August 30, 2009
the acid house revolution (chapter two excerpt)
sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September
[....]The genre’s formation was not entirely without a process. Hard upon importation, the Balearic sound ran up against “full-on acid house,” with its cry of “acieed!” and its “Acid Teds,” the young clubbing rabble derided by the cognoscenti. The Balearic style was identified with a kind of laid-back gentility and a jet-set cosmopolitanism; acieed with a more frenzied will-to-party, and devotees more local and lower-class. The globe and the street.
This offered a miniature of London’s character as a world city Cerberus: economic capital, cultural capital, global capital. It was the mutual pressure of Balearic and early acid house that drove the development of London’s social scene, and shortly an indigenous sound for acid house parties. While “acid house” swiftly won out as the genre’s trade name, and the idea of an “acid house revolution” entrenched itself in the public imagination, still the musical double-formation of London’s rave scene shouldn’t be abandoned altogether. Within it is preserved the dialectical kernel the center of rave’s development.
In 1988, this development was swift and accelerating. Club nights blossomed in size from the hundreds to the thousands. After Shoom’s success, the London clubs opened like gates at the Epsom Downs starting bell: Spectrum, the Trip, R.I.P. This last, originally an underground club night and then a relatively aboveboard and frenetically popular venue, captured in its name another peculiarity of rave’s doubled consciousness, not musical but explicitly cultural: an identification both with the supposedly engagé counterculture of the American sixties, and with an isolationist hedonism. At the time it was commonly held that the club’s name stood for “Rave In Peace”; in point of fact, it was an acronym for “Revolution In Progress.” It remains hard to decipher whether these two slogans were congruent or contradictory; and, if the latter, which carried the day. Journalist Sheryl Garratt’s memoir frames the early London scene: “Many were using acid as well as Ecstasy. This, the longer hair, Ibiza’s hippie past and the feelings of peace and love they felt they were sharing all invited parallels with the sixties, although without the radical politics.” In Reynolds’ summary, “For all the self-conscious counterculture echoes...acid house was a curiously apolitical phenomenon.”
But apolitics is a politics — a fact that is always with us. Perhaps more importantly in this present case, many of the denizens of rave’s growing scene believed it had a politics, and this matters. That “Rave In Peace” and “Revolution In Progress” could be understood as something other than contradictory is a useful first judgment on rave’s social substance (and perhaps a judgment on the sixties counterculture’s as well). A peaceful revolution, revolution without conflict, might be seen as the soul of rave’s social desire.