Rave culture was not just escapist hedonism – it marked a tectonic shift in youth culture and its politics that resonates today
It was the chemical generation's Woodstock: May bank holiday weekend 1992, four years after the Summer of Love and the arrival of ecstasy, upwards of 20,000 revellers alight on Castlemorton Common in Worcestershire's Malvern Hills after national news reports inadvertently turn a minor subcultural event – a diverse, like-minded alliance of crusties and travellers, ravers and weekenders – into the watershed for rave culture going mainstream.
Images of blithely cavorting youth were stoked into a moral panic by tabloids and middlebrows, who frothed that it was all "mindless escapism", an apolitical act of disengaged thrill-seeking – a surefire sign that it was anything but, that it marked a tectonic shift that reverberated through youth culture and its political attitudes. Indeed, famously, Castlemorton's mass manifestation of hedonism would tweak a puritanical nerve in Whitehall, ultimately provoking the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which legislated against public gatherings with "music characterised predominantly or wholly by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats".
There have been other youth movements that have shaken the status quo and/or worried the establishment (rock, punk), but rare is the cultural form that prompts explicit legislation. Twenty-one years later, with dance music all grown up, is it conceivable that it – or popular music as a whole – could shake the government machinery in such a way, or is it all now safely part of an entertainment industry that can absorb and co-opt any radical energies, happily selling packaged thrills to Ibiza?
Nottingham's DiY soundsystem spent four days at Castlemorton – an oasis of house grooves amid the pounding techno – and the best part of two decades thereafter throwing free parties across the Midlands and beyond. Explicitly positioned against capitalism and the profit motive (whenever the police came to shut things down or arrest them, they were unable to because, to their general bewilderment, no money was changing hands), they were also against the passivity of consumer society, an ethos encapsulated by their name: create your own pleasure, don't simply consume a readymade experience.
The "free" aspect was just as much existential as monetary. These were spaces of personal and collective experimentation, of ego-loss and identities being undone (fuelled in part, of course, by illicit pills that were originally called empathy), a precondition for imagining a society different to the one you're escaping (and in the process imperceptibly causing to unravel). The parties retained the free festivals' diversity, while the music promoted face-to-face contact – for evolutionary biologists, the primordial building block of social relations – and not solipsistic, scrunch-faced Shangri-La-seeking. Many become politicised there.
Not only have the old networks of the pre-internet Castlemorton era now broken up, but social media have today made the organisation of free parties much easier to monitor. The internet has also perhaps proven an agent of affective disconnection, providing an immediate, if virtual, global community for dance music aficionados who then withdraw into microscenes in which people become dogmatic about the music and experience they want, much as consumers who have bought tickets for a stadium concert demand their anthems, their rights, an attitude diametrically opposed to free-party experimentation: "I know what I like" versus "Bring it on!"
It may be difficult to replicate such utopian moments as Castlemorton, then, but those quick to condemn the chemical generation and its cultural impact as little more than an obsolete relic of escapist hedonism ought to bear in mind the sage words of Chinese premier Chou En-Lai while in Geneva in 1953 to negotiate the end to the Korean war. Asked by an eager French journalist what he thought of the French revolution, he replied: "It's still too early to tell."
The effects of Castlemorton are still being sedimented, still carrying a real, if latent, micropolitical force in the hearts and minds of people who may well have made their compromises with the established order yet still nurture hopes of a freer, less alienated, more convivial time to come.
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by Scott Oliver via Music: Electronic music | guardian.co.uk
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