History

Mainstream raves, sometimes described by the acronym Radical Audio Visual Experience, began in the late 1980s as a product of, reaction to, and rebellion against, trends in popular music, nightclub culture, and commercial radio.

In an effort to maintain distance and secrecy from the mainstream club scene (or perhaps for lack of affordable, receptive venues), warehouses, rental halls, and outside locations most often served as raves' venues. In an effort to control and curtail rave parties, some police and governmental bodies effectively outlawed raves in some areas. Such laws consequently forced regional electronic dance music events to move to formal venues, such as nightclubs and amphitheatres. Some venues and jurisdictions additionally prohibited certain types of rave fashion and paraphernalia.

Early raves were completely do it yourself; only a small number of people contributed to event production and promotion. Self-styled production and promotion companies have increasingly organized raves; the "companies" were usually unofficial or loosely defined. The companies promote their events by creating and distributing fliers and online bulletins.

As law enforcement agencies increasingly began paying attention to raves, concealing a party's location became important to an event's success. To that end, event organizers sometimes either promoted events solely by word-of-mouth, or would only reveal the date and location of the event to subscribers of an electronic mailing list or via voicemail. Some even went so far as to provide a series of clues or map checkpoints that ultimately led to the location of the rave.


What is a rave?

A rave is an all night event, where people go to dance, socialise, get high and generally have fun in an uninhibited way with other likeminded people. Some say it's about the creation of a community and re-connecting with something perceived as lost. Others just say it's about necking loads of pills and getting wasted with your mates in a field.

Where?

Usually in a derelict warehouse, a club, a beach, a field, an aircraft hangar or a sports arena - anywhere you could fit a massive sound system and a lot of people. In the rave heydays of the late '80s, the larger events attracted tens of thousands of people. The venue would often remain secret up until hours before the party was to begin as a way of keeping the police away. Organisers would even sometimes have backup sites in mind in case the cops sniffed them out - which they did more and more often.


Origins?
The term rave first came into use in Britain in the late 50's referring to the wild bohemian parties of the time. It was then briefly revived by the mods, but didn't come back into fashion until the illegal London warehouse party scene in the mid eighties. However it is likely that the term 'rave' came from Jamaican usage rather than a revival of any previous usage in Britain.


Who?

Rave crowds were and still are mostly (but not exclusively) young from all sections of society .

What is rave music?

Rave music is what most people now call 'dance' music, or as some government wonk put it, music with a distinctive 'series of repetitive beats'. Early ravers discovered that the combination of ecstasy and music with fast, repetitive beats was a marriage made in disco heaven. The big raves have a line-up of bigtime DJs as well as some live performances by dance music bands.

Why did rave culture take such a hold of the UK in the 1980s?
There are many theories why the UK went nuts for raving in the late 80s and beyond. It happened during a period of major consumerism and individualism. Margaret Thatcher was telling everybody to look after number one (famously saying there was "no such thing as society"). There was bound to be a reaction to this and it helped that a bunch of English DJs had just got back from Ibiza where they had experienced ecstasy and rave culture first hand. They brought it to the young people of Britain and within a year rave culture had flourished. Instead of money and power, rave called for empathy, intimacy, spirituality and the joy of losing yourself in the crowd.

Some other random thoughts: Doug Rushkoff, author of Ciberia, observed that the majority of house music runs at the speed of 120 bpm (the rate of the foetal heartbeat), while Simon Reynolds has noted that raves mimic the atmosphere of a nursery with its use of kids' TV themes, sampled baby vocals, dummies, baggy unisex clothes, and the camouflaging of drugs as sweets. Think about that next time you go dancing.

And then came the end

By the early '90s, the Tory government, the police, the tabloid press and middle England had all had enough of rave culture. The government acted, passing the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994).

Sections 63, 64 & 65 addressed the issue of raves:

A 'rave' is defined as a gathering of 100 plus people, at which amplified music is played which is likely to cause serious distress to the local community, in the open air and at night. These sections give the police the power to order people to leave the land if they're believed to be:


Preparing to hold a rave (two or more people)
Waiting for a rave to start (10 or more)
Actually attending a rave (10 or more)
Ignoring this direction, or returning to the land within the next week, are both offences, liable to 3 months' imprisonment and/or a £2,500 fine. Section 65 lets any uniformed constable who believes a person is on their way to a rave within a 5-mile radius to stop them and direct them away from the area - failure to comply can lead to a maximum fine of £1000.

The Act effectively killed off free parties or events not licensed through local government.
Aciiid is dead, long live Aciiid.


1985:
1985 - The Music - Acid House The History
Like it or not, house was first and foremost a direct descendant of disco. Disco had already been going for ten years when the first electronic drum tracks began to appear out of Chicago, and in that time it had already suffered the slings and arrows of merciless commercial exploitation, dilution and racial and sexual prejudice which culminated in the 'disco sucks' campaign. In one bizarrely extreme incident, people attending a baseball game in Chicago's Komishi Park were invited to bring all their unwanted disco records and after the game they were tossed onto a massive bonfire.

Disco eventually collapsed under a heaving weight of crass disco versions of pop records and an ever-increasing volume of records that were simply no good. But the underground scene had already stepped off and was beginning to develop a new style that was deeper, rawer and more designed to make people dance. Disco had already produced the first records to be aimed specifically at DJs with extended 12" versions that included long percussion breaks for mixing purposes and the early eighties proved a vital turning point.

However, it was not until the mid to late 1980s that a wave of psychedelic and other electronic dance music, most notably acid house and techno, emerged and caught on in the clubs, warehouses and free-parties around London and later Manchester. These early raves were called the Acid House Summers.

1990s: United Kingdom
Raves began to expand into a global phenomenon around 1989-1992, mostly on a grassroots basis: people who had travelled to attend the first raves in each region began setting up promotion companies, often informally, to organize their own parties. By the mid-1990s, major corporations were sponsoring events and adopting the scene's music and fashion for their "edgier" advertising, making the scene become more commercialized, in direct contrast to the anti-establishment groups who birthed the rave scene during the 1980s.

1990s: Europe
Rave culture was becoming part of a new youth movement. DJs and electronic music producers such as Westbam proclaimed the existence of a "raving society" and promoted electronic music as legitimate competition for rock and roll. Indeed, electronic dance music and rave subculture became mass movements. Raves had tens of thousands of attendants, youth magazines featured styling tips and television networks launched music magazines on house and techno music. The annual Love Parade festivals in Berlin attracted more than one million partygoers between 1997 and 2000.

Raves had also spread to far away places, such as Australia. In Australia the Melbourne Shuffle dance style has evolved over the last 15 years. American dancers started doing liquid dancing at this time.

2000s:
By the early 2000s, the terms "rave" and "raver" had fallen out of favor among many people in the electronic dance music community, particularly in Europe. Many Europeans returned to identifying themselves as "clubbers" rather than ravers. It became unfashionable among many electronic dance music affectionados to describe a party as a "rave," perhaps because the term had become overused and corrupted. Some communities preferred the term "festival," while others simply referred to "parties." True raves, such as "Mayday," continued to occur for a time in Central Europe, with less constrictive laws allowing raves to continue in some countries long after the death of rave in the United Kingdom. Moreover, traditional rave paraphernalia, such as facemasks, pacifiers, and glowsticks ceased to be popular.

In the northeastern United States, during the mid-2000s, the popularity of Goa (or psy-trance) increased tremendously. This is due to the fact that acceptance was never questioned in the sub-rave culture of Goa, and that this culture represents their selves as a community not a scene. With the warehouse party scene, the trend is also restarting; This contrary belief in the early 2000's was that 2002 would mark the end of the rave (known as party scene at the time), and the scene was over.

2006:
2006 is being marked as the renaissance of the underground electronic culture.




« Last Edit: 25/July/2006, 02:39:57 PM by jana »


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