and a few into actual real-deal corpses.
* * * *
To be
a participant in the underground rave scene of the early Nineties was
electrifying, like being plugged into currents of revolutionary energy. The
sensation was explosive: energy exploding into public space (with illegal raves
and warehouse parties), energy exploding across the airwaves (with pirate
radio), energy exploding through the music itself, which felt like it was
propelled pell-mell by a mutational momentum that was uncontainable.
And
then a strange thing happened--all that unruly, turbulent energy, and all that
borderline-criminal activity, started to get orderly and organized. Clubs and
labels became business-minded, looking towards steady long-term profits rather
than quick killings, and thinking like corporations rather than buccaneers.
Raves in the "darkside" era
became too edgy for all but a diehardcore of headstrong nutters, and
alienated by the moody, paranoid vibes, many ravers returned to the clubs, with
their safer atmospheres and predictable
satisfactions. Gradually, the punk principles that informed the original rave
scene ( the crowd-as-star, the anonymity of producers and DJs, "faceless
techno bollocks") faded with the emergence of a global circuit of
superclubs and a hierarchy of superstar DJs: pseudo-personalities like Paul
Oakenfold, Bad Boy Bill, Lottie, Paul
Van Dyk, Dave Ralph, who travel the world earning fat fees and racking up the
Air Miles.
The
music changed too, the fever and fervor of hardcore rave gradually tempered
into something milder. On the global quasi-underground of superclubs, the
dancefloor is dominated by the whiter-than-white sounds of trance and its
mature cousin "progressive" (the sound made famous by Sasha &
Digweed at the late unlamented Manhattan superclub Twilo, among other places).
Anthemic and sentimental, trance has a certain cheese-tastic anti-snob allure:
in some sense, it is still music for ravers. Punkless and funkless,
"progressive" is definitely a post-rave style. Musically, it's somewhere between a
de-anthemized trance and a house music utterly purged of blackness, gayness,
sexuality, humor. What's left is a faint aura of ersatz futurity, spirituality,
cosmic-ness. Sleek, abstract artist names like Evolution,
Breeder, Hybrid, Moonface, Quivver, Lustral, and vapidly big-sounding track
titles like "Force 51", "Syncronized Knowledge", "Gyromancer", "Enhanced",
"Carnival XIII", "Descender", "Supertransonic"
seem almost subconsciously designed to to avoid conjuring real-world evocations
or resonances.
Purging all the
aspects of rave that harked back to earlier youth movements like hippie and
punk, progressive has achieved a blank purity, sterile and non-referential.
It's the nullifying soundtrack for experiences sealed off from everyday
life--the sanitized debauchery that superclubs are in the business of catering for, despite their front of
co-operation with the authorities against drug use. Beyond "edge" in
the subcultural sense, the very sound of the music lacks edges --your typical
progressive track is a featureless miasma of samey-sounding texture and
mid-tempo surge-pulses, blurring
indistinguishably into the next track as DJs compete to perfect the craft of
the seamless, pointlessly prolonged mix. It's music that doesn't explode with
crescendoes and climaxes, but slow-burns, simmers. And this implosive aesthetic mirrors the way the club
industry has successfully corraled and contained the once anarchic energies of
rave.
Part of progressive's selling point is its image as
streamlined pleasure-tech. The tracks are mere components for the mixscapes
assembled by the ultra-skilled technicians who travel the global superclub
circuit. Temples of too-easy hedonism
like Gatecrasher, Cream, Ministry of Sound, actually use their very leisure
industry corporate-ness as part of their image and sales pitch: the logos, the
slogans like Gatecrasher's "Market Leaders In Having-It-Right-Off Leisure
Ware," the merchandising and spin-off compilations, all communicate the
sense of quality guaranteed, a reassuring predictability. You get what you pay
for, the superclubs and superjocks seem to be saying; your precious leisure
time is safe in professional hands. But
Progressive embodies the ultimate
vacuousness of pleasure as its own justification. For without difficulty (the
physical commitment of actually journeying to a remote rave, or a shady club,
say), you get what you pay for and
nothing more. The "surplus value" that came with participating in
the rave underground--with its possibility of either wild adventures or a total
bust--has disappeared as an option. The
superclubs are like department stores or shopping malls, the dancers like
consumers or spectators. Factor in the Ibiza-isation of dance culture, and the
Spring Break-isation of Ecstasy, and you have a depressing picture: the
transition from rave as counterculture to clubland as a mere supplement or
adjunct to affluent, aspirational, enjoyment-oriented lifestyles. A dance
"culture" without even the transcendent escapist frisson of the
original disco. Because with lives so well-adjusted and abundant, why would you
even need to escape at all?
I have this far-fetched theory that Daft Punk's album of last
year, Discovery--with its titillating infusions of late Seventies AOR, soft-rock,
and lite-metal, its evocations of Frampton, 10CC, Van Halen, ELO, Buggles, and
the actual recognisable Supertramp keyboard lick on "Digital
Love"---was trying to make a point: that dance music right now has a lot
in common with American rock at its most toothless, radio-programmer-castrated,
emollient (all those groups ruled the radio roost during the
punk-never-arrived-here FM void of 1976-80). Almost as if, by making this
unhappy resemblance blatantly obvious, Daft Punk could somehow prompt a real Dance-Punk
into existence. Well, I said it was far-fetched theory.
Another
abreactive symptom of this dawning sense of dance culture as a dead end, as a
new decadance, is the resurgence of interest in the original dance-with-edge:
avant-funk, mutant disco, early Eighties proto-house. Compilations like In The
Beginning There Was Rhythm: The Birth Of Dance Music After Punk, Disco Not Disco, and Nine O'Clock Drop (complete with compiler
Andrew Weatherall's sleevenote railing against the way dance music has become
"the soundtrack to complete an easily assembled life(less) style.... the
soundtrack for ad agency pick and mix culture snitches"). Reissues of 23
Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire, ESG. Clubs
like Mutants and Transmission. Then there's the plethora of contemporary groups
who are taking cues from the early Eighties: Playgroup, with their loving
pastiches of New York mutant disco and synth-funk, their Pigbag and Specials
homages; the Kraftwerk circa Computer
World meets Todd Haynes circa Safe anomie & modernity of Adult; the art
school bop and Sprockets-funk of Berlin's Chicks On Speed; Le Tigre's lo-tech
agit-funk, all spiky riffs and rad-feminist sloganeering.
Angular,
scrawny, not-quite-fluid, early Eighties postpunk dance is a world away from
the plumply pumping satisfactions of modern dance music, the supple repleteness
of its production. What seems appealing to contemporary ears about that period
of punk-funk is its very failure to be funky in a fully-realised fashion. And that brings us back to the original
question of what the white boys and girls can bring to the party? Precisely
their alienation, their awkwardness and unrelaxedness, their neurosis, their
inability to swing (think David Byrne's persona: the geeky consumer-commuter
burb-dweller straining to "stop making sense," trance-out). It was
this very Euro-WASP stiltedness and coldness that was so inspiring to the
original Detroit techno people (a paradox that Carl Craig crystallized with the
insight: "Kraftwerk were so stiff, they were funky"). Rave culture
once offered a transgressive ecstasy, but after ten years of
professionalisation and technical refinement, rapture has become routizined,
bliss banal. No wonder that a new generation is rejecting the very notion of
trance-dance as narcotic, lulling, null, and grasping instead for some kind of
edge. Rather than the ease of release offered by house music in its many forms,
tension and unease seem desirable again, for their own sake.
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