Having shown that there are organisations and collectives whose actions are inherently political, I will show how more commercial organisations such as ‘Cream’ in Liverpool have a working ethos that is different from most other British corporations. Whilst many aspects of contemporary dance culture can be categorised as being entirely commercial in origin, and initially appear to be exactly the same as other elements of consumer culture, the example of Cream shows qualitative differences between what contemporary dance culture terms ‘the underground’ and ‘the mainstream’.
Having dealt with these three specific examples I will then go on to examine how drug usage in contemporary dance culture positions its participants as a ‘deviant other’, and how, in reacting against the criminalisation of drug use, dance culture participants come into conflict with policing authorities. This leads many dance culture participants to describe their actions and experiences in political terms. At the end of this section I will discuss the likely results of the recent intensive concentration of governmental and police attention on drug use in contemporary dance clubs. Here I will suggest that certain sections of contemporary dance culture will attempt to ‘disappear’ from the gaze of policing authorities, and, in refusing to submit to the will of the state, these sections of dance culture will continue to be politicised.
Towards the end of this chapter we see a shift of analysis away from specific actions towards two discourses of political opposition within dance culture, a discourse of ‘disappearance’, and a discourse of ‘refusal of language’.
Having introduced the notion of deviancy in the section on drug usage, I will look at ‘deviancy theory’, showing how an examination of deviancy theories can further help to explain why dance culture ‘reacts’ against governmental interference, and how it is consequently politicised. In this section I will show how Howard Becker’s classic study of early-1960s’ jazz musicians can be used to show the similarities and differences between previously ‘deviant’ music cultures and contemporary dance culture. Having examined how these discourses influence the relationship between contemporary dance culture and the state, I then move on to a comparative examination of Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of celibacy in the Pyrenées. Comparing Bourdieu’s analysis with contemporary dance culture shows how we have arrived at the situation whereby contemporary dance culture finds itself in an almost impossible situation, attacked by common-sense discourse, and attacked by the state.
As suggested in the introduction to this thesis, common-sense discourse characterises contemporary dance culture as apolitical. However, campaigns against the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act of 1990 and, in particular, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 have shown us that dance culture can be a politically resistive force. The earlier piece of legislation was known in its formative stages as the ‘acid house’ bill and increased the penalties for organising unlicensed parties for profit. The latter Act is the first and only piece of legislation to use the term "rave" (it does so twice), defining rave music as composed of "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats" (Section 63, sub-section 1[b])1. For the first time in British legal history a musical form has been legally proscribed, albeit in a particular context. Sadly, the only logical recent comparison to make is with legislation in Nazi Germany during the Second World War that outlawed various forms of jazz.
Not only does the Act criminalise any two or more persons ‘preparing’ a site for a rave, but also, crucially, criminalises those on their way to a rave, those waiting to attend, and those at the event (the official definition of a rave being a gathering of 100 or more people on land in the open air at night, irrespective of whether they have permission to use that land). In theory therefore, a large birthday party in someone’s back garden with music playing in the background could lead to the imprisonment of all concerned.
During the period before Royal Assent to the Act, many artists and dance culture participants were active in resisting this legislation. An example of this resistance was the release of the ‘Repetitive Beats’ e.p. by a musical collective entitled Retribution (a track from this e.p., produced by On U Sound, and entitled Mind & Movement Control, can be found on the compact disc bound within the cover of the British Library copy of this thesis). To promote the record a video was shot which featured a demonstration in Trafalgar Square opposing the Bill. This demonstration was the largest in a series of protests that occurred throughout the country. Another example of creative protest2 was the 300 protesters who ‘invaded’ the garden of the Conservative Home Secretary (see The Times, 21 November 1994, p.1). Whilst many such protests were peaceful (or "fluffy" in the argot of the committed protester), other demonstrations were more confrontational (or "spiky") in nature3. For example a protest march through central London ended with a full scale battle between police and protesters, with, according to an interviewee who had attended the protest, police in riot gear repeatedly charging protesters who were desperately trying to leave the area (also see Johnstone and Milton, 1994, p.11).
In direct contrast to common-sense discourse, Jonathan Margolis, writing in The Sunday Times on 17 July 1994, suggests that, in the wake of demonstrations and campaigns, there has been a widespread politicisation of youth culture;
Contemporary dance culture has been deeply affected by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. An example of this is police action against the aborted ‘Mother’ rave of July 1995. A combined intelligence operation mounted by Devon, Cornwall and Northamptonshire police forces discovered that a rave was to take place in Corby, Northamptonshire on Friday, 7 July. Details about the rave were to be given out on a specific telephone number immediately before the event.
When sound systems, potential participants, and organisers arrived at the site in the early hours of the 7th they were followed by one police van. At 2 a.m. a police helicopter was seen above the site. Come dawn, although the rave had yet to start, two people were arrested and charged with ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance’. At 11 a.m. police roadblocks were set up around the site, with police using their new-found powers under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act to turn away potential participants. An hour later more organisers were arrested. Those potential participants that rang the telephone information line were surprised to find not a recorded message, but a person asking them for their names, their telephone numbers and the names of the people that they were travelling with. The police had taken over the telephone line and were busily preparing for more arrests. Some potential participants tried to obtain information on the rave by telephoning organisers’ mobile phones. However the police had managed to deactivate all mobile telephones in the surrounding area.
During the course of the evening the police escorted all the remaining organisers and potential participants out of the county of Northamptonshire and into Cambridgeshire. Another rave, believed to have been set up on a ‘fall-back site’ in Smeatharpe, Devon, was raided by 200 police officers. Police road blocks were set up on all surrounding roads, and nine people were arrested. The homes of Debbie Staunton, a member of United Systems (a sound system collective) and Michelle Poole, a member of the anti-Criminal Justice Act organisation Advance Party, were raided by the police, and they were both arrested and charged with conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.
It should be noted that both raves were to occur on unused open ground, and sound systems would not have been heard from any residential properties. However, police action to prevent the rave caused a 1.5 mile tail back on a Cambridgeshire dual carriageway. Perhaps therefore it could be suggested that police actions to prevent the Mother rave were ideological rather than practical (for more information on the Mother rave see Petridis, 1995a, pp.38-40, and Penman, 1995, pp.2-3).
In the pre-Act 1980s the first wave of acid house5 led to a widespread flouting of laws concerning the occupation of private properties, and most of the early British raves were held in squatted private property. Such events are infrequent now, due to the heavy penalties inscribed in the above legislation, yet the occasional illegal warehouse party still occurs. There are still some micro-cultures devoted to using unused properties, for example the Goa Trance scene based around illegal parties in South London.
Before the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act, 1990 and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 dance micro-cultures were often as politically resistant as members of the contemporary scene. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the Conservative government must have felt that raves were politically resistive, otherwise they would not have felt the need for legislation such as the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.
Whilst I wish to suggest that dance culture contains a ‘discourse of resistance’, it is worth noting that this discourse frequently breaks out into overt active political resistance on an everyday level. In London resistance to police interference often takes the form of club promoters and dance culture participants opposing the actions of the colloquially termed ‘Club Squad’, officially known as the 8 Area Clubs and Vice Unit of the Metropolitan Police, who deal with offences committed on the premises of nightclubs, and whose headquarters are based at Scotland Yard. In particular the Club Squad deals with those premises that are open later than 1 a.m., premises that, according to Inspector John Piddington (head of licensing), "need more intensive policing" (in Headon, 1995b, p.40). Why this should be the case is open to interpretation, but is a confirmation that nightclubs are more heavily policed than other licensed premises. Dance culture participants have reacted against this; an example being anecdotal evidence from interviewees who have suggested that when Club UK, one of London’s most commercially successful techno clubs of recent years, was visited by the Metropolitan Police in the wake of a well-publicised death in the club at the start of 1996, individual policemen were verbally abused and obstructed by the dance floor crowd.
The above analysis of opposition to parliamentary legislation has given us an example of how common-sense discourse on the nature of contemporary dance culture is erroneous in its suggestion that dance culture is apolitical. Opposition to parliamentary legislation has politicised dance culture. However there are elements of dance culture whose politics stem not only from an opposition to state interference, but also from an allegiance to a form of anarcho-libertarianism previously witnessed in the marginalised cultures of travelling communities and the ‘festival’ circuit of the 1970s and 1980s6. The ‘rave collective’ Exodus is a good example of such an organisation, and this section shows how there are elements of contemporary dance culture with deeply held political beliefs.
Taking over a deserted farm in 1992, Exodus began as a housing co-operative and party organisation. The deserted farm is the property of the Department of Transport and is due to be flattened for an extension to the M1 motorway in 1998. The farm has now been fully renovated and contains a working forge, a herd of Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, and facilities for visits from local schools7. The raves themselves are held on a variety of sites in and around Luton.
Exodus are a non-profit-making organisation, and they see their roles as explicitly political. Statements by the collective suggest that they see their role as beyond merely providing free parties for members of the local community, preferring to move towards a position whereby they are responsible for the radicalisation of a whole generation of young people, drawing them away from profit-making principles towards an entirely self-sufficient community built along anarcho-libertarian principles. An anonymous source quoted in The Guardian sees this occurring throughout the country; "party culture is equivalent to the old fairs that provided an economy for survival to the dispossessed part of society" (in Campbell, 1995, p.13). At events organised by Exodus any profits made from the sale of soft drinks (attendance is free), and any donations received from party goers, is spent on the maintenance of sound and lighting equipment, and on renovating local derelict buildings and converting them into homes. All members of the collective subscribe to the non-profit-making ‘anti-commercial’ ethos;
In late 1992 the police’s attitude to Exodus appeared to change with Chief Inspector Mick Brown from Dunstable advertising in local papers for information on unused spaces that could be used by Exodus for their parties. Chief Inspector Brown is quoted as saying
Whilst local police wished to continue with their more pragmatic approach, orders from above put an end to this. Chief Inspector Brown is on record as stating that
Once the liberal policing policy had been reversed the farm was raided by dozens of police, and 36 people were arrested. Detective Superintendent Alan Marlow has denied that this particular raid was heavy handed, although he is on record as stating that there may have been some "clumsiness" (in Campbell, 1993). On hearing the news, 4,000 local ravers made their way to the police station where the Exodus members were being held. Riot police were mobilised, but the tense situation was defused by Debbie Taylor, one of the few members of the collective not arrested (presumably she had not been at the farm) who persuaded protesters to disperse, despite the alleged presence of a police ‘agent provocateur’ who was, according to some reports, actually arrested for inciting violence (see Malyon, 1998, p.197). All Exodus members were released without charge.
Police interest in Exodus continued, and February 1993 saw more arrests and more confrontations between ravers supporting Exodus and riot police. Charges of causing a public nuisance and possession of controlled drugs were brought against Exodus members. This latter charge was thrown out of court by the presiding judge, amidst suggestions of procedural irregularities and police corruption (the alleged drugs find was completed by a single Police Constable in the dark, on his first day with the drugs squad, after a two minute search).
These allegations of police corruption led to local cross-party support for an independent public inquiry into the behaviour of the local police force. The Policy and Resources Committee of Bedfordshire County Council voted 10-8 for a public inquiry, to be chaired by Michael Mansfield QC. Committee minutes state that "this inquiry should examine the defence’s claims that were believed by an Appeal Court judge, stipendiary magistrate and juries, of allegations of malpractice by the Bedfordshire police in the investigation and prosecution of these cases" (in Campbell, 1994, p.8). As Malyon suggests "this remains the first and only example of a local council voting to investigate its own police force itself, rather than trust the Police Complaints Authority" (Malyon, 1998, p.198).
By mid 1993 many Exodus members were also occupying the derelict Oakmore Hotel in central Luton, and had begun to decorate and repair the building. However, eviction notices led to police arrests for criminal damage and the hotel was raided. Malyon explains further;
Whilst Polly Toynbee, writing in The Independent newspaper, falls in with common-sense discourse in her characterisation of the attitudes of the youth of Luton as "nihilism with a dash of hedonism" (Toynbee, 1995, p.2), those who support Exodus suggest that their role in the local community has led to a more political, and less hedonistic, youth culture. There have been claims, by group members themselves and by outsiders, that Exodus were instrumental in the ending of a riot in Luton in 1995. For three summer nights Luton saw numerous arson attacks, the stabbing of a policeman, the ambushing of a police car, looting, and widespread car burning. Exodus issued a statement stating "it is better to dance than burn your own community". An impromptu rave was attended by many of the tenants on the Marsh Farm estate, which was the focal point for the rioting. The violence promptly stopped (Campbell, 1995, p.13, see also Malyon, 1998, p.198-9).
Despite police intimidation, the Exodus collective continue to put on free parties in and around the Luton area. The results of the police operations Anagram, Ashanti, Anatomy and Anchovy mean that, at the time of writing, four Exodus members are currently banned from organising or attending raves, and nearly every single member of the collective has been arrested, including one 18-year-old Exodus member who was chased by 30 police officers and a police helicopter after allegedly stealing a sandwich. Local newspapers remain implacably opposed to the organisation’s activities.
Exodus’ non-profit making ethos has led them to uphold an interesting rule concerning Ecstasy use. Drug dealing is banned at Exodus parties, and Exodus have their own ‘drug squad’ who search out dealers and remove them. This means that, in the case of Exodus, another major governmental objection to raves is unfounded. David Taylor, an ex-policeman who attended an Exodus event in 1994, confirms this:
Whilst the economic prospects for Luton appear to be improving, Exodus are also going from strength to strength, with their largest party attracting approximately 10,000 people. To date, the independent inquiry into police malpractice has yet to occur. Andrew Cowper, a contributor to the internet discussion group UK-Dance (uk-dance@uk-dance.org), posted an email describing how he came to attend an Exodus party in the summer of 1996. This email goes a little way to capturing the spirit of adventure in finding an Exodus party, and the satisfaction received when the search is successful (for more information on Exodus see Saunders, pp.176-7, Campbell, 1993, Toynbee, 1995, White, 1996a, and Malyon, 1998).
There[’]s hundreds of cars parked in a field, next to a forest. We park, and follow the people down into the forest, where there is the maddest scene ever. Huge pumping sound system, lights bouncing all off the trees and loads of people all dancing and wandering and smiling and grooving and WOW what an am[a]zing sight. I thought nothing could be as cool as the party in the bottom of a valley near Ivinghoe could be that they had last time I went, but a party in a forest glade with UV drapes hanging off the trees... Crikey! (Cowper, 1996)
The above section has shown that there are dance cultural organisations such as Exodus whose actions are based upon specific political beliefs, beliefs that position them in opposition to common-sense politics. In putting forward this example I am not suggesting that all elements of contemporary dance culture are as politically aware and as politically active as Exodus. There are other organisations within dance culture that are far less ‘oppositional’ than Exodus. One example of such an organisation is Cream in Liverpool, a large limited company with a multi-million pound turnover. However, despite being a commercial organisation, I intend to show how there is still a discourse of opposition to certain ‘mainstream’ values within the actions of the Cream organisation. Cream are capitalistic in origin and action. However theirs is a benevolent capitalism, a capitalism far removed from the nightclubs owned and run by national corporations whose sole aim is the creation of profit. In this section I intend to show that, whilst it makes a profit, Cream does so in a manner different from other profit-making enterprises. The consumerism of Cream is a consumerism that is different from the consumerism of ‘mainstream’ Britain. In exploring this analysis I intend to show how there is an implicitly political motive of avoiding excessively exploitative commercial decisions, showing how the Cream ethos is derived from a political opposition to ‘naked’ capitalism.
The genesis of Cream was the aptly named club The Underground in Liverpool in 1989. The Underground was prized for its communal atmosphere, said to be the best in the country. In particular the club became the focal point for a large community of Liverpudlians who met up at 2 a.m. outside the club and travelled to illegal raves in the old mill towns of Lancashire and Cheshire9.
1990 saw continual police harassment of the club, with the police persuading local magistrates to revoke the club’s entertainment license amidst allegations of drug misuse in the club. Charges were brought against those involved in running the club, although no convictions were secured. Determined to continue to provide a quality club for Liverpudlian dance culture participants despite police opposition, the two leading DJs from The Underground, James Barton and John Kelly, moved to the Quadrant Park club, north of the city of Liverpool in Bootle. This club became legendary within contemporary dance culture for the quality of its music and for a continuation of the community initially built at The Underground. But the ‘underground’ nature of the club was soon spoilt by a managerial greed that continually pushed up entrance fees10. Soon the club was half empty on a Saturday night. Opposed to the naked profiteering of the management of the Quadrant Park, Barton and Kelly, along with fellow DJ Andy Carroll, began the search for an environment whereby they could earn a living whilst also providing Liverpool with the best music, the best sound system, and the best dancing environment, at a reasonable price.
The story continued as Barton, Kelly and Carroll moved to Liverpool’s city centre club The 051. The opening night saw a partial reuniting of The Underground community. With door prices fixed at £4 for students and members and £5 for non-members, and a music policy firmly geared towards ‘underground’ house, Friday and Saturday nights looked set to become one of Britain’s premier underground dance events. However managerial greed meant that door prices doubled in a matter of weeks to £10, and aggressive door staff, controlled by the club manager rather than the promoters themselves, turned away many committed dance music fans. Here there is a further connection to common-sense discourse on contemporary dance culture, with the management of the 051 believing that the naïveté and stupidity of dance culture participants would mean that, no matter how high the entrance price, and no matter how poor the standards, dance culture participants would continue to flock to the club. Such a view proved misguided, and within a matter of months, the communal atmosphere in the club had degenerated, with unemployed and low-paid members of Liverpool’s dance culture unable to attend.
Once the atmosphere at The 051 had become stale, Barton and Carroll left, starting a new night entitled Cream at the nearby Merseyside Academy venue. Catering for approximately 400 dancers, Cream was initially praised for the expense the promoters had gone to in renovating the building, and for the consistent quality of the music on offer. Again Cream showed themselves willing at this stage to sacrifice potentially very high profits.
Despite resistance from police and magistrates, Cream’s popularity increased, as did its capacity. It now holds approximately 3,000 dancers, and is invariably full each and every Saturday. The Cream name is franchised to other clubs around the country where Cream DJs hold ‘Cream nights’. In 1996 the Cream organisation sold over one million albums, and employed 46 people on a turnover of several million pounds a year.
1996 saw allegations that what had become known as the ‘superclub’ phenomenon as epitomised by the rise of Cream had gone too far, with many regulars no longer visiting Cream due to what they perceived to be its overly commercial nature. Cream had appeared to desert ‘the underground’, and had appeared to renege on its unwritten contract with Liverpudlian dance culture. Cream reacted against these criticisms, and publicly stated that they would no longer be booking those over-priced DJs who they perceived to be "unprofessional", and whom they blamed for increased door entrance prices (White, 1996b). Whilst not denying that they are a money-making enterprise, James Barton and Darren Hughes (another founding member of the Cream organisation) still subscribe to the discourse of ‘underground’ culture. Adherence to this discourse also led Barton and Hughes to speak out against drug-dealing in their club, claiming that criminal gangs with purely profit-making motives are unwelcome within the Cream ‘community’. Cream have also been the only club to date to bear the expense of employing a fully qualified doctor to deal with emergencies (see Alderson, 1996), and were also instrumental in organising a conference on ‘club health’ held at Cream’s Liverpool venue (see Kilfoyle and Bellis, 1997).
The summer of 1996 saw the addition of a jungle room to Cream. Whilst it is possible to view this move as an attempt to commercialise a then fiercely independent and ‘underground’ micro-culture, to turn, in George Melly’s immortal phrase, "revolt into style" (see Melly, 1970), the fact is that in the summer of 1996 jungle was still a very much London-based phenomenon, and Liverpool jungle nights were poorly attended. The addition of a jungle room at Cream was a sign of a musical and financial reinvestment within Liverpool dance culture; style turned back into revolt, and a musical genre that contained an outright political opposition to ‘mainstream’ values was incorporated into the Cream ethos. As a result of moves such as this Cream still feels ‘underground’ despite its multi-million pound turnover. It is still a part of a ‘deviant’ culture that emphasises its resistance to the values of ‘mainstream’ society. The financial success of Cream also means that it is now able to dictate a policy of booking avant-garde American DJs without fear of loss of custom. Musical experimentation is one of the primary facets of contemporary dance culture, and Cream has reasserted its allegiance to ‘the underground’.
The first two sections of this chapter have shown how there are elements of contemporary dance culture that are in direct political opposition to the state. The previous section on Cream has shown how there are other elements of contemporary dance culture that, whilst not directly oppositional to the state, are nevertheless in opposition to the unfettered workings of the free market, and therefore in opposition to dominant social discourses concerning how society functions. The free-market ethos has fully penetrated many areas of British society, such as the hitherto strictly Reithian BBC and the National Health Service. The above section on Cream is intended to show how matters of profit are less important in what may be the most financially successful dance club in the country than in many other areas of British society.
As stated above, Cream still ‘feels underground’, for the participants it still feels that they are part of a politically deviant culture, a culture viewed by common-sense discourse as purely hedonistic and entirely apolitical. Part of the reason for this is that the majority of clubbers that attend Cream consume the drug Ecstasy (3,4 Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA for short), and in doing so they are criminalised and politicisied. The illegal nature of Ecstasy, and the experiences that it offers, make contemporary dance culture politically resistive. This is not to posit a form of pharmacological determinism. I am not suggesting that Ecstasy somehow chemically causes political resistance, merely that the Ecstasy users that I have interviewed cast their usage in political terms. In particular they often describe their experiences as offering up a vision of a possible future utopia based upon co-operation rather than competition, based upon community rather than the individual. Douglas Rushkoff offers a similar analysis;
A more recent addition to British drugs legislation is the Public Entertainments Licences (Drug Misuse) Act of 1997. This legislation is similar to both the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act of 1990 and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 in that it directly targets contemporary dance culture. In criminalising dancers in the most commercial of contemporary dance clubs, policing authorities position all dance culture participants as criminals, as a ‘deviant other’, and, once criminalised, dance culture participants are politicised. Introduced to the House by the Conservative MP Barry Legg (who lost his seat in the 1997 General Election a matter of weeks after introducing the Bill to the House) the Act enables licensing authorities, acting on the advice of the police, to revoke immediately the licenses of those clubs, bars and public houses at which drugs are dealt or consumed. In particular the Act amends two previous pieces of legislation, and allows for the first time the immediate closure of a club where there is "a serious problem relating to the supply or use of controlled drugs at the place or at any place nearby which is controlled by the holder of the license". Jo Chipchase and Kevin Buckle expand upon the whole process of revocation of licenses;
In statements quoted by Chipchase and Buckle the police, and club owners and promoters who have been in contact with the police, cite owners’ ‘co-operativeness’ as a major factor in whether they are allowed to continue to trade (see Chipchase and Buckle, 1997) . There is plenty of scope for a Police Inspector to say, for example, that the type of music played in a club is encouraging drug use. In the years before the Act, the police have managed to persuade many Scottish club owners to enforce a "no hardcore" policy in their clubs due to the dance music micro-genre of Scottish hardcore becoming linked with the consumption of ecstasy and amphetamine sulphate. It is this link that often politicises members of contemporary dance culture; they see a piece of legislation aimed at preventing drug use being used to enforce specific music policies.
Whilst the Act gives greater powers to the police, the end result has been the tighter ‘self-policing’ of clubs. Let us also not forget that it is contemporary dance clubs that are the focus of this legislation. Those private clubs of London, frequented by city high-flyers and top journalists, where rest rooms are awash with cocaine, have remained untouched. Door policies, searches and surveillance in dance clubs have been stepped up. The searches completed at many clubs now border on the obsessive, where burly and aggressive bouncers search the contents of potential entrants’ shoes, socks, hairstyles and, on occasion, underwear. I have personally been searched in manner that veered towards assault, with a club doorman running his hand underneath my trouser waist band, with his fingers protruding inside my trousers about two inches below the bottom of my belt. However, in order to obtain entry to the club, I had ‘consented’ to the search and there was therefore little that I could do. Any complaint would in all probability have led to my being suspected of being a drug dealer, and would have therefore led to either permanent exclusion from the club, or detainment until the arrival of the police. I remember thinking "now is not the time to argue my case as an academic researcher taking part in field research". Many clubs now employ sniffer dogs to enable door personnel to detect those who have recently been in contact with drugs, thereby enabling them to prevent such people from gaining access to the club (see Glaser, 1997). I have personally spoken to both men and women who have been searched in a manner that, conducted anywhere else other than a nightclub, would have led to charges of indecent assault. However because such searches are ‘voluntary’, invasive practices continue. Some dance culture participants that I have spoken to have been strip searched by club bouncers in private rooms in nightclubs after they have been found in possession of drugs, or in one case when they were suspected of being in possession of cannabis.
The reactions of dance culture participants to such controls are twofold. Firstly, they devise new methods for storing and consuming their illegal drugs. Secondly, they become even more aware that dance culture is a culture of the outlaw, a culture of resistance. When dance culture participants are treated to such stringent searches it is not surprising that they consider themselves to be politically opposed to the state that sanctions such behaviour.
The long-term result of this latest piece of legislation is now in the balance. It seems likely that, under informal pressure from the police, club owners will be at least partially successful in reducing the amount of drug consumption on their premises through the further introduction of sniffer dogs, closed-circuit television camera systems, stringent searches on entry, and random searches whilst in the club. Club owners may also put pressure on club promoters and DJs to move away from music that has a ‘homologous’ relationship with illegal drugs towards more ‘mainstream’ ‘alcohol-oriented’ genres (the notion of homologous relationships between drugs and music will be dealt with in chapter 4). On the one hand a decrease in the use of drugs will lead to a decrease in the ‘use’ of music, and on the other hand a decrease in ‘drug-oriented’ music such as the aforementioned Scottish hardcore (or tartan techno as it is affectionately known) will lead to a further decrease in drug use. Dave Fowler cites one London club that was forced to alter its musical policy after an anti-drugs push by the Metropolitan Police’s 8 Area Clubs and Vice Unit. The explanation, according to Fowler; "fewer pills meant fewer people could get into the harder music on the main floor" (Fowler, 1997, p.62).
Further down the line, and with all the above occurring, dance culture will, in its own parlance, ‘go underground’, attempting to evade the gaze of the authorities through an increase in illegal and unregulated one-off parties. Matthew Collin, author of the much respected historical account of dance culture entitled Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House agrees;
The above section has showed how the intensification of the ‘war on drugs’ by policing authorities has led to the situation whereby dance culture participants characterise their drug consumption in explicitly political terms. The section finished with the suggestion that to avoid criminalisation some dance cultures could attempt to ‘disappear’ from the gaze of policing authorities in order to avoid a direct conflict with the state. Some dance cultures already choose to hide away completely from the gaze of official regulations and authorities, and are therefore resistant in the sense that they are invisible to the regulatory gazes of legal and moral authorities. This method has been successful in the face of new police tactics in the policing of clubs. Whereas in the late 1980s, when dance culture was smaller than the contemporary scene, police opposition to drug use in a club would take the form of an all-out raid and the searching of all participants, nowadays the use of undercover police surveillance operations to target those clubs at which drugs are consumed means that club owners and dance culture participants are not necessarily aware that they are being observed by the police. There is also a great deal of behind-the-scenes surveillance, with, for example, the police examining club promotional material for likely leads, or in the words of Inspector Piddington of the Club Squad, looking for clubs that are "getting into doing things that we don’t consider right" (in Headon, 1995b, p.40). It is interesting that Piddington should speak in terms of morality rather than criminality.
Having made this point there are still high profile campaigns against specific clubs with, for example, the Gardening Club in London’s Covent Garden being raided three times in one week. In 1995 Shelly Boswell, manager of the Gardening Club, succinctly describes the process whereby a dance micro-culture disappears from view: "if they want to control drugs and be seen to be clamping down, they should support the people who are legal. They’re just driving it all underground" (in Headon, 1995b, p.40).
Another example of the continuation of high profile police raids is the 86 arrests that were made at a rave held in 1995 in three adjacent venues in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. The police made use of the fact that participants had to walk along a public highway to travel between the venues, and searched and arrested people throughout the night. The whole operation involved 150 police officers drafted in from around the country (see The Guardian, 27 November 1995, p.6, and The Times, 27 November 1995, p.5). More recently one person that I interviewed whilst researching this thesis gave an eye-witness account of a police raid on The Garage Club in Liverpool in 1997. The club was in fact being raided by police and officials from the electricity supply company Manweb on suspicion of meter tampering. Manweb’s suspicions proved correct, and Manweb representatives immediately declared that the club’s electricity supply was dangerous. The police made the most of this opportunity, and, as the club was emptying, police officers searched club-goers. Those found in possession of drugs were immediately arrested, whilst, according to my eye-witness, those not found in possession of drugs were arrested for being drunk and disorderly. Positioned between the proverbial frying pan and the fire, it is not surprising that many dance culture participants, particularly those involved in organising events, attempt to maintain a position as far away from the gaze of the police as is humanly possible.
Two examples of dance cultures that have successfully ‘disappeared’ spring to mind. The first is the Nottingham collective ‘DiY’ who organise illegal outdoor parties throughout the Midlands, the North of England and Wales. I have spoken to people who have attended these events, where attendance was free for those willing to take the trouble to search out the location (one interviewee told of a particularly enjoyable free party in the Delamere Forest in Cheshire). The DiY collective, and those who attend their parties, are an excellent example of, in Sarah Thornton’s terms, a "transitory and disorderly" (Thornton, 1994, p.185) dance micro-culture. This is not to suggest that DiY are always successful in evading the gaze of the police, a party organised for New Year’s Eve 1997 was prevented from occurring by a last minute-police raid.
A second example of a micro-culture that has avoided the gaze of the authorities is the British-Asian bhangra house micro-culture, which is all but invisible to outsiders. Avoiding the gaze of authorities, and slipping into the "Ecstasy of disappearance" (cf. Melechi, 1993) is a politically resistive act because it is attempting to subvert the due process of law, it is attempting to outwit policing authorities, and attempting to ‘bypass’ parliamentary legislation.
These are but two examples of dance cultures that have at least partially evaded the gaze of policing authorities, and I would venture to suggest that there are a significant number of other dance cultures that have also managed to avoid my ‘academic’ gaze.
So far in this chapter I have concentrated on the way in which dance culture’s relationships with policing authorities have led dance culture to take an explicitly political stance. This has been to ensure that I have a strong case against common-sense discourse. However I have also suggested that there are elements of contemporary dance culture that are inherently political. These have included the anarcho-libertarianism of the Exodus collective, the ‘quality first’ ethos of Cream, and the utopian dreams of many Ecstasy consumers. I now wish to continue this line of enquiry by looking at an element of dance culture that could be considered to be inherently politically radical, and that is dance culture’s ‘refusal of language’11.
This aspect of dance culture’s political resistance is a consequence of contemporary dance music’s lack of lyrics. Dance music’s endless cycles of repetition and difference affirm the importance of non-linguistic communication, highlighting what Robert Beeston refers to as the "dissolution of the Word" (Beeston, 1996). A link can be made between this analysis, which places a political significance in non-linguistic communication, and my applications of theoretical positions offered by Mikhail Bakhtin and Theodor Adorno in chapter 4, where I will suggest that dance music subverts dominant values by refusing to use the power-laden linguistic structures of capitalist society, by refusing to submit to enlightenment reason.
If "music is a language which reason does not understand" (Bloch, 1964, p.195), and "defiance of society includes defiance of its language" (Adorno, 1967, p.225), then a spokesman for Spiral Tribe (an illegal rave collective) would appear to agree. On being charged with "causing a public nuisance" after the illegal Castlemorton rave of 1992, this anonymous spokesman stated that "we prefer to call it causing a public new sense" (in Low and Shaw, 1993, p.69).
Whilst the politically resistive elements of rock music were expressed through overtly political lyrics, this does not mean that contemporary popular music should follow suit. George McKay agrees; "does the lack of lyrics inherently constitute a lack of any discursive possibility or social involvement? No: instrumental be-bop or free jazz never prevented African-American jazz musicians from contributing to the civil rights movement, for instance" (McKay, 1996, p.110).
The lack of lyrics within dance music also ties in with the politically resistant nature of the Ecstasy experience, and Ecstasy users’ inability to translate their (communal) experiences into an English language that emphasises the bourgeois subject. The name ‘Ecstasy’ itself is connected to this element of dance culture, with the Collins English Dictionary citing a psychological definition of the word; "[an] overpowering emotion characterised by loss of self-control and sometimes a temporary loss of consciousness" (Hanks, 1986, p.485).
An interesting parallel can be drawn between the role of contemporary dance culture within the systemic functions of British society and Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of celibacy in the Pyrenées in Les Héritiers (Bourdieu, 1979). The aim of this section is therefore to draw comparisons between the culture that Bourdieu describes and contemporary dance culture. In doing so I wish to show how the politicisation of dance culture is derived from contradictions in the structural location of young people in the late 1990s. In short I wish to show that the politicisation of contemporary dance culture is not only experientially determined (determined through the everyday experiences of dance culture participants), but is also structurally determined. In doing so I will show how the politicisation of contemporary dance culture is a logical reaction to the socio-economic conditions that young people find themselves in.
Bourdieu shows us how celibacy is the product of the structures that govern marriage in the Béarns, whereby a person’s marriage partner is decided by their parents according to customary rules. The marriage of a person can be categorised as either ascending or descending, with the system likely to favour mixed marriages between older and younger children, rather than marriages between two elder inheritors or two younger non-inheritors. This societal structure necessarily excludes the youngest children of large families from taking full part in society. Within this traditional structure the celibate’s life is "circumscribed but meaningful. It...[is] meaningful because it...[is] a fulfilment of an acknowledged logic of social relations" (Robbins, 1991, p.33). However the urbanisation and the cross-cultural moves of post-war France meant that the celibate was in a situation whereby his or her traditional function was no longer needed, and they were ill equipped to negotiate the new sexual terrain.
A similar analysis can be made with regard to the position of the young individual in the 1990s, locked into an ideology of youth that was dominant in the late 1950s but is now no longer so. The "high wage, mass-production, domestic-consumer-orientated modern economy" (Hall et al, 1978, p.229) of the 1950’s produced full employment, rising standards of living, and a mass consumer market. For working-class youth, without dependants or other major financial responsibilities, the rise in actual income was translated as a roughly equal rise in disposable income12. As part of this process the ideology of consumption was necessary for the reproduction of the status-quo, young people were required to be hedonistic in order to keep spending, and therefore manufacturing output, high. The consensus of 1950s British society was almost like the ‘closed system’ of the traditional rural French peasant as described by Bourdieu. However, the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s meant that the old discourse of youth was no longer needed by the British economy. What was needed was thrift, and long-term structural unemployment. The "charmed cycle" was broken, like the rural French life described by Bourdieu "the edifice of mutually supporting and mutually validating functions had to crumble" (Robbins, 1991, p.51). The young person who grows up in the 1990s accepting the discourse of their parents’ generation, a discourse that can be described as ‘youth as consumer’ (examined in further detail in chapter 2), is as ill-equipped to deal with his or her economic and social circumstance as the celibate peasant is in the Béarns. This inability to cope with a shift in economic structure means that young people transfer their energies towards dance culture rather than their ‘official’ careers. This has been noticed by commentators on dance culture that broadly support the scene. Daniel Newman, writing in DJ magazine, a well-respected publication within dance culture, suggests that
The whole notion of ‘youth’ has changed for British society. No longer is ‘youth’ that glorious period between childhood and adulthood, where the young person has money to spend on consumer durables earned from their well-paid job, a process that, in itself, provides work for those who produce consumer durables. Whilst the Thatcherite project might not have been entirely successful in replacing the values of the post-war social-democratic consensus with those of the New Right, the policy of Keynesian reflation leading to full-employment and rising incomes is but a distant memory. What is needed now, according to both of the main political parties, is thrift, not conspicuous consumption. Again, young people find themselves trapped between discourses. They see the youth of their parents as a golden age, an age of fashion, music, full employment, extended educational opportunities, an age where young people were perceived to have a say, and were perceived to have it all. For young people today, it was their parents’ generation who fought off those stuffy middle-class notions of thrift and sobriety in the first place, discourses that had no place in the post-war age of "you’ve never had it so good", rising incomes and increased prosperity. The arrival of Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative party in 1975 saw the start of a long 20-year reversal of these discourses. The return of Victorian values, or in John Major’s terms "Back to Basics"13, has meant that young people are once again attacked. Toby Young noticed this process occurring in the years before the arrival of contemporary dance culture, but suggested that young people necessarily accepted their plight;
Young people today live in an age of student loans, YTS schemes, and the Job Seekers Allowance; an age where there are seemingly few prospects for self-betterment without wholesale acceptance of common-sense discourse, wholesale acceptance of low pay, jobs with no future, no career structure and no dignity. In rejecting this lifestyle, in living for today and forgetting about tomorrow, in taking drugs and ignoring the ubiquitous and patronising warnings of the media, state and commerce, young people live the lives of outlaws. Like Bourdieu’s celibates they are locked out of ‘mainstream’ society and therefore attempt to create and live a culture of their own. Despite the commercialism contained within the dance scene, despite all its flaws, young people hang on to it as their culture, a culture that no one else likes or understands, but a culture that is resolutely theirs nonetheless. Stanley Cohen, in speaking out against what he perceives to be the increasingly abstract nature of much contemporary theorising, has suggested that
Having made this point, what is important is that dance culture participants do not perceive themselves as dysfunctional; "individuals who...[are] suffering from a kind of culture shock should not internalize an interpretation of their malaise which might suggest that they... [are] essentially - in themselves as individuals - inadequate" (Robbins, 1991, p.51, see also Bourdieu, 1962 and Bourdieu 1979).
Bourdieu’s analysis in the final section of ‘Célibat et Condition Paysanne’ is particularly useful in our analysis in that it shows how the celibate cannot compete with his or her urban contemporaries in dancing. In particular Bourdieu points out structural affinities between physical behaviour in dance, attitudes and perceptions. In particular Bourdieu shows us how physical actions combine with perceptions and attitudes within dance, and lead to the symbolic fulfilment of desires that have not been fulfilled by a person in their relationship with society as a whole. This is precisely the process that occurs in contemporary dance culture. In particular Bourdieu shows us how this process occurs not through determinism but through agency, it is the individuals who, once they have internalised the logic of their social position, are (successfully) reconciling their low status in society through dance. This concept of internalisation is particularly useful, as, according to Bourdieu, "the process of internalization is not to be thought of as a mental process alone but rather as one of incorporation whereby the mind/body dualism is as inappropriate as the subjective/objective dichotomy" (Robbins, 1991, pp.35-6, see also Bourdieu, 1962). This directly relates to my critique of common-sense discourse on dance culture. A theory of agency allows us to acknowledge that the politics of dance culture is not purely reactive, not purely defined by a relational opposition, but defined by young people attempting to work through structural contradictions.
In this chapter I have attempted to show how dance culture is political. In doing so I hope to have laid to rest the common-sense notion of dance culture as an apolitical culture defined by little more than drug-fuelled hedonism. I have done this through an examination of dance culture’s reactions to state interference, and through other elements of dance culture not defined purely through oppositionality, but through other discursive determinants (such as the ‘radical consumerism’ of Cream and ‘the refusal of language’). This then led me to examine the structural impasse that youth culture finds itself in, stuck between an outdated ‘youth as consumer’ discourse (see chapter 2) and a new neo-Thatcherite discourse of thrift.
This chapter has therefore introduced the twin notions of discourse and deviancy. To understand these notions further a return to deviancy and ‘labelling’ theory is called for. This will enable us to provide a further critique of common-sense notions concerning contemporary dance culture. Contemporary cultural studies has developed a broadly Marxist approach to youth culture that has sidelined other theoretical developments such as deviancy theory, despite the rich source of theoretical material contained within it. The conclusion of this chapter is therefore intended to address the ‘secondary aim’ outlined in the introduction of this thesis, namely to take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of a social phenomenon, showing how contemporary cultural studies’ rigid adherence to a specific Marxist orthodoxy (as outlined in the next chapter) has been misguided, and neglects useful analytical tools outside what might be termed ‘the culturalist canon’. This will then lead us into chapter 2 where I will complete a more detailed examination of contemporary cultural studies’ analyses of youth culture.
Common-sense discourse claims that contemporary dance culture is purely hedonistic, and demonises it for its drug use. A return to deviancy theory acknowledges that if common-sense discourse labels a societal sub-group as ‘deviant’ then that sub-group is likely to form a culture based around the difference between their analysis of what they do and the analysis of the rest of society. This allows us to avoid an essentialism that suggests that certain acts are inherently deviant, and allows us to move towards a position where acts are only deviant because ‘labelling’ institutions such as print media and parliament define them as such. This is certainly the case with dance culture. Many of the participants in dance culture that I spoke to in preparation for the writing of this thesis expressed a regret that society disapproved of their activities and misunderstood their culture, but, as they were being attacked from ‘outside’, they expressed a solidarity with what they perceived as dance culture’s resistance to the values implicit within common-sense discourse.
Throughout this thesis I will attempt to address the thorny issue of ‘opposition’ and ‘resistance’. In this chapter I have shown that dance culture is political in the sense that it has been politicised through its opposition to state interference and state repression. Here I am not suggesting that dance culture is entirely separate from the rest of society. Michel Foucault suggests that "resistance is never in a position of exteriority with regard to power" (Foucault, 1979, p.123). Although dance culture sees itself as ‘oppositional’ to the rest of society, through defining itself as ‘oppositional’, it is as much a part of the rest of society as it is independent from it. Where I use the term opposition, Beverly Best uses resistance, suggesting
A return to deviancy theory also enables us to understand dance culture’s usage of the terms ‘mainstream’ and ‘underground’. In the audience research completed in chapter 6, and in discussions with participants in contemporary dance culture, these are the two terms most used to characterise the relationship between contemporary dance culture and the rest of society. The world of ‘the mainstream’ is, according to dance culture, the world of consumerism, individualism, and repression. In opposition to this is the world of ‘the underground’, a world of communality and anti-consumerism. However, merely stating that the latter is defined in opposition to the former is not to suggest that it is controlled by it14. The categories of ‘underground’ and ‘mainstream’ are ways that dance culture participants divide up the world that they see. The continual usage of these categories is evidence in itself that dance culture participants can see a qualitative divide between their micro-cultures and ‘mainstream’ society. To deny the power of the materiality of the discursive is surely to deny any kind of Foucaultian analysis.
Having said this, it should not be forgotten that contemporary dance culture is a culture of the relatively powerless. Contemporary dance culture does not have the cultural or political power to create a ‘pure’ underground. For instance, it cannot prevent multinational record companies from purchasing the rights to cherished pieces of dance music and turning them into packaged products for a consumer society. In Marxist terms, dance culture does not have complete control over the means of production, distribution and exchange. It fights for control, but rarely obtains it. So, whilst the categories of ‘underground’ and ‘mainstream’ appear to be polar opposites, most dance cultural texts and practices fall somewhere on a scale between these two extremes.
Whilst common-sense discourse claims that contemporary dance culture is as consumerist and individualist as the rest of society, and is entirely apolitical, this is not the case. There is certainly an element of commercialism and consumerism within contemporary dance culture, but this is not a defining factor. Earlier in this chapter I introduced the notion of ‘radical consumerism’ through the Liverpool nightclub Cream. A further example of the way in which consumerism within dance culture is qualitatively different from ‘mainstream’ consumerism might be a record played at a free party. This record may well have been purchased in a record shop that belonged to a national chain of shops, and it may well have been released by a multinational record company. However to play it at an (illegal) free party is to alter its economic status; it simultaneously emphasises its use value, whilst also denigrating its value as a commodity. Legal dance clubs pay fees and obtain specific licenses that enable them to legally play officially published records. The historical justification for such regulations was to enable artists to make a financial gain from the playing of their records in a public context. But the sale of recording rights by artists to record companies and publishers means that record and publishing companies have successfully ‘subverted’ this system and made it into yet another source of profit15. As illegal raves and parties do not pay publishing rights they are therefore guilty of ‘theft’ of music. However this state of affairs is rarely if ever criticised by dance music producers eager for financial recompense, as it is more often than not considered an honour for a producer to have his records aired at illegal raves or events. On the other hand the accumulated money lost by record and publishing companies at unlicensed events does constitute a financial blow.
We can also make a link here between the practices of dance culture participants (the creation of, and participation in, free parties), and the criteria that dance culture participants use to evaluate music. In making this link we see a shift in our analysis of common-sense discourse away from a critique of the suggestion that dance culture is apolitical, towards a critique of the suggestion that dance culture is of no aesthetic worth. This analysis is extended and completed in chapter 4 where we look at the structure of contemporary dance music and see that the relationships between musical form, musical content, and the lives of dance culture participants are more complicated than common-sense discourse suggests. In the meantime it is worth noting that the categories of ‘mainstream’ and ‘underground’ are not only related to cultural practices but also to cultural texts. Dance culture participants make value judgments and praise those musical texts that are deemed to be ‘underground’, whilst criticising those texts that are deemed to be excessively commercial. However the criteria used is not merely whether a musical text has commercial success but whether that track was produced with commercial success in mind. This validates my suggestion above that there is no simple binary opposition between ‘commercial’ and ‘underground’. If a track is commercially successful this need not reflect badly on the artist, providing that commercial success was not a primary aim for producing the track. However, if that artist is perceived to be craving commercial success he or she invariably comes under attack. An example of a record in the former category is Children by Robert Miles16, which was popular on the most credible of ‘underground’ British dance floors in late 1995, and ‘crossed-over’ into the ‘mainstream’ charts at the start of 1996. Robert Miles was trusted to have made the track for aesthetic and artistic, rather than commercial, reasons17.
A useful comparison is between the analysis provided by Howard Becker in his 1963 study of dance musicians (a classic of modern ethnography), and the relationship between the concepts of ‘mainstream’ and ‘underground’ in the production of contemporary dance music. A comparison with Becker also addresses the ‘secondary aim’ of this thesis of ‘re-introducing’ and re-appraising neglected theorists. Having said this, the situation has changed from Becker’s day where
It is hoped that this brief comparison highlights the suggestion that contemporary dance culture contains elements that are inherently radical, and in doing so, bolsters my suggestion that dance culture is inherently political.
At this point it is worth noting that there is also a qualitative divide between contemporary dance culture, whose origins lie in the dance floors of Ibiza in the mid 1980s and the warehouses of Northern England and London in 1987 and 1988, and those dance floors whose lineage can be traced back to the British discotheques of the 1970s and 1980s. Again, dance culture participants refer to the former as ‘underground’, and the latter as ‘mainstream’. Within the former there is a ‘radical consumerism’ (a consumerism not purely based upon the search for profit), within the latter there is naked profiteering untainted by any search for aesthetic beauty or political radicalism.
One need only look at the type of language employed by Mintel Marketing Intelligence in their report entitled Nightclubs and Discotheques to see how ‘underground’ dance culture differs from ‘mainstream’ club life18. Mintel highlight how the big chains such as First Leisure, Rank Leisure, Scottish Inns and Granada Leisure employ various techniques to hide their corporate ‘mainstream’ nature. For example Mintel state that
This is the year that clubbers are going back to basics. Regular Saturday night faces are finding more pleasure in an intimate and comfortable room with friendly people and some interesting tunes rather than the purpose-built warehouses that the early nineties threw up. This new phenomenon is centred in London, although clubs like Salvation On Sunday in Liverpool prove it’s a national thing...
"I think these smaller, more exclusive nights are springing up for three reasons," says Richard Benson, editor of The Face. "Some clubbers are certainly reacting to the way that clubs and the high street are moving closer together and becoming increasingly commercialised. I also think it’s because music like jungle and trip hop are breaking house music’s hegemony. That sort of newer music can’t be played in a huge room with 3,000 people. House music can work a crowd of that size, but other forms need smaller venues. I also think people are getting a bit pissed off with the excessive dressing up competition that clubbing has become. In the more underground clubs, people dress down and it’s only the odd logo on a T-shirt that counts as a fashion statement" (Armstrong, 1996, p.10).
1.Interestingly, the phrasing of the 1994 Act appears to let the musical sub-genre of jungle off the hook, since it is, to paraphrase the Act, characterised by a lack of repetitive beats (see chapter 3). An interestingly resistive approach was taken by the band Autechre whose Anti e.p. contained the track ‘Flutter’, described by the band’s Sean Booth as having "a repetitive melody but, as far as the beats go, to take the clause literally, you should be able to play this all night without the party being stopped. At the moment we’re working on some tracks that would take two days before the beats repeat" (quoted in Lay, 1994, p.64). However I fear that, without the aid of a defence barrister who is also a musicologist, such an argument would receive short shrift from the police and the courts. Perhaps Hillegonda Rietveld is correct in her suggestion that the notion of "repetitive beats", along with
3.For a critical examination of the connected terms "fluffy" and "spiky" in ‘counter-cultural’ movements see McKay, 1998b, pp.15-17, Aufheben, 1998, pp.111-17, pp.121-3, and Rietveld, 1998b, pp.247-266.
4.John Jordan describes the scene;
6.For detailed and sympathetic accounts of this crucial set of travelling micro-cultures, and their connections to contemporary dance culture, see Stone, 1996, and McKay, 1996.
7.The case of Exodus provides us with a good example of how the predominantly urban emphases of early subcultural analyses of youth are now inappropriate, in particular those analyses that draw theoretical sustenance from Robert E. Park’s 1915 text The City (Park, 1997) and Milton Gordon’s 1947 essay ‘The concept of the sub-culture and its application’ (Gordon, 1997). Exodus combine an almost Arcadian ‘green’ lifestyle with a commitment to freeing up urban spaces, and a specific pledge to provide musical entertainment in ‘green’ surroundings for urban and suburban youth.
8.A fear of contemporary dance culture by the alcohol industry is not confined to Bedfordshire. The arrival of ‘alcopops’ (alcoholic fruit-flavoured drinks, commonly 4-6% alcohol by volume), and their aggressive marketing strategies, can be seen as a direct result of a drop in alcohol consumption by young people in the 1990s, itself at least partially determined by the rise in recreational drug use that has accompanied contemporary dance culture. Andrew Barr, writing in The Times, explains:
Drinks producers may deny they are targeting alcopops at drug users, but club owners have their own views. When an "alcoholic spring water" was launched earlier this summer, the distributor was publicly accused of trying to sell "laced" water to clubbers who simply wanted to rehydrate themselves after taking Ecstasy.
The big brewers have also invested a lot of money this year in marketing brands of "alcoholic soda" to nightclubs. These look more grown-up than ordinary alcopops, as they come in clear glass bottles with minimalist labels and names such as Vault and Sub Zero. Nor do they have a sweet, fruity taste. In fact, they taste of very little. Only someone who is already under the influence of another substance could take much pleasure in them (Barr, 1996).
9.For a somewhat idealistic analysis of these raves see Hemment, 1998.
10.At this stage in dance culture’s development, the running of individual nights was split between promoters and club owners. The former hired a club from the latter, booking DJs, publicising the night’s entertainment, decorating the venue, dictating the music policy of the club, and often organising the provision of extra lighting and sound equipment. The vast majority of these promoters, such as James Barton and John Kelly, had a dedication to dance culture and were enthusiastic consumers before they became involved in production and distribution. Nightclub owners however, retained control of, for instance, door pricing policy and entrance policy, and, as a consequence, many promoters found themselves undermined in their attempts to provide a quality service for their guests (some of who may well have been unable to gain entry due to dress restrictions imposed by the club owners).
11.Hillegonda Rietveld has been at the forefront of suggestions that dancing to house and techno music can lead to a liberation from language. Describing the dancing that occurred in The Haçienda in the late 1980s, Rietveld suggests that
12.Stanley Cohen traces the roots of teenage culture back to the late 1940s, stating that between 1945 and 1950 "there was a large unmarried generation (between 15 and 21) whose average real wage increased at twice the rate of the adults’" (Cohen, 1980, p.179).
13.The arrival of this phrase in the early 1990s caused much merriment within contemporary dance culture, due to the influence of the Leeds club Back to Basics, a centre for Northern hedonism, named several years before Major’s party conference speech. Major’s speech returned to haunt him in later years as tabloid newspapers exposed members of his party and government who were conducting adulterous affairs of one sort or another, and maintaining corrupt business practices.
14.Adam Brown, a researcher at the Manchester Institute for Popular Culture, agrees. In his interview with Andy Stratford, a promoter of illegal parties in Manchester, Brown suggests that Stafford’s organisation Funhouse Promotions is interesting because
15.Convoluted patterns of rights ownership have reached such ludicrous levels that, currently, whenever a Lennon and McCartney song is played in public, Michael Jackson, the ‘owner’ of the vast majority of The Beatles’ songs, is paid a ‘performance’ fee.
16.Robert Miles’s Children is discussed in more detail in chapter 4, and a version of the track is contained on the compact disc bound within the cover of this thesis.
17.Theodor Adorno recognised this distinction as well, suggesting that the essential dichotomy within musical production was between market-oriented music and music made for its own sake (Adorno, 1932, p.106). Martin Jay, in his history of the Frankfurt School, continues the theme; "if at the present time the latter tended to be incomprehensible to most listeners, this did not mean that it was objectively reactionary. Music, like theory, must go beyond the prevailing consciousness of the masses" (Jay, 1973, p.182). Much dance music is indeed incomprehensible to those outside contemporary dance culture, its meanings lost on the majority of the public, for it is simply not aimed at ‘mainstream’ tastes.
18.Perhaps it is the manner in which ‘mainstream’ clubs desperately attempt to mimic ‘underground’ style to gain micro-cultural credibility that confuses those who suggest that contemporary dance culture is purely consumerist.
19.A white-label bootleg is an illegal pressing of a particular dance track. It could be illegal for two reasons. Firstly the copyright for the track might be owned by a record company who are testing the market with their own limited edition white-label record, distributed to club and radio DJs on their mailing list. DJs then fill in a ‘reaction sheet’ stating whether they or their audiences liked the record. A bootlegger might obtain a copy, and press up 500 or 1,000 copies, selling them through small independent record shops, whilst passing them off as originals distributed by the record company concerned. Secondly, a bootleg might be illegal in that it contains samples that have not been ‘cleared’ with the copyright owner of that particular sample. Clearance for the use of samples is often prohibitively expensive for small producers, and often the copyright owner refuses to allow a sample to be used if they do not like the track. I use the example of a bootleg white-label twelve inch record to emphasise that there are degrees of commercialism at work within dance culture, and that this is recognisable to clubbers; clubbers use such information in their decisions as to whether they collectively categorise a particular club, record, or DJ as ‘underground’.
20.Another newspaper article quoted by the Vermorels further highlights the process of societal condemnation leading to royal approval