VICE: Explaining Rave Culture to Americans

[dirtynumbangelboy]

America,

Your relationship with rave culture is not unlike our relationship with football. You invented it in your post-industrial northern cities, yet it's the rest of the world that has truly learnt to understand it. It's a precocious child that you managed to spawn, only to realise that you were less than competent as parents and had to give it to the rest of the world to provide it with a proper upbringing.

Now it's back in your life and you don't know how to deal with it.

For the last 25 years, while you guys were buying Learjets and listening to Creed, Europe has been double dropping, reaching for the lasers and constantly asking strangers if they are "having a good night". You thought this made all of us homosexual, existentialist drug addicts (which may be partly true) and for years you resisted the charms of Mitsis, Ministry Of Sound and the music of Paul Oakenfold. Your party scene was content with smashing "brewskis", smoking "doobs" and blasting the music of Kid Rock and 2 Live Crew.

Recently, though, something's changed. You've got some of the hoodest guys out there eulogising about MDMA in a way that would make a young Bez wonder if he was overdoing it a little on the pilled-up hyperbole. Trinidad James is always going on about "popping molly", as is Danny Brown, as is Future. Lil Wayne got caught with enough of it on his tour bus a few years back to keep the whole of the Berlin Love Parade rushing for a few hours, and even that new Destiny's Child track sounds like it wouldn't be out of place at an all-day, early 90s Fantazia rave in Donnington.

Now, thousands of your previously clean-cut, "Euro-fag"-hating teenagers are trading in their Ozzfest tickets for Skrillex stadium shows and making signs that say "Daft Punk Rocks!" at Coachella. A colleague of mine told me that, at his high school, listening to house music was once akin to listening to Judy Garland live albums. Now it's the done thing. Something's in the water and it might well be MDMA.

I'm not sure you really "get it", though. I mean, I'm sure Levon Vincent, Terrence Parker, Juan Atkins and Kenny Dixon Jr get it. But the newbies don't. In fact, us pill-popping redcoats in the old world find it quite funny how much you don't get it. This is a continent that had "Born Slippy" soundtracking political campaigns and school runs alike. We have politicians who have taken pills and DJs who open youth centres. Us watching you get into ecstasy and dance music is how I imagine you probably feel when you see footage of line-dancing classes in Runcorn and hear TGI Fridays waiters "YEE-HAW!"-ing their way to lonely and inevitable suicide.

I've seen your "Camp Bisco", I've heard your Deadmau5 and I thought you might need a little bit of a crash course in the do's and don'ts of rave culture >> Click here for the rest of the story..

Taken from VICE UK

[mongki]

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