Introduction

Having provided a critique of both common-sense discourse on contemporary dance culture and contemporary cultural studies’ discourse on dance culture in chapters 1 and 2, the previous chapter introduced the reader to televisual representations of contemporary dance culture through an institutional analysis of BPM. This chapter extends this analysis, in that it contains an extended examination of the relations between contemporary dance culture and its televisual representations.

Firstly I will examine the applicability of theoretical positions provided by the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. Of particular interest in this section is Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin, 1984a). In this text Bakhtin gives an elegant description of the carnival as it existed in the pre- to mid-Renaissance period (1494-1553), and in the first section of this chapter I will suggest that we can draw an analogy between the carnival as described by Bakhtin and contemporary dance culture. Having made this point, I then draw further upon the work of Bakhtin in my suggestion that an analogy can be made between what Bakhtin describes as ‘carnivalesque’ literature (literature that represents the medieval carnival) and televisual representations of contemporary dance culture (such as BPM). These two sections employing the work of Bakhtin therefore continue the work started in the previous chapter, namely the achievement of the third aim of this thesis, which is the countering of televisual discourse on contemporary dance culture.

This then leads me on to an extended application of the notion of ‘homologous structures’. Through an application of Lucien Goldmann’s joint concepts of ‘genetic structuralism’ and ‘homology’ I will propose a working model for the analysis of the relationship between contemporary dance culture and BPM. This work goes some way to addressing the fourth and final aim of this thesis, the countering of common-sense discourse on the relationship between young people and television. In particular I will show how the relationship between a specific cultural practice, textual representation, and audience is far more complicated than common-sense discourse suggests.

Having shown how the work of Lucien Goldmann is particularly useful in the study of contemporary dance culture, I will then re-examine a more fashionable theorist to see if the work of Theodor Adorno is as useful as that of Goldmann. In a sense this section uses contemporary dance culture to show some of the contradictions central to Adorno’s work on popular music and the ‘Culture Industry’, and goes on to suggest that even if Adorno’s criticisms of popular music were valid (which they are not), they could nevertheless not be applied to contemporary dance music (or, to be more precise, they could not be applied to the relationship between production, distribution and consumption in contemporary dance music).

Having introduced the reader to theoretical positions offered by Bakhtin, Goldmann and Adorno, the final substantive section of this chapter examines the formation of the musical sub-genre of jungle to see how an analysis of jungle culture can further our understanding of contemporary dance culture. In particular this section on jungle will introduce the reader to the suggestion that contemporary dance culture offers an ‘auto-critique’ of itself. Common-sense discourse suggests that contemporary dance culture is mindless. The final section of this chapter shows that this is far from the case in its examination of the extent to which the micro-culture of jungle has itself analysed and provided a partial critique of the socio-economic structural location of contemporary dance culture.

According to Bakhtin, within the early modern period (1494-1553) carnival was a set of resistive practices opposed to the ‘serious rituals’ of officially sanctioned culture. In this section I will suggest that contemporary dance culture performs this function within late-20th century Britain, that it is, in the jargon supplied by the author Hakim Bey, a "temporary autonomous zone" or "TAZ"¹(Bey, 1985). Contemporary dance culture is a temporary crisis of legitimation. In the Althusserian terms employed earlier on in this thesis, Ideological State Apparatuses (see Althusser, 1971) have ceased to function, and have collapsed under the weight of society’s ideological contradictions. ‘Repressive State Apparatuses’ in the form of, for example, Parliamentary legislation and the police raid, have taken over, and there is an ambiguity and confusion in the state’s position on dance culture². As we saw in chapter 1 there have been a variety of legislative acts that prohibit and inhibit dance culture since the late 1980s. This process looks set to continue with the anti-dance culture Public Entertainment (Drugs Misuse) Act (1997) and the Health and Safety of Young People at Dance Events and Clubs Bill (1997).

Despite contemporary cultural studies’ disinclination to accept contemporary youth culture as having a resistive impulse, the subjectivities on offer from officially sanctioned culture are invariably rejected by participants in contemporary dance culture. The vast majority of those participants that I have interviewed suggest that contemporary dance culture is a way of coping with the alienation that they feel from ‘mainstream’ society, talking in terms of creating their own culture, a culture that, albeit temporarily, breaks down hierarchies, and which feels like the distant pre-echo of a truly egalitarian culture. They accept that the dance scene is commercialised, and that they are being used to swell the profits of club owners and other commercial forces, but they still maintain that there are brief fleeting dance floor moments that empower them, that feel revolutionary to them. Contemporary dance culture provides a space for youth to protest against social inequality, and provides a space where, in the words of Angela McRobbie (the only significant academic working in contemporary cultural studies to support dance culture publicly) "young people, who are as yet unformed as adults, and relatively powerless as a result, can... impregnate a scornful, often condemning adult social order with the politics of their adolescent identities" (McRobbie, 1994a, p.3).

It might be suggested that dance culture is not oppositional, "not political enough", because dance culture is partially sanctioned by the state (in that the state allows some dance events to take place). There are two points to be made here:-

Through their rejection of ‘mainstream’ subjectivities, the occupants of the dance floor are, albeit briefly, united in resistance. Again, to extend our neo-Althusserian analysis, participants in dance culture refuse to accept the interpellative positions offered by ideology. The dance floor space is resistant to ideology. However the Academy often sees it as resistant to analysis. This is partly due to contemporary cultural studies’ preference for the study of the social relations of production rather than consumption⁴. This inclination, allied to contemporary cultural studies’ view of dance culture as purely a culture of consumption, implicitly links the dance floor with an acceptance of a dominant ideological discourse. There are three fundamental problems with this analysis:-

The contemporary dance floor, like the carnival, celebrates a "temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order", and marks "the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions" (Bakhtin, 1984a, p.10). This quotation from Bakhtin is a useful one; it highlights the temporality of the dance floor, whilst also acknowledging carnival’s resistance to ‘mainstream’ values. McRobbie describes the changes in subjectivity within contemporary dance culture;

The unstructured and liberating forms of contemporary dance also echo the special type of communication that Bakhtin suggests occurred during the medieval carnival. Like carnival speech, contemporary dance styles, and the other interactions that take place within the space of the dance floor, "liberate from norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other times", with contemporary dance demanding "ever changing, playful, undefined forms" (Bakhtin, 1984a, p.10-11). Ecstatic interpersonal relations on the dance floor, and their play with different relations and forms of being, are distant relatives of medieval carnival laughter, described by Bakhtin as "not an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event... [but] the laughter of all the people... It is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants" (Bakhtin, 1984a, p.11).

The facially and physically expressed joy of the dance floor is also non-specific and non-referential, it is aimed at the communality of the dance floor itself. As the musicologist Phillip Tagg has stated

Bakhtin’s description of the carnival is of an event subject only to "the laws of its own freedom" (Bakhtin, 1984a, p.7). Again, this is idealist, and again, if used in our analysis of contemporary dance culture, an overstatement. Dance events are obliged to abide by licensing laws and public performance laws, with a majority of events largely complying with statutory regulations, and a minority consciously and overtly flouting the law¹⁰. Some academics might well take this partial authorisation by the state, and partial compliance on the part of contemporary dance culture, as proof that contemporary dance culture is apolitical or consumerist. This ignores the fact that, in principle, contemporary dance culture is antithetical to authority. To suggest that it is not entirely successful in resisting legal and commercial discourses (or in Althusserian terms RSAs and ISAs) is not to suggest that dance culture is in willing submission. There is a struggle between dance culture and agents of the state; if there were not, it would not be a criminal offence to organise, or attend, unlicensed dance events.

This section has shown us how an application of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin can be used to counter the suggestion that contemporary dance culture is apolitical and consumerist. I have done this through an examination of contemporary dance culture’s rejection of the social categorisations offered by ‘mainstream’ society. As McRobbie suggests, contemporary dance culture offers "a suspension of categories, there is not such a rigid demarcation along age, class, ethnic terms. Gender is blurred and sexual preference less homogeneously heterosexual" (McRobbie, 1984, p.146). In resistance to ideology, the participants of dance culture have created their own alternative social organisation, and whilst on the dance floor have also created their own alternative subjectivities. The dance floor carnival is therefore about defining itself in rejection to ‘the mainstream’, it is about an otherness that highlights the fact that social roles are constructed and ideological, rather than natural and apolitical.

In the previous section I introduced the reader to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. In particular I made an analogy between the medieval carnival and contemporary dance culture. The previous section was therefore a prelude to this section, which draws an analogy between televisual representations of the contemporary dance floor (BPM) and textual representations of the carnival (carnivalesque literature). This section therefore directly addresses the third aim of this thesis (the critical examination of televisual discourse on contemporary dance culture). In both the previous and following sections I am also addressing the ‘secondary aim’ of this thesis (the re-appropriation of ‘neglected’ or ‘forgotten’ theorists), as well as also partially addressing the second aim of this thesis (the countering of contemporary cultural studies’ discourse on contemporary dance culture). Mikhail Bakhtin is frequently used in literary studies, but rarely used within the field of media studies or contemporary cultural studies. When Bakhtin is used in the latter field (such as in the work of John Fiske) his work is misanalysed and misappropriated. The previous and following sections redress this.

What links televisual discourse with contemporary cultural studies’ discourse is an unwillingness and inability to represent contemporary dance culture (in particular an unwillingness to represent contemporary dance culture in a positive light). As McRobbie suggests, "if dance exists and has existed as a mass popular leisure activity, and if in turn it has gone largely unconsidered by sociologists and social historians, the same holds true for images of dance and for the way dance finds itself inscribed in other visual texts" (McRobbie, 1984, p.133). British youth television, and its representations of contemporary youth cultures, have been particularly under-theorised, with the exception of work by Simon Frith (see Frith et al, 1993).

Youth television’s representations of contemporary dance culture can be split between two sub-genres. Youth television texts such as BPM, Hypnosis, and Club Nation use dance clubs as their textual referent, with footage taken in dance clubs from around the country. Here the spatial and temporal relationships of the dance floor are shifted, a time shift is made to the time of broadcast, and a spatial shift fits the dance floor within the gaze of the television camera, compressing it into a television set sited within the realm of ‘domestic ideology’.

Sean Cubitt describes Top of The Pops as trying to fit "the larger-than-life world of pop in the little box in the corner of the living room" (Cubitt, 1984, p.47). The same can be said of the sub-genre of youth programming that deals with contemporary dance culture¹¹. The oppositional subjectivities on offer on the dance floor are at least partially lost within televisual representation, whilst, at the same time, it could be suggested that the mechanisms for reproduction of the social relations of production are present, but hidden. The ‘language’ of television is vastly different from the language of the dance floor, and this factor prevents a clear translation of event to text.

The ideological nature of televisual representations of dance culture is heightened by the formal impression of disposability that television discourse attaches to contemporary dance culture, a discourse that attempts to position dance culture as merely one choice in what Stuart Hall has termed the "domestic-consumer-orientated modern economy" (Hall et al, 1978, p.229). Whilst the producers of television programmes such as BPM might view dance culture as politically resistant and of cultural value, the institutional structures of the broadcasting system as a whole do not, and merely wish to tap into the credibility of dance culture to exploit it for profit. Dance culture participants vehemently oppose this commercialisation; for them dance culture is not merely one leisure activity chosen from a range of others, but is a distinct culture separate from the rest of society. The institutional and textual discourses of television that suggest that dance culture is disposable weaken dance culture’s position as a deviant ‘other’, thereby weakening its political resistance. Whilst contemporary dance culture positions itself as resistant to (or, to put it another way, accepts the oppositional positioning of) common-sense discourse, televisual representations of the dance floor reverse this process. They draw dance culture back within common-sense discourse, hiding the qualitative differences between contemporary dance and previous forms. The dance floor on the screen, like the officially sanctioned carnivalesque literature of the seventeenth century, has turned the carnival into a ‘parade’. Like the parade, and to paraphrase Bakhtin, contemporary dance culture on television is brought into the home and becomes part of the private life of the family. The privileges formerly allowed in the carnival are more and more restricted; "the carnival spirit with its freedom, its utopian character orientated toward the future..., [is] gradually transformed into a mere holiday mood" (see Bakhtin, 1984a, p.33).

The cerebral pleasures of the carnivalesque dance floor are not entirely lost in the process of representation; they are visible to the eye, but the bodily sensuality of the dance floor is gone. The subjectivities on offer to the occupant of the dance floor are not available to the viewer at home, who becomes a spectator from a distance; "shifted from public sphere to the bourgeois home..., carnival ceases to be a site of actual struggle" (Wills, 1989, p.131). Youth culture has fought for a space for its own activities, and the result of this fight is contemporary dance culture. To take dance culture from its ‘natural’ environment and to re-site it in the bourgeois home is to change its context to such an extent as to irrevocably weaken its resistive power.

Television’s representations of the dance floor result, as Sean Cubitt suggests, in "a sanitising of pop music’s sexuality and rebellion, a miniaturisation of its torment, thrills and excesses" (Cubitt, 1984, p.47). Whilst the contemporary dance floor offers "an extreme barrage of the senses" (Russell, 1993, p.122) with its strobe lighting, thick smoke, and dense soundscapes, the viewer at home has to make do with a two-dimensional representational scale, and sound through a television speaker primarily designed for the reproduction of speech, not music. This is particularly the case with the ‘youth audience’, unable to afford ‘NICAM’ digital stereo reception equipment. The youth television viewer is the ‘spectator’ of dance culture, and, as suggested in the previous section, spectatorship is antithetical to the principle, if not the practice, of the carnival¹².

Running alongside the de-carnivalising nature of televisual discourse is the gendered gaze of the television camera, which, as McRobbie puts it, "confirms and illustrates the convention of dance as sexual invitation" (McRobbie, 1984, p.139). The gendered gaze inevitably arises within the institutional and discursive structures of television production. In particular, the structure of the televisual shot coincides with the male gaze, or mode of looking. Women are taken out of the participatory and liberatory social relations of the dance floor and positioned as objects of the male gaze. As John Fiske and John Hartley suggest "the dance of sexual display naturalises our view of women as sex-objects by showing it to be part of the social structure and thus acceptable on the fireside screen" (Fiske and Hartley, 1993, p.45, see also Lange, 1975).

An analogy can be drawn here between my analysis, and Angela McRobbie’s work on the film Flashdance. In her analysis, McRobbie looks at how the male gaze of the camera objectifies the female dancers in the film, and suggests that

Ann Jefferson suggests that

Within contemporary dance culture the object/subject dualism is broken down, resulting in the physical materiality of a ‘communal body’¹⁵. Participants in contemporary dance culture "lose subjective belief in their self and merge into a collective body" (Jordan, 1995, p.125). On the one hand contemporary dance culture’s concentration on the body, and the breaking down of barriers between bodies, mocks capitalist individualism and the reified individual¹⁶. On the other hand televisual discourses reaffirm the subject/object distinction, and in doing so reaffirm individualism, with the resulting isolation of the individual leading to the loneliness mentioned earlier.

The reaffirmation of the subject/object dualism (and the concurrent ‘deaffirmation’ of the collective body) also has relevance for our analysis of the gaze. Ann Jefferson points out that

In Bakhtin’s analysis of the carnival, the individual’s body is downgraded. The supra-individual nature of the communal body alleviates the necessity for communication between subjectivities; ‘individuals’, previously autonomous, are subsumed within the carnival body. Whilst the occupant of the dance floor is attempting to disappear into the communal body, the gaze of the television camera prevents this. Whilst the dancer remains aware of the omnipresent camera, disappearance is impossible. Short of using covert cameras (a practical impossibility with contemporary technology and decidedly unethical as well) television will never be able to avoid interfering with the mechanisms of the dance floor whilst filming, particularly in relation to those clubs and events that are shrouded in smoke and feature a darkened dance floor.

Other youth television texts such as The Word, Juice, and Dance Energy use non-professional and professional dancers in an attempt to recreate the dance floor ‘atmosphere’ within the television studio, with dancers representing the forms of dance and the relationships of the dance floor. However the aura of rebellion and resistance that is perceptible on the dance floor is lost, the official sanctioning of the broadcasting industry and the omnipresent cameras lead to a self-consciousness on the part of the dancers. The spatial and temporal relations of the television studio prove to be a pastiche in the Jamesonian sense, a blank parody of the dance floor (see Jameson, 1984). The link that exists in BPM to the actual dance floor is lost, and the result is the same as when medieval carnivalesque literature lost its ties with folk culture, where carnival laughter was "cut down to cold humor, irony, sarcasm. It ceased to be a joyful and triumphant hilarity. Its positive regenerating power was reduced to a minimum" (Bakhtin, 1984a, p.38).

Some academic theorists, notably John Fiske, have attributed aspects of the carnival to the television text itself (see especially Fiske, 1987, pp.240-264). This is a crucial error, for the carnival is the event lived by the people, and representations of the carnival, are, at best, a diluted alternative, and, at worst, mock the dance floor carnival¹⁷. Fiske introduces us to the notion of television as ‘lived culture’, but even if, for a moment, we accept this notion, then we must ask ourselves where is this culture lived? The positioning of the television set within the privatised sphere of home and family must limit the decoding potential of any set of televisual signifiers. To shift context from the ‘temporary autonomous zone’ of the dance floor to the private space of the home inevitably shifts meaning into the domain of ‘domestic ideologies’. Bakhtin himself placed great emphasis on ‘particularity’ and ‘situatedness’, and on relations between time and space (see Holquist, 1990, pp.12-13), so for Fiske to appropriate Bakhtin’s analyses and pay so little attention to location is a severe methodological flaw.

Fiske himself admits in a later essay that "notions of jouissance and affective pleasure require an intensity of viewing and a loss of subjectivity that do not accord with television’s typical modes of reception. Television is not an orgasmic medium" (Fiske, 1989, p.71). The phraseology of Fiske echoes McLuhan’s hot/cold distinction (see McLuhan, 1964) with an essentialism and technological determinism worthy of Baudrillard. The intensity of the contemporary dance floor is itself beyond such Barthesian notions¹⁸. The concepts of plaisir and jouissance uphold the binary opposition between mind and genitally centred body. Describing the pleasures of the carnival body as belonging to the realm of jouissance is inappropriate. Jouissance emphasises genital orgasm, whilst also emphasising the dismemberment of the body; "it is only as fragment and fetish that it interests and excites" (Jefferson, 1989, p.171, see also Barthes, 1975). Contemporary dance culture, and the carnival body, are closer to the Freudian pre-Oedipal state of polymorphous perversity¹⁹ than the post-Oedipal mind/body dualism²⁰. It should also be borne in mind that in Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text jouissant reactions to texts are not possible at the present. The idea of the text of jouissance is but a prediction on the part of Barthes, and, as John Sturrock suggests, "Barthes is a disappointing prophet" (Sturrock, 1979, p.72).

The fragmentation of the body and the binary opposition between mind and body is an analysis that should be rejected. Bakhtin was tutored within the neo-Kantian tradition, a tradition that emphasised the connections between notions such as sensibility and understanding, physical sensation and mental concepts, mind and body (see Holquist, 1990, ch.1). As a result of this a Bakhtinian analysis is particularly interested in examining the dialogue between the mind and the body, rather than emphasising their separateness. The contemporary dance floor experience, particularly when heightened by amphetamine-based stimulants such as Ecstasy, breaks down the mind/body dualism, with a bodily sexuality beyond bourgeois individuality²¹.

Television is not ‘a carnival’ because it is not strictly participatory. Although television viewers are participants in the creation of meaning, they are not active participants in the creation of the initial signifiers of the television text²². The issue is not, as it is for Fiske, merely about the production of meaning, but is also concerned with the struggle for control of the production of textual signifiers. Television texts are not produced by contemporary dance culture, although they require an audience (in the case of BPM dance culture itself) for textual closure. Structuralism has taught us how a particular parole or speech act only has meaning through its position within a langue or language. The result of this is that when we speak what we say can be "considered as potentially having already been said" (McRobbie, 1994c, p.194, see also Barthes, 1957 and Barthes, 1964), and we find ourselves trapped within "the prison-house of language" (Jameson, 1972). ‘Translated’ into television the dance floor is trapped within the prison house of televisual discourse.

Fiske points to Barthes’ claim that wrestling is a contemporary carnivalesque activity (see Barthes, 1973, p.20), and then attempts to make the same claim for wrestling’s televisual representation, without the significant change of analysis that is necessary, and should be expected, with such a major shift of analytic referent. Fiske describes the carnival as having "[an] insistence on the materiality of the signifier,... its excessiveness, its ability to offend good taste" (Fiske, 1987, p.249). Yet Fiske’s analysis of the television text denies this materiality, all Fiske achieves is an extension of the boundaries of the definition of good taste, without accepting that, for instance, wrestling, or indeed contemporary dance culture, do indeed offend and oppose this discursive category. Another major problem with Fiske’s claim is that to emphasise the importance of signifiers is to downplay the importance of textual signifieds. In doing so Fiske places the producer over and above the textual reader, whilst claiming elsewhere that the textual reader is all-powerful. I do not wish to separate signifier and signified within my analysis, and within the following section I will show how the relationship between signifier and signified within televisual representations of contemporary dance culture is not one of dominant and dominated, but is equal and homologous. Although not mentioned by name, Fiske is obviously one of those critics that would fit into Beverly Cook’s categorisation as arguing "for a type of pluralistic, value relativism which seeks to discern only the ‘differences’ among cultural texts, as opposed to designating some texts as better than others, for fear of ‘essentializing’ one definition of cultural value to the exclusion of others" (Cook, 1997, p.25).

Fiske does not acknowledge that the materiality of the signifier is fundamentally altered when represented on television. It has been argued that the televisual text is polysemic, not least due to the importance of the reader’s subjectivity as a primary determinant of meaning, and Fiske himself has been an important force in asserting the power of the viewer. For Fiske to claim that the signifieds of certain "carnivalesque" texts are unimportant in the creation of meaning, and that the textual signifier reigns supreme, is a negation of his initial theoretical position. Fiske’s claim is curiously close to the assertion of televisual discourse that its representations of dance culture capture the intensity of emotion and sensation present at contemporary dance events, that, in Fiske’s terms, there is no difference between "the real and its representation" (see Fiske, 1987b, p.151). Both Fiske’s analysis, and television’s representations, are, to a certain extent, misleading in their suggestion that textual representations of contemporary carnivals are the same as the lived event.

In the previous section we saw how the work of Mikhail Bakhtin is of use in examining the relationship between a lived cultural form (in Bakhtin’s case the carnival, in our case, contemporary dance culture) and its textual representation (in Bakhtin’s case carnivalesque literature, in our case youth television and BPM). It is the aim of the following section to pull together some of the threads from this work on the textual representation of a lived culture to see if the work of Lucien Goldmann (in particular The Hidden God and Towards a Sociology of the Novel, Goldmann, 1964, and Goldmann, 1975) and Paul Willis (in particular Profane Culture, Willis, 1978) is of use in examining the relationship between contemporary dance culture, BPM, and its audience. Common-sense discourse suggests that dance music is mindless, and televisual representations of dance culture merely represent a simplistic leisure culture. This section will counter this in its suggestion that there is a homology²³ between contemporary dance culture and its televisual representation.

Before we engage directly with dance culture, it is worth noting that an analysis of homologous structures might well allow us to examine the extent to which young people consider themselves to be members of the ‘youth television’ audience; the extent to which there might be a homology between youth culture and youth television. John Hartley suggests that

Whilst it could be suggested that Hartley is arguing for a deconstruction of the notion of ‘the audience’ rather than specific audiences, such a suggestion is misleading, because there is such a thing as the ‘audience’ for BPM, as contemporary dance culture is a recognisable and definable social category. As Hartley himself admits "television as an industry is subject to certain market forces" (Hartley, 1987, p.134). As institutions that contribute to the creation of a social category of youth, Thornton suggests, quoting Bourdieu, that the media are central to the ways in which we "create groups with words" (Bourdieu, 1990, p.139, see also Thornton, 1994, p.176). However, even Thornton, who entirely rejects notions of dance culture as a culture of resistance, does not go as far as suggesting that the media have single-handedly created the discourse of youth in circulation within society²⁴.

Hartley’s central point is that there appears to be no correlation between the construct of a socio-empirical grouping and the discursive and textual construct of an audience. The difference between my analysis and Hartley’s is that ‘youth’ is a socio-discursive construct rather than a socio-empirical one (it is not merely ‘people between the ages of 16 and 25’), and that there is a correlation between intended audience (the reader inscribed within the text) and actual audience. Youth television programmes such as BPM, and the advertisers that fund their production, are successful in attracting ‘youthful’ audiences²⁵.

Once we have suggested that there may be a homology between youth television and youth culture, we can go on to suggest that there may be a homology between BPM and contemporary dance culture. There is certainly a likeness between a "[textual] form itself and the structure of the social environment in which it developed" (Goldmann, 1975, p.6)²⁶. To be a regular viewer of BPM is to be a member of contemporary dance culture, for in being a regular viewer of BPM one learns about some of the key aspects of contemporary dance culture through watching a programme that is broadly sympathetic to the ‘movement’ as a whole.

Taking my analysis further, is there a homologous relationship between contemporary dance culture, its televisual representation, and the main musical genre that is incorporated within both these cultural phenomena, namely contemporary dance music? Theresa Buckland hints at such a relationship when she describes dance music videos as "the fast edit visual equivalent of House music, where cutting and splicing of ready made sounds is a compositional technique" (Buckland with Stewart, 1993, p.71).

This view highlights the definition of homology that I am employing, in that I am suggesting that there is an exact structural likeness between subcultural activity (dancing), visual text, and music. Most contemporary house and techno music is based on a strict 4/4 time signature (or as the musicologist Phillip Tagg defines it "four bars 2/4...alla breve in classical terms" (Tagg, 1994, p.213). In particular house and techno has been described as ‘four-to-the-floor’ due to its perfectly sequenced kick drum on all four crotchet of each bar²⁷. Figure 1 shows the drum pattern from the Italian ‘dream house’ track by Robert Miles entitled Children²⁸. Within this graphic representation of bars 109 and 110, we can see the kick drum and open hi-hat perfectly sequenced on each crotchet beat, and a syncopated closed hi-hat that provides a contrast to the open hi-hat and kick drum.

Figure 1

It is the crotchet beat of house and techno that causes those who are not active consumers of dance music to suggest that "it all sounds the same"²⁹; in their listening they are concentrating on rhythm, rather than the melody or the occasional vocal that break up this repetition. It may well ‘all sound the same’ to the uninitiated listener, but this is because such a listener is employing a ‘reception technique’ derived from previous musical forms that is not applicable to contemporary dance music. For example, to employ a listening strategy more in suiting with "rockology" (Tagg, 1994) is to misunderstand the meaning of house and techno. As Tagg suggests, contemporary dance music’s "musical structuring differs more radically from that of its precursors than most previous forms of pop" (Tagg, 1994, p.213)³⁰.

Here I am suggesting that structure has meaning. An acknowledgement of this enables us, as Tagg has noted, to study what "the structural characteristics of a certain type of music can tell us about the culture of which that music is such an important part" (Tagg, 1994, p.209). This is precisely what an examination of homologous structures allows us to do, it tells us something about contemporary dance culture. Although Lucien Goldmann belongs to a tradition that has been ‘critiqued’ for various reasons, some of his work is directly relevant to such an analysis. In particular Goldmann’s homological analysis of the relationship between societal groups and literary texts is remarkable for its applicability to dance culture.

Goldmann suggests that the fundamental relationship between societal groups and the literary texts that they produce is not found in the content of those texts, but is found in what he describes as "the form of the content" (see Goldmann, 1964, pp.3-22 and pp.89-102, see also Evans, 1981, p.60). Paul Willis, implicitly drawing upon the work of Goldmann, suggests that "songs bear meaning and allow symbolic work not just as speech acts, but also as structures of sound with unique rhythms, textures and forms" (Willis, 1990, p.64). I would add that this is particularly the case in the dance music of the mid 1990s, where, within many sub-genres such as techno, lyrics are almost entirely absent. With no lyrics, we therefore rely solely upon the music for meaning. As much contemporary dance music is non-linguistic, meaning is therefore generally derived from learnt cultural and social knowledges, and from an interpretation of structure. Theodor Adorno puts this in a slightly different manner;

It is also possible to view music without lyrics as even more powerful than the traditional song³³. Such a view is supported by Dahlaus and Zimmerman who suggest that music began to hold such a position towards the end of the eighteenth century; "conceptless instrumental music - and precisely because of and not despite its lack of concepts - was elevated to a language above verbal language" (Dahlaus and Zimmerman, 1984, p.179).

Perhaps therefore we can suggest that "rockology" (Tagg, 1994) is but a brief historical aberration, and that popular music is reverting to its non-lyrical form. Adorno would agree, although he puts the drawing of music within enlightenment reason at a much earlier date, suggesting that pre-capitalist music "did not ‘represent’ anything outside of itself; it was on the order of prayer and play, not painting and writing. The decay of this reality of music by its becoming an image of itself tends to break the spell" (Adorno, 1939, p.72). According to Adorno some music carried on this tradition, and I would suggest that much contemporary dance music also does so.

An analogy can also be made between Adorno’s analysis of polyphonic music and contemporary techno, with the definition of polyphonic music being that which is "composed of relatively independent melodic lines or parts" (Hanks, 1986, p.1189). Polyphonic music, like techno, represented life, though not in a literal or reflective manner. As Martin Jay explains "originating in the rhythms and rituals of everyday life, music has long since transcended its purely functional role. It [is] thus tied to material conditions and above them, responsive to social realities and yet more than merely their reflection" (Jay, 1973, p.182).

This is not to suggest that there is a pluralism of meaning within contemporary dance music, merely that we have to look beyond purely linguistic structures to discover how meaning is fixed. Here we have a link with Russian formalism as characterised by Mikhail Bakhtin, in particular Valentin Voloshinov’s concept of multiaccentuality within the parametric constraints of textuality. In the case of contemporary dance music, we must look towards both context and structure in order to examine meaning. Only then can we continue to counter both common-sense discourse on dance culture, and common-sense discourse on the relationship between young people and television. Common-sense discourse on dance culture sees dance music as simplistic and devoid of meaning through it not being in a traditional song format. An analysis of the form and structure of dance music shows how this is not the case, how there is meaning in structure. Common-sense discourse on the relationship between young people and television sees BPM as a disposable television programme watched by young people for trivial reasons; pure entertainment for a lost generation. However if we can say, as I am suggesting, that the structure of BPM is similar to the structure of house and techno music, then the least that we can say is that the situation is more complicated than common-sense discourse suggests.

The metronomic 4/4 beat is a good example of how form determines meaning within contemporary dance music. Such a simple pattern might initially appear to be devoid of meaning, yet the meaning invested in it by dance culture is huge. Along with timbre, volume and instrumentation it is one of the defining characteristics of the contemporary dance floor³⁴. Even the government would appear to agree that musical form is an all important characteristic of contemporary dance music; the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 criminalises the participants and organisers of events at which are played, in the (immortal) words of the Act, "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". It is ironic that legal discourse sees house and techno music as being inherently political, whilst common-sense discourse, and to a certain extent contemporary cultural studies’ discourse, see it as apolitical; a mere kick-drum beat devoid of meaning.

BPM’s footage from nightclubs and raves made use of the repetitive beat of house and techno, particularly in its editing. In the first two series special effects were overlaid on top of the representational image, frequently following musical rhythm. The relationship between visual text and soundtrack, where visual edits and effects matched the beat and rhythm of the music, goes beyond the similarity of form inherent in an isomorphic relationship, and approaches the exact structural likeness of a homologous one.

As well as the homologous relationship between editing and music, we have a similar relationship between dancers, music and visual text in that the dancers have synchronised their body to the beat. There is therefore a homology between action and text. As television viewers we see this as it occurs; BPM recorded the soundtrack to their clips directly from the DJ’s mixing desk onto a time-coded DAT cassette, thereby ensuring a perfect synchronisation with the cameras. As well as the television audience witnessing the dialectical relationship between dance floor and DJ, they could also ‘feel’ this relationship through listening to the music and observing the crowd’s reaction to it.

Broadening the definition of repetition beyond musical rhythm, the structure of BPM remained the same from week to week; opening footage from club, spoken introduction, more club footage, interview with club promoter, more footage, video clip of the week, and so on³⁵ (see Appendix 3). John Caughie notes that, with the exception of the auteurist text, repetition lies at the heart of generic categorisations of television. Interestingly Caughie ties this to the notion of subjectivity and suggests that televisual subjectivity is essentially concerned with repetition and difference (Caughie, 1991, pp.127-8). Perhaps we can therefore suggest that BPM has a self-consciousness concerning repetition that is either missing, or deliberately hidden within other television texts.

So far we have suggested that the relationship between dance music, BPM and the audience is more complicated than common-sense discourse suggests. In particular we have suggested that the central meaning of contemporary dance music is not contained within lyrics but within musical form and structure, and that BPM made use of this form and structure in its textual composition. It is at this point that I want to connect the repetition that is at the centre of both contemporary dance music and BPM with subjectivity, in particular the drug-based subjectivities on offer within contemporary dance culture. This section therefore shows that drug consumption within contemporary dance music is not purely hedonistic, but is at least partly due to the psychological and ‘subjectival’ relevance of the psychopharmacological effects of specific drugs such as Ecstasy.

Over the past ten years there has been a massive increase in drug consumption within youth culture. There is a wealth of evidence to support this assertion. The Home Office’s own statistics suggest that 1.5 million Ecstasy tablets are consumed every weekend (cited in Wroe et al, 1995, p.18). A survey of 700 young people aged between 14 and 16, compiled by Manchester University, suggests that 51% of those questioned had taken drugs, whilst 76% had been offered them. The Guardian has suggested in the same words on two separate occasions that "drug-taking has become an integral part of youth culture" (The Guardian, 15 August 1995, p.10, and Boseley, 1995, p.2). One report suggests that within certain areas the majority of school-leavers have, at some point, consumed an illegal drug (see Parker et al, 1995). A survey of 3,000 under-18s conducted by the drug and alcohol advice agency Turning Point suggests that the majority of those who had approached the agency for advice in the previous twelve months considered drug use as ‘normal’. Wendy Thompson, Turning Point’s chief executive, is quoted as saying "young people see the use of recreational dance drugs and cannabis as...entirely acceptable" (in Bellos, 1995b, p.6). Within dance culture this acceptability is further accentuated, with a survey completed by the drugs advice agency Release suggesting that 97% of clubbers had, at some point in their lives, taken drugs (Brooks, 1997, p.34).

As a result of this cultural shift, characterised by Patrick Mignon as "the democratisation of bohemia" (Mignon, 1993), it could be suggested that it is the non-drug takers who are the deviants within dance culture, in the sense that they deviate from the norm of drug consumption within British youth culture³⁶. Howard Parker, professor of social policy at Manchester University, agrees "over the next few years, and certainly in urban areas, non-drug-trying adolescents will be in a minority group. In one sense, they will be the deviants" (in Boseley, 1995, p.2). This point should be remembered when we come to the analysis ‘oppositional readings’ in the following chapter.

In particular, contemporary dance culture is inextricably linked to the use of Ecstasy. The majority of participants in contemporary dance culture regularly take, or have regularly taken, the drug Ecstasy. One suggested result of Ecstasy consumption is that, by stimulating the 1b receptor in the brain, the user does things over and over again without necessarily being aware of the fact, in short, Ecstasy encourages repetitive behaviour. Add Ecstasy consumption to house and techno music’s sequenced ‘four-to-the-floor’ kick drum on every crotchet beat and you have a dance floor full of dancers who appear to have entirely synchronised their bodies to the music. A Liverpudlian dance culture member explained to me the significance of this homologous relationship between Ecstasy and dance music;

Dr. Martin Paulus, Resident in Psychiatry, University of California at San Diego, offers a similar account;

This has not gone unnoticed by record producers, who will provide ‘DJ remixes’ of a dance track that emphasise sequenced beats exactly on the bar, thus enabling a seamless switch between records. This has enabled the dance track to have a ‘four structure’ at the level of the track as a whole. Mike Turner describes this ‘metastructure’; "everything has to be [in] fours, you subconsciously expect it, a loop lasts for four beats, a riff lasts for four loops, a verse lasts for four riffs etc." (Turner, 1996, n.p.).

The effects of Ecstasy use have gone full circle, record companies are now producing records for Ecstasy consumers, specifically designed to heighten the Ecstasy experience³⁸. Rather than Ecstasy use facilitating dancing to music, music facilitates dancing on Ecstasy. However, this is not merely a one-way relationship, with drug having an effect upon behaviour and psychopharmacological state, there is in fact a three-way relationship between cultural activity, musical text and drug. As Willis suggests in his ethnographic analysis of hippy culture

Again I draw upon Goldmann’s support in making my case;

Common-sense discourse assumes that Ecstasy is a new drug. It was, in fact, first patented in 1913 by the German firm Merck, but remained largely unused in this country until the mid 1980s (see Saunders, 1995, ch.2). I would suggest that its current popularity in Britain is due to the relevance of its psychopharmacological effects to contemporary youth micro-cultures, in particular those whose genealogies can be traced back to the summer of 1987 in Ibiza, and the associated rise of the ‘Balearic’ micro-culture in London the following winter⁴⁰. The position of Ecstasy within British youth culture can be contrasted with the American experience. Whereas in Britain Ecstasy is viewed as a ‘dance drug’, in America the use of Ecstasy is concentrated in the home. This emphasises that Ecstasy does not necessarily ‘impose’ its effects upon the user; different consumers experience the effects of Ecstasy in ways that are not directly determined by its psychopharmacological properties. The following section is intended to explain why Ecstasy is so central to the lifestyle of dance culture participants.

Contemporary dance culture is often viewed as a culture of the ‘weekender’. During the week members of contemporary dance culture often work, if work is available, in what have been termed ‘McJobs’⁴¹, repetitive employment that requires little concentration. Those who have managed to find skilled employment often describe their jobs as repetitive as well. For instance I asked five random club-goers at the Liverpool club Voodoo what their occupations were. Their responses were as follows; hairdresser at a salon in North Wales, chamber-maid at The Feathers Hotel, Liverpool "cleaning out the prostitutes’ rooms", building worker, Youth Training Scheme brick-layer, and unemployed ("I live with my mum"). These occupations are all based on doing the same thing repeatedly; cutting hair, making beds, placing one brick on top of another, and signing on at the Job Centre every fortnight at exactly the same time. Regular attendance at weekend clubs such as Voodoo is both a release from the repetition of their jobs, and, paradoxically, a repetitive act in itself (all five respondents were habitual clubbers).

Again, connections can be made with an Adornoesque reading of dance culture, with Adorno suggesting that the consumption of standardised repetitive musical texts reflects the standardised and repetitive nature of work in late-20th century society;

Siegfried Kracauer offers a similar analysis, suggesting that, by offering an escape from reality, dancing persuades the dancer that a future liberation has, albeit temporarily, arrived:

In summary then we have a complex homologous relationship that provides an implicit critique of common-sense discourse on the nature of contemporary dance culture, and provides an implicit critique of common-sense discourse on the relationship between young people and television. There is a formal and structural likeness between Ecstasy, contemporary dance music, and the recreational and occupational activities of members of contemporary dance culture; they are all based on repetition. Add this to editing style and special effects and we have a four-way relationship between drug, cultural activity (dancing), musical text and televisual text.

Ecstasy has been described as a psychedelic amphetamine (see Saunders, 1995, p.150). Ecstasy use can also therefore be linked to the ‘psychedelic’ nature of much contemporary dance culture, and shifts our analysis from the structural and the formal to the stylistic. Here I draw upon Willis’s extension of the definition of a homology beyond Goldmann’s "form of the content" to include the "style, typical concerns, attitudes and feelings of the social group" (Willis, 1978, p.191). In particular I also draw upon Willis’s suggestion that the content of an object or artefact must have

A difficulty arises here in that an adequate definition of psychedelic in the context of popular music is notoriously hard to come by. Richard Norris, of the popular techno act The Grid, has suggested that psychedelia is characterised by the excessive use of technology (in Roberts, 1988, p.66, see also Russell, 1993 p.125, and McKay, 1996, pp.108-9). This is certainly an important element of contemporary house and techno music. A postcard used by The Grid as promotional material for their Evolver album and Rollercoaster single in 1994 emphasises this in its usage of a photograph of a Roland TB-303 sitting on a child’s lap (with the image therefore also encompassing the pre-oedipal status assigned to dance culture in the previous chapter. An analysis of the political nature of pre-oedipal regression will be returned to later on in this chapter, and in the conclusion of chapter 6).

The dictionary definition of psychedelic also includes specific sounds, in that a secondary definition of psychedelic is "relating to or denoting new or altered perceptions or sensory experiences, as through the use of hallucinogenic drugs" (Hanks, 1986, p.1233). Sheila Whiteley, however, proposes a definition of psychedelic where musical techniques are intended to mimic the hallucinogenic high. These techniques include:

I would also suggest that the BPM text was also psychedelic. Firstly it represented the psychedelic imagery of the dance floor, complete with complex coloured lighting patterns. Secondly, BPM frequently altered this image with over-contrasted colours, negative images, and other special effects such as ‘tracing’, where the image of, for instance, a dancer appeared to remain on screen long after he or she had moved out of shot. Thirdly, complex moving images, such as those popularised as ‘fractals’ and ‘The Mandelbrot Set’, were occasionally overlaid on top of the representational image, particularly within the first and second series of the programme. The viewer saw the dancers through an intricate web of colours. As well as being classic psychedelia, such images are also, again, repetitive, in that they are based upon the iteration of simple mathematical formula, in the case of the Mandelbrot Set, z2+c. The Collins English Dictionary would appear to make the connection between this visual style and drug explicit in its definition of psychedelic as "the vivid colours and complex patterns popularly associated with the visual effects of psychedelic states" (Hanks, 1986, p.1233).

BPM’s special effects are similar to those used by multimedia artists such as Hex, and the Electronic Sound and Pictures organisation (ESP). Graham Brown-Martin, the Managing Director of ESP, makes the direct connection between contemporary special effects and, particularly, Ecstasy;

To conclude our homological analysis, it should also be stated that BPM was specifically designed to fit into the schedule of a dancer’s night out. BPM was broadcast between 3 and 5 a.m. on Sunday mornings. This gave the dancer plenty of time to collect their coats upon the imminent closure of a nightclub, the majority of which shut at 2 a.m., and make their way home. With the effects of Ecstasy still apparent, they switch on the television and lock into the rhythmic patterns of sound and image. Ecstasy is used to enhance the televisual experience, and the television is ‘used’ to enhance the drug experience. So here we have a seven-way homologous relationship; recreational drug, music, cultural activity (dancing), editing, representational image (of dancers), special effects, and ‘reading strategy’ are all, in essence, repetitive.

As suggested earlier, the aim of this chapter is to provide an analysis of the relationships between contemporary dance culture, televisual representations of contemporary dance culture, and the audience for these representations. In the previous section I have suggested that there is a homologous relationship between cultural practices and cultural texts based on repetition. In particular I have made use of theoretical and methodological positions provided by Lucien Goldmann and Paul Willis to show how dance culture recognises and foregrounds repetition. This analysis has revolved around the suggestion that the repetition of daily life is (homologously) present in contemporary dance music. The most well-known theoretician for the analysis of repetition in popular culture is Theodor Adorno, a mid-century writer working within the Institute of Social Research, otherwise known as the Frankfurt School. It would therefore seem appropriate if I spent a little time examining what Adorno’s view on the relationship between contemporary dance culture and contemporary dance music might be. Such a process will perform two functions. Firstly it will enable us to provide a critique of the common-sense suggestion that Ecstasy use is purely hedonistic, and that contemporary dance music is mindless and of little aesthetic value. Secondly, it will enable us to re-evaluate a theorist who has become synonymous with ‘cultural pessimism’. Before I deal specifically with the work of Adorno, I want to give an example of what initially appears to be an Adornoesque analysis. This will take the form of an analysis of a newspaper article written by Mark Steyn and published in The Independent newspaper. An examination of this review gives the reader a good example of the kind of attitudes that surround discussions on contemporary dance culture, and the kind of attitudes that surround discussions on the relationship between young people and television. Following this I intend to show what a ‘real’ Adornoesque analysis might look like, showing how the work of Adorno can be used to praise, rather than criticise, contemporary dance culture. In many academic discourses Adorno is used as a stick with which to beat contemporary ‘low’ cultural forms. I intend to show that Adorno’s work might well have been misinterpreted by academic discourse, and can be used to show how ‘low’ cultural forms are more complicated and sophisticated than common-sense and academic discourse suggest.

Steyn’s article (reproduced in full in Appendix 3) is a review of two television programmes, an episode of the BBC series Timewatch featuring a Shaker community in the United States, and an episode of Dance Energy, a BBC2 programme featuring items on contemporary dance culture (particularly Black dance culture) and shot in a studio in London. Steyn begins his review by stating that "on Timewatch, we heard once again the strains of ‘Tis the Gift to be Simple’, the enduring Shaker hymn which so inspired the composer Aaron Copland" (Steyn, 1990, p.14). Here we have Steyn expressing his own cultural credentials, making obvious his own cultural prejudices. As an element of contemporary high culture, Steyn is suggesting that Shaker hymns appear enduring and timeless, and then attempts to compare and contrast Shaker songs with the work of the Hispanic rapper Mellow Man Ace featured on Dance Energy. Firstly, Steyn uses personalised abuse, suggesting that the only inspiration that Mellow Man Ace could possibly have gained from rap music was an inspiration "to change his name from some baptismal liability like Irving Schmuck". Secondly, Steyn compares and contrasts the two cultural forms. Shaker culture is characterised as a high cultural form that is grounded in "frugal self-denial"⁴⁸, whilst Dance Energy is characterised as a low cultural text containing little more than "rampant hedonism".

Rather than the argument appearing as an attack by high culture on popular culture, Steyn twists the argument round by suggesting that broadcasting institutions are on the side of low culture, directly impoverishing high culture; a situation where the Philistinism of the BBC means that "the United Society of Believers rated a one-off documentary, [and] the slap-happy sappy rappers of LA, Philadelphia and London get not only Dance Energy (Monday) but also Dance Energy Update (Wednesday)". Steyn, either through wilful ignorance or deceit, refuses to believe that any culture can change even minutely within two days. The culture he defends is timeless and static, whilst the nuances and tastes to be found within contemporary dance culture change from day to day, a vibrancy that makes it appear all the more exciting to the initiated. However this vibrancy and excitement is interpreted by Steyn as a lack; a lack of quality which means that the music will not last, and that "Dance Energy is a show whose sell-by date is calibrated in nano-seconds". For Steyn, dance music is a textual form of little worth, liked by those who know no better.

Steyn goes on to quote a track from American rapper KRS-1, claiming to not understand the lyrics and suggesting that "rap, like opera, seems most agreeable when it’s in a language you don’t understand"⁴⁹. Here Steyn is emasculating rap, whose primary formal characteristic is generally held to be the overtly political nature of its lyrics, whilst making the claim that with opera meaning transcends linguistic barriers. Within this discourse opera and high culture are authentic and timeless, whilst rap is "a ‘musical’ genre wholly dependent on technology whose exponents are so incapable of performing live on television that they have to mouth their latest single, and then stand around sheepishly as the record fades behind them". Note the inverted commas around the word musical, with Steyn suggesting that rap is not music at all. Here it could certainly be suggested that the origin of Steyn’s argument is a Frankfurt School analysis, where modern technology is inauthentic and fake, not having the quality and intellectual resonance of ‘timeless’ instruments such as those used by the Shakers⁵⁰. Again, I am not suggesting that the position that Steyn holds is homologous with common-sense or academic discourse, merely that there are connections.

After KRS-1 has performed his rap, the studio audience are seen to respond "with what became a familiar ‘ooh-ooh-ooh’ grunting sound, rather like the end of the Goodie’s seminal record ‘Funky Gibbon’". So not only are dance culture participants criticised for their cultural choices, they are reduced to the status of wild animals, and referred to as "troops", again suggesting a Frankfurt School analysis where consumers are characterised as regular, regimented, and having identical animalistic reactions.

Steyn’s article can be viewed as a bourgeois individualist attack on the communality of the dance floor. In countering such attacks, this thesis echoes Bourdieu’s text Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Bourdieu, 1984) in that it aims to show how there is no such thing as innate ‘good taste’; the reason that dance culture is considered ‘degenerate’ is that there is an unequal distribution of cultural capital that disfavours young people. As we have seen, a homological analysis addresses this for it allows us to examine the sophisticated structures of contemporary dance culture, and the musical sub-genres associated with them, and their televisual representations, at any one point of time.

Having now shown how ‘cultural pessimism’ is used by journalistic discourse, we can now go on to examine the work of the ‘Grandfather’ of cultural pessimism, Theodor Adorno. In particular I wish to show in this section that, if Adorno were alive today, he might well cite approvingly certain elements of contemporary dance music. As we have seen in the previous section common-sense discourse sees dance music as being of little or no aesthetic worth. As we saw in chapter 2 contemporary cultural studies’ discourse also frequently sees contemporary dance culture as resistant to analysis. This section will show that both discourses are incorrect, and that the form of contemporary dance music, and the relationship between contemporary dance music and its audience, are far more complicated than both discourses suggest.

In this section I also wish to show some connections between an Adornoesque analysis and a Bakhtinian one. In their book entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) Adorno and Max Horkheimer suggest that the "seriousness" of "the culture industry" is undermined by the playfulness and the unconventionality of the modern carnival; "the eccentricity of the circus, peepshow, and brothel is as embarrassing to [the culture industry] as that of Schöenberg or Karl Kraus" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944, p.136). Whilst Adorno and Horkheimer emphasise the carnival’s "eccentricity", Adorno suggests in his book entitled The Culture Industry (Adorno, 1991) that "the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilisational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent in it" (Adorno, 1991, p.85). Irrespective of the contradiction between the carnival’s "eccentricity" and its "seriousness", I would turn this latter statement around and suggest that, whilst the repetitive nature of dance music and Ecstasy is enhanced by the physicality of the dance floor carnival, a glimmer of spontaneity and difference breaks through. Adorno and Horkheimer appear to agree;

Another similarity between a Bakhtinian and an Adornoesque analysis is an emphasis on the difference between the carnival and the carnivalesque, between the event and its textual representation. Whilst Adorno and Horkheimer suggest that there are some elements of the carnival left within contemporary society (I would suggest that this includes contemporary dance culture), once "the culture industry" represents and co-opts such events, their disruptive power is lessened, they become merely carnivalesque. Adorno suggests that

Moving away from Adorno’s work on "the culture industry" towards his musicological work, Adorno believes that the production and consumption of popular music is characterised by ‘pseudo-individualisation’ and standardisation. Both aspects tie in with the analysis of repetition and difference explored in previous sections. Dominic Strinati explains;

A further trait of contemporary dance culture that Adorno might well have approved of is its resistance to narrative closure. The reconstitution of 4/4 dance tracks within a DJ set is an example of this, where the beginnings and endings of individual tracks are merged into each other, or in the case of many DJs ignored altogether⁵³. Adorno approves of this, suggesting that narrative closure in Beethoven sonatas, with their triumphant endings, are linked to "the great idealist systems, with Hegel the dialectician, in whom at the end the epitome of negation and thus of becoming self results in the theodicy of the existent" (Adorno, 1976b, p.127). Rather than the discrete bourgeois text, Adorno favours music that emphasises developmental sections, "thereby liberating the potential of the subject via using the potential of the technical means of the music of his time" (Bowie, 1989, p.81, see also Lindner and Lüdke, 1980, p.498). Contemporary dance music as reconstituted by the club DJ often consists of nothing but developmental sections.

Returning to the notion of ‘pseudo-individualisation’, Adorno suggests that standardisation elicits "a system of response-mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideals of individuality in a free, liberal society" (Adorno, 1991, p.305). However, to apply this to contemporary dance culture would be to miss the point. Dance culture is consciously and deliberately antagonistic to individualism. It is essentially a communal experience that rejects the isolationism and the ‘individualisation’ that many perceive to be defining characteristics of late-20th century Britain. For Adorno the form of popular music is based upon standardisation and pseudo-individualisation (part of an overall fetishism of music), and this process enforces a "regression of listening" on the part of the consumer; "the ban on changing the basic beat during the course of the music is itself sufficient to constrict composition to the point where what it demands is not aesthetic awareness of style but rather psychological regression" (Adorno, 1967, p.123). This psychological regression is characterised by an infantilisation of the listener.

Again, there are similarities at this point between an application of Adorno and an application of Bakhtin, but a Bakhtinian analysis is less fatalistic. According to Adorno, listeners to popular music are "arrested at the infantile stage...they are childish" (Adorno, 1978a, p.286) Within a Bakhtinian analysis, this state is, as suggested earlier, a regression to the polymorphous sensuality of the child; it is about rejecting individualism, subsuming yourself within the communal body, "undoing... the constructed ‘self’" (see Rietveld, 1993, p.43) and returning to a pre-linguistic child-like state. Adorno disagrees; the listeners’ childishness "is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded" (Adorno, 1978a, p.286)⁵⁴.

According to Adorno the characteristics of regressed listening include the inability to listen to anything other than truncated parts of a composition. Such a criticism is ironic coming from Adorno, who, according to Martin Jay, rarely examined entire compositions (see Jay, 1984, p.131), and who, as we have seen above, directly criticised narrative and ideological closure. It should also be noted that those composers that Adorno does praise also make use of narrative closure. Adorno is himself aware of this; he criticises Beethoven’s symphonies for the "the crushing repression, of an authoritarian ‘That’s how it is’" (Adorno, 1976a, p.210). In relation to contemporary dance culture, the criticism that listeners are regressed, inattentive and unable to listen to more than a small part of a piece of music carries little weight. The mark of a good DJ is often viewed to be his or her ability to play an extended DJ set of four or more hours (it is surely no coincidence that such a time-frame is similar to the time-frame of a single dosage of Ecstasy), and dancers frequently engage in heroic feats of endurance when attending all-night events that go on for up to twelve hours. Mary Anna Wright explains further, and in doing so emphasises that both music and drug are used by dance culture for its own purposes;

In some texts Adorno refers to popular music as "infantile", in others he suggests that it is characterised by an "adolescence". In the following astute observation, Adorno looks forward to the accelerated youth cultures of contemporary society:

The defining characteristics of repetition and bricolage within house and techno musics have led many to claim that they are essentially postmodern forms. An analysis of Adorno and Horkheimer is useful in that it shows that repetition and bricolage are not textual strategies limited to the condition of postmodernity, but can be found in modernist texts. In chapter 5 I will examine how discourses of modernity also cast the difference between mass culture and high culture in terms of the difference between masculinity and femininity, with high culture equalling activity, productivity and objectivity (masculine) and mass culture equalling passivity, consumption and emotionality (feminine). Adorno is as guilty of this as most modernist writers, with his talk of "the girl behind the counter", "the girl whose satisfaction consists solely in the fact that she and her boyfriend ‘look good’" (Adorno, 1978a, p.280), and "the woman who has money with which to buy is intoxicated by the act of buying" (Adorno, 1978a, p.279). Whilst this gender essentialism has been criticised elsewhere (see Huyssen, 1986), in using a Bakhtinian analysis we can highlight the importance of traces of a low ‘folk’ culture that is neither elite nor mass, and which foregrounds a breaking down of gender barriers. Contemporary dance culture breaks down these binary oppositions, it is simultaneously populist, the soundtrack to a million Saturday nights out, and avant-garde, in its production and in the radical recomposition of form inherent in the DJ set. In some of Adorno’s writings, Adorno criticises the separation of high and low forms of art (see Adorno, 1976a, p.18), whilst in other texts he criticises popular music for appearing to break down these boundaries, whilst in fact reaffirming them;

Whilst an application of Adorno can lead to a degree of cultural pessimism, it is crucial to note that the production of contemporary dance music is a far cry from the production methods of Adorno’s "Culture Industry", where, in relation to popular music, ‘the jazz monopoly rests on the exclusiveness of the supply and the economic power behind it" (Adorno, 1967, p.129). Recording studios are now no longer the preserve of record companies, and now that non-corporate access can be gained to record pressing plants we are beginning to see dance culture participants gaining a degree of control over the means of production, distribution and exchange unthinkable within the totalising embrace of the ‘Culture Industry’. This must be a central part of any Marxist analysis, no matter how ‘Western’ or anti-economist. In particular the production of dance music is now taking place on a small-scale, with dance culture participants pressing up maybe 500 copies of a record, with any profits reinvested in new equipment. This is hardly the mass-production monopoly capitalism that Adorno talks of, and is a direct attack upon the ‘star system’ that Adorno directly criticises (see Adorno, 1978a, p.276). As technological innovations proliferate, and as consumers become producers, these changes lead to new sounds and musical styles. To equate musical production with the production of functional artefacts is to ignore some crucial distinctions between the two. The production of dance music is changing all the time, and, through the use of technologies such as the internet and digital sound recording, music production is being wrestled from the hands of the monopoly corporations that are anathema to Adorno.

It is a bizarre thought, but not such an outlandish one, that if Adorno had lived in the late-20th century, he could well have been a fan of contemporary dance music, a form that liberates the subject from language, from linear narrative, and from textual closure. Andrew Bowie’s reading of Adorno can be used to qualify such a statement; "the implicit warning it contains is...that of the need to sustain means of articulation which enable subjects to assert some kind of freedom against the dominant modes of discourse" (Bowie, 1989, p.83). Whilst some commentators have suggested that the repetition of the 4/4 time signature is a form of fascistic regulation (see, for example, Thompson, 1995), my analysis would be to suggest that it can offer a textual space outside of official discourses, within which meaning is only fixed through the context of the communal dance floor and contemporary dance culture. Chris Stanley offers a similar analysis;

We could go on for ever, citing examples of where Adorno’s critique of popular music can be either co-opted by myself in my search for analytical tools with which to study contemporary dance culture (a search that is allied to the achievement of the secondary aim of this thesis), or superseded by it. Perhaps the problem is not with Adorno himself, but with the fact that, as stated earlier in this thesis, contemporary cultural studies continues to oscillate between the perceived pessimism of Adorno and the ‘cultural optimism’ of the likes of John Fiske. Perhaps now is the time to jettison this binarism. Other theorists are beginning to agree. Beverly Best, in her call to arms on behalf of what Steve Redhead has called ‘popular cultural studies’ (as opposed to contemporary cultural studies)⁵⁵, suggests that any theorising about popular culture

One recent development that appears to address directly, in a critical manner, the homological analysis presented earlier in this chapter is the emergence of a new musical sub-genre entitled jungle^56, which, since its inception, has subsequently developed into a thriving dance micro-culture. The emergence of jungle has led to a major schism within contemporary dance culture, and it is crucial that we examine jungle culture and jungle music to show the extent to which contemporary dance culture provides self-developed theories concerning its own existence and the role it takes within the lives of its participants. Before I examine the micro-discourses circulating within jungle culture, it is necessary to examine jungle music itself.

A typical jungle track consists of a frenetic high-hat percussion track at around 320 beats per minute, a second percussion track at around 160 beats per minute, and an irregular and shifting bass-line at around 80 beats per minute. The 160 b.p.m. drum track invariably has an erratic beat emphasis, thereby directly rejecting the ‘four-to-the-floor’ basis of house and techno music, and thereby rejecting an essential element of the foregrounded repetition within house and techno-aligned micro-cultures. An example might be where the first beat of each bar is on the beat, and the rest are syncopated. Another example is where emphasis is placed on the first two beats of each bar or where the drum track is based around syncopated second and fourth crotchets. Vocals, strings and synthesised sounds are sandwiched between percussion and bass.

Crucial to our analysis is the suggestion that jungle, whilst still based upon the 4/4 time signature, firmly eschews the kick drum sequenced on each crotchet beat that characterises house and techno music. Instead of the kick drum, jungle relies upon sped up ‘break beats’, often sampled from American hip-hop records⁵⁷, or the result of hours of computer programming using software such as Steinberg’s Cubase, which allow each drum hit to be graphically represented and edited on screen. The origin of dance music’s appropriation of the break beat is generally accepted to be the Bronx, New York in the early 1970s, where a DJ would mix two records together, extending the mix at the point of a drum break by cross-cutting between the two records using an audio mixer. These break beats can then be digitally ‘chopped’ so that each four bar structure is different⁵⁸. This not a mere ‘surface’ change that an Adornoesque reading can ignore. The morphological metaphor that characterises the Adornoesque and Goldmannian analyses of techno and house given above (repetition as central core, other sounds providing a peripheral difference) is destroyed. There is no repetition at the heart of jungle, rather there are never-ending circles of change and difference.

One important point to make is that jungle does not exist in tolerance of house and techno music, it developed in opposition to it. Two Fingers and James T Kirk, in their polemical novel entitled Junglist explain further:

Some of my interviewees go further than this, suggesting that, whilst they feel that they have to take Ecstasy to be able to dance to house and techno, this is not necessary with jungle. A typical comment is provided by Guy, who features in Session 3 in chapter 6; "the thing I like about jungle is that I can dance to it ‘beered-up’. I can’t do that with techno". Whereas house and techno music are designed for the Ecstasy user, jungle is not.

BPM’s occasional forays into jungle culture were noticeably different from their visits to house and techno clubs. Shorn of a sequenced beat on each bar, the dancers either stayed rooted to the spot, moving their arms and gyrating their hips, or frenetically jumped up and down. There appeared to be less of the tension visible in those who dance to, in particular, techno, and more of a relaxed fluidity to their movements. This is noticeable in the lack of ‘gurners’⁶¹ in BPM’s footage in jungle clubs.

The structural relationship between drug (Ecstasy) and music (house and techno) has broken down. This breakdown is signified by something as seemingly insignificant as the beat emphasis on a record. Or has the homologous relationship broken down? Do we have a wide variety of different homologies between musical sub-genres, micro-cultures, and the televisual representations of these phenomena? Goldmann suggests that "by structure, we mean the regularities which make it inevitable that a change in one part of a whole brings about certain complementary changes in the other parts so that an overall significance is preserved" (Goldmann, 1967, p.87). This is a perfect description of what has happened in the shift from hardcore techno (originally based on four-to-the-floor kick drums) to jungle. If we remove the recreational drug from the analysis above, and replace it with an ‘attitude’, then much of the homological analysis above can be used to analyse jungle culture.

That there is a specific attitude surrounding jungle clubs and music is not in doubt. Indeed the micro-culture has spawned its own adjective, ‘junglist’, to describe itself and its cultural artefacts. Jungle’s manic percussion track is widely considered to reflect the frantic speed of inner-city life, and this is made explicit in one of the rarest of things; a lyric in a jungle record, entitled Inner City Life by the artist Goldie:

In terms of its development the speed of jungle not only emphasised the pace of inner-city but also enabled jungle to enclose itself, to repel commercialisation. But this was not entirely successful, and the "revolt into style" process described so eloquently by Melly continued. In 1997 and 1998 jungle was deracinated, ripped from its street roots to form the aural backdrop to, for example, television adverts for deodorants. Jungle now wins national awards such as The Mercury Prize (for Roni Size’s 1997 album New Forms, see Williams, 1997), and is packaged by commercial forces for audiences beyond contemporary dance culture.

The pre-eminence of ‘speed’ within early jungle was also combined with an emphasis on ‘darkness’, a reference to the largely Black origins of jungle culture, as well as highlighting the shadow cast by the urban and suburban poverty-traps in which so many jungle consumers find themselves situated. Two Fingers and Kirk explain further:

With this foregrounding of darkness we can see a crucial difference between jungle and the other offshoots of the hardcore rave music of the early 1990s, other offshoots that nevertheless have a homologous relation to specific drugs and specific micro-cultures. In the period 1993-4 hardcore rave music split in three ways, forming ‘darkcore’ (which eventually became jungle), ‘happy hardcore’, and a variant of the Dutch genre ‘gabber’⁶². Whilst gabber and happy hardcore have similarities to jungle, neither combine jungle’s rejection of the four-to-the-floor beat emphasis with its darkness. Gabber is certainly as fast and as dark as jungle, but retains the kick drum on each crotchet beat of techno. The aggressive nature of the super-fast kick drum can be directly related to the use of amphetamine sulphate at gabber events. The ‘happy hardcore’ of the mid 1990s is as fast as jungle and also uses break beats, but deliberately opposes jungle’s darkness and its emphasis on ‘reality’, preferring to offer an escape from reality within the confines of the utopian rave (much in the same way as acid house did in the late 1980s). This is not to suggest that the happy hardcore scene is any less political than jungle culture, or any less oppositional, merely that it adopts different tactics. For example Simon Reynolds detects a "political resonance" within happy hardcore’s utopian aesthetic, suggesting that

Matthew Collin and John Godfrey firmly believe that there is an exact structural likeness between musical form, specific dance micro-cultures, and drugs, and can be quoted to validate my hypothesis concerning homologous relations;

Whilst some micro-cultures and micro-genres mutated in tandem with an increase in the use of amphetamine sulphate (the popularity of gabber in Britain in the mid 1990s can certainly be seen as related to an increase in amphetamine consumption), music designed specifically for the Ecstasy experience is still popular (although, of course, it may not be by time of the publication of this thesis). There has also been the development of a gabber/happy hardcore hybrid, which combined gabber’s ultra-fast ‘four-to-the-floor’ kick drum with happy hardcore’s utopian aesthetic. This micro-genre, which eschewed the darkness of gabber and jungle, became known as ‘4 beat’. In particular 4-beat was connected to scenes that indulged in amphetamine and Ecstasy cocktails. Simon Reynolds summarises this scene in 1997;

As we have seen, each micro-genre and micro-culture has an attitude specific to it. However, perhaps the correct term is not ‘attitude’ but ‘world vision’. Goldmann asks

The world vision of ‘underground’ jungle cultures was markedly different from the world visions of previous dance cultures. Steve Shapiro, a graduate student at McGill University in Canada, suggests that the British jungle experience was

Whilst I have suggested that the tactics employed by jungle culture are markedly different from those employed by, for example, house and techno cultures, I still feel able to collect all the micro-genres and micro-cultures outlined above under the umbrella term of contemporary dance culture. Although, as suggested in chapter 2, connections between class and youth (sub)culture have broken down, the connections between economics and contemporary dance culture have not. Contemporary dance culture constitutes an economic group in that it contains specific modes of production, distribution and exchange for cultural and symbolic goods. This is not to suggest that dance culture constitutes an economic class. Members of dance culture have specific economic interests, yet "not all groups based on economic interests necessarily constitute social classes" (Goldmann, 1964, p.17). The vast majority of members of house, techno and jungle micro-cultures have incomes less that the national average. Many of them are unemployed, and the majority see the culture to which they belong as opposed to ‘mainstream’ social groups.

There are elements of jungle culture that did not directly arise through opposition to the specific tactics employed by house and techno cultures, but through reference to previous musical cultures. One example is the use of the break beat, the usage of which can be traced back through black music cultures such as rap and hip-hop. The use of sampled break beats is central to jungle music, yet this central defining characteristic of the musical form is derived through reference to previous musical cultures, rather than through any opposition to house, techno or ‘mainstream’ cultures. For many this is the defining characteristic of jungle music, implying that, through its reference to, yet difference from, the earlier forms of funk, jazz, reggae, ragga, and hip-hop, it is simultaneously both black and British. The use of the break beat is all the more powerful because it is ‘black’, yet its ‘blackness’ is not defined as a polar opposite of ‘whiteness’, but as having characteristics that have developed in isolation from ‘whiteness’. In particular jungle emphasises that the break beat can be traced through a whole hidden history of black music. This is further emphasised by post-jungle’s current hip-hop aesthetic, where jungle has hybridised with hip-hop to form the micro-genre ‘jump up’.

Jungle musically defines the urban experience for many young working-class black people in Britain. Jungle music is certainly, in Adorno’s terms, a commodity, yet it has cultural value and social resonance beyond its monetary value. It expresses a resistance to the poverty of the inner city. It does this purely through its musical structure, through the claustrophobic break beat drum patterns and percussive intensity;

Some interviewees have suggested that the speed of these changes (possibly allied to the speed that jungle always emphasised in the first place, highlighted by jungle’s 320 b.p.m. hi-hat) is due to jungle being produced by musicians who are completely immersed within the culture of jungle. As jungle’s parent culture of rave grew in the late 1980s, one way of obtaining ‘cutting-edge’ music was through the exchange of DJ tapes, usually recorded live at a rave and sold within days of being recorded. This enabled dance culture participants to obtain music that was only available to DJs, and formidable collections were built up by the most avid fans. The exchange of tapes was a means of maintaining status as a ‘fully paid up’ member of dance culture, rather than an interested outsider. If a person was able to provide a mix tape that another had not previously had access to, then their status, their (sub)cultural capital, was seen to increase. Within this process a parallel can be drawn with Bourdieu’s analysis of the exchange of gifts as maintaining prestige and confirming membership of a particular subsection of society. However, within contemporary dance culture the ‘macro role’ Bourdieu assigns to gift-exchange is reversed. Such generosity is seen as directly opposed to the rugged individualism of Thatcherite Britain, and to exchange tapes was to show that you were opposed to ‘the mainstream’ (see Bourdieu, 1977). In general, exchange of cheap and easily replenishable items, such as DJ tapes, bottles of water, chewing gum, T-shirts and inhalers⁷⁰ is another part of the ‘habitus’ of dance culture.

Connected to this phenomenon, the early 1990s saw the rise of the bedroom DJ. With the aid of two record decks and a ‘mixer’, participants in dance culture could produce their own DJ tapes to be circulated informally among their friends and to be sent to clubs in order to obtain paid DJ work. The late-1990s’ equivalent of the bedroom DJ is the bedroom producer, who purchases cheap sampling and sequencing equipment, presses up maybe 500 or 1000 copies from a D.A.T. tape onto twelve-inch vinyl and then sells these records to record shops, friends and DJs. The split between producer and consumer has broken down so that the three-way relationship described above between the production of music, the consumption of music, and recreational drug use is sped up. As suggested above, the widespread availability of skunk within Britain from May 1995 run concurrently with the development of a whole new micro-culture and musical sub-genre.

But "built-in obsolescence", combined with commercial co-option, has prevented dance culture’s latest generic additions from gaining more than a footnote in musical history. The speed of change within contemporary dance culture is accepted as necessary by its participants, but infuriates mainstream commentators, who accuse dance culture of ‘ephemerality’. It equally infuriates commercial forces, who, once they have co-opted and repackaged a youth cult, find that it is no longer credible. This pattern occurred with old-style rave culture, and occurred with jungle. Whilst these genres and micro-cultures remain popular, they have ceased to be credible. They have also ceased to be as innovative as they originally were. Generic jungle tracks, with their samples from The Winston’s Amen, Brother track (Winstons, 1967), are now seen as hackneyed and formulaic, and the search is now on for a new musical form, a form with a new symbiotic relationship to British youth.

In the first section of this chapter I introduced the reader to the suggestion that an analogy could be drawn between the medieval carnival and the dance floor within contemporary dance culture. In this section I introduced the reader to the notion of the dance floor as a ‘temporary’ or ‘relatively’ autonomous zone. In particular I examined the utopian subjectivities on offer on the contemporary dance floor, and how, despite the temporal limitations of the dance floor, participants were radicalised in the acceptance of these subjectivites. Extending my Bakhtinian analogy I talked about the dance floor as a place where social hierarchies are subverted, and where, in particular, traditional gender roles are rejected. This section therefore represented an extension of the first aim of this thesis, namely the countering of common-sense discourse’s suggestion that dance culture is apolitical and purely hedonistic. Dance culture’s subversion of social hierarchies and gender roles represent an important rejection of the current social order.

My use of Bakhtin in the first section of this chapter then led to an attempt to theorise the difference between a lived cultural practice and a media representation of that cultural practice. Here I suggested that an analogy could be drawn between Bakhtin’s descriptions of carnivalesque literature and televisual representations of the dance floor. The following section on structural homologies within dance culture took this as a starting point, but, rather than emphasising difference, began to look at the connections between the dance floor, televisual representations of the dance floor, and the audience for these representations. Whereas the first two sections of this chapter led to a reappraisal of Mikhail Bakhtin, this next section led to a reapplication of Lucien Goldmann’s work on structural homologies. A Goldmannian analysis, centred on an analysis of structural homologies based around the notion of repetition, shows us that the relationship between young people and television is not simply visible to the naked eye, but requires theoretical work. A Goldmannian analysis therefore suggests that the relationship between young people and television is far more complex than common-sense discourse suggests. In particular, this section suggested that structure has meaning, and that the repetition at the heart of contemporary dance music is also at the heart of contemporary dance culture, and represents a symbolic attempt on the part of contemporary dance culture to understand its place within late-capitalist society. In particular this section showed how Ecstasy is not used by participants within contemporary dance culture for purely hedonistic reasons, but is tied to the repetitive nature of both dance music and life within British society. The key point of this section was my suggestion that

In order to test and extend my Goldmannian analysis I then went on to examine the development of the musical sub-genre of jungle. In particular I showed how a change in musical structure was also reflected in a change of, in Goldmann’s terms, the "world vision" of those who ally themselves with the jungle scene. Here I suggested that there was not a single homology between the whole of contemporary dance culture, a specific drug, and one musical form, but that there were a range of structural homologies between micro-genres, micro-cultures and a variety of recreational drugs. Crucial to this section was Goldmann’s suggestion that "by structure, we mean the regularities which make it inevitable that a change in one part of a whole brings about certain complementary changes in the other parts so that an overall significance is preserved" (Goldmann, 1967, p.87). In particular I made the implicit suggestion that the study of the formation and collapse of structural homologies allows us to examine social relationships in a diachronic manner, something that was perceived as not possible by Paul Willis who, in the 1970s, first adapted the notion of structural homologies to examine the relationships between youth culture, music and drugs. In this section on jungle (and in the earlier section of this chapter named after the Flowered Up song Weekender), I showed how there appeared to be an on-going debate between micro-cultures and micro-genres as to the best ‘tactic’ to use in contemporary dance culture’s search for an explanation and exploration of the lives of its participants.

1.Chris Stanley prefers the term "wild zone" suggesting that

3.It should be acknowledged that, within Althusser’s essay ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ (see Althusser, 1969), the phrase ‘relative autonomy’ means ‘autonomous relative to’, rather than ‘more or less’ or ‘nearly’ autonomous. However this is complicated by Althusser’s insistence that cultural superstructures are determined by the economic base or infrastructure "in the last instance". It could be suggested that Althusser’s own position is contradictory, and that Althusser wants it both ways; he wants to give an independent determining power to the superstructures, as well as maintaining his materialist credentials. This internal contradiction is never resolved within Althusser’s work, and has been at the root of many of the battles between Althusserians and Marxists from other traditions (for example see Clarke et al, 1980).

4.An example of this is the continuing centrality within youth culture studies of Paul Willis’s research on school culture, which suggests that delinquency among school children fulfilled a central role in capitalism by providing continuing waves of unskilled manual workers (Willis, 1977).

5.By ‘mainstream nightclub’ I mean those clubs whose lineage can be traced back to the British discotheques of the 1960s and 1970s. The contemporary British dance club can be traced back no further than the acid house and rave movements of the late 1980s. Qualitative differences are too numerous to mention, but are succinctly described by contemporary dance culture as ‘mainstream’ and ‘underground’.

6.The Mass-Observation group of the 1930s were perhaps ahead of their time in noticing precursors to this contemporary shift; "the old element of sexual approach still exists in the dance, but the new form gives dancing a new meaning. The dance is a partial substitute for more intimate sex relations" (Cross, 1990, p.174).

7.Simon Reynolds puts forward the same view, but suggests that at its extremes, the asexual impulse of Ecstasy can lead to a misogynist homo-eroticism;

12.This is not to suggest that young people don’t enjoy watching such programmes. As Sarah Thornton suggests "youth subcultures aren’t ‘anti-television’... Music-orientated television programs which tie into club culture... have not accrued the connotations of Top of the Pops." (Thornton, 1994, p.180). Youth television’s representations of contemporary dance culture are enjoyable, but this does not necessarily mean that they are not ideological, that they are not part of a process that destroys the resistive politics of the contemporary dance floor.

13.For a general summary of this field, see Morley, 1992.

14.Although this quotation originally referred to a particular sub-section of dance culture, within a specific historical moment, Melechi’s analysis is still valid when used in an analysis of contemporary dance culture, of which acid house was the primary precursor.

15.My use of the phrase ‘communal body'‘ is related to Bakhtin’s body of "grotesque realism". I have chosen a different term to emphasise the shift in referent between the medieval carnival and the contemporary dance floor, but the basic functions and attributes remain the same. For example the following quotation can be easily adapted and used to describe the actions of the communal body of the contemporary dance floor:

17.As Clair Wills suggests "it appears a mostly compensatory gesture when critics enthuse about the ‘carnivalesque’ they find in the latest (post-)modernist novel. Surely they can’t really confuse reading a good book with the experience of carnival grounded in the collective activity of the people?" (Wills, 1989, p.130). Unfortunately this is precisely what Fiske does with his analysis of ‘carnivalesque’ television.

18.Barthes himself recognises that when the body becomes a sign or image it loses its radicalism and is subsumed within bourgeois ideology. Michael Moriarty’s reading of Barthes’ Mythologies acknowledges this, with Moriarty stating that "the body is particularly prone to mythical appropriation, for it can so easily appear as the natural basis of an (ideological) representation" (Moriarty, 1991, p.188).

19.Rietveld suggests that MDMA is a primary determinant in this process, stating that, "as an entactogenic drug, MDMA makes the skin subtly sensitive, creating a higher sense of tactility. This may affect the user’s sexual feelings, which in Freudian terms may best be described as being polymorphous, having returned to the mental state of an infant which can not yet speak" (Rietveld, 1998a, p.181, see also Rietveld, 1993).

20.Simon Reynolds would appear to agree, but suggests that pre-oedipal infancy is entirely jouissant, thereby implying that, come socialisation, it comes into conflict with cerebral plaisir:

22.This can be directly contrasted with the dance floor, where participants are active in the production of the dance floor ‘text’. Without a horde of dancers, the producer, the DJ, the promoter and everyone else are useless. Adam Brown expands upon this

Writing in 1955, Lucien Goldmann extended the analysis of homologous structures, suggesting that there are homologies between the form of literary works and the "world view" of the class or sub-class fraction in which the writer is situated. Writing in The Hidden God (Goldmann, 1964), Goldmann shows how there is a homologous relation between the position of the noblesse de la robe in seventeenth century French society and the "tragic vision" found in the works of Pascal and Racine (Goldmann, 1964). Goldmann extended this notion in Towards a Sociology of the Novel (Goldmann, 1975) where, borrowing from The Theory of the Novel by Georg Lukács (Lukács, 1971), Goldmann examined the notion of literary form, suggesting that the meaning of a text is found not necessarily in the content of that text, but in its form. However, there is not a simple homology between literary form and the social consciousness of a class or sub-class fraction, rather novelistic form is

24.In a sense, my criticism of Hartley also ties in with my criticism of subcultural theory. There are two possible conclusions to Hartley’s analysis. The first possible conclusion is that, by suggesting that the audience for BPM is an exclusive creation of televisual discourse, Hartley is guilty of homogenising that audience. As we saw in the previous footnote, Paul Willis is also guilty of this homogenisation by suggesting that "identity" is logically prior to culture. This is a form of essentialism that should be rejected, for the next step would be to ascribe attributes to the category of ‘youth’ that are prior to the people that instantiate them, and the culture that creates them. However, Willis does go some way to correcting this error in a later text, where he suggests that "popular music becomes one of the principal means by which young people define themselves" (Willis, 1990, p.69).

The second possible conclusion is that Hartley is implicitly criticising the aggressive targeting techniques in use within television institutions and the feeling of "being part of an audience" resulting from textual practices derived from them. Within this second scenario, Hartley is implying that these techniques are homogenising. Either of these conclusions suggests that the theoretical outlook of Hartley, or actions of television institutions themselves, lead to a homogeneity that simply does not exist. Subcultural theory within contemporary cultural studies would appear to do the same, in that it homogenises youth culture along class lines, and, at times, refuses to acknowledge the subtle differences within youth that cut across class differentials.

This has been highlighted by McRobbie in her critiques of subcultural theory. Within McRobbie’s analysis gender can be seen to cut across class lines (see McRobbie, 1993). However, I would suggest that both the class-based and gender-based cultures of previous generations have broken down, single spectacular subcultures have splintered into micro-cultures with their own distinctive patterns and activities, many of which can be collected under the ‘umbrella’ term of contemporary dance culture. Although the youth audience can be ‘labelled’ as a single entity, it is actually far from this, it is a diverse collection of micro-cultures. It is an acknowledgement of this splintering that prevents the homogenisation of differing cultural practices that other theoretical approaches have led to. In particular, we have seen what McRobbie terms "a rejection of the primacy of the youth and social class couplet that underpinned the development of ‘subcultural theory’" (McRobbie, 1994c, p.181).

25.Simon Potter confirms that the ‘youth’ element of BPM is discursive rather than empirical when he cites a letter from a Ted Gadsty, age 59, protesting at BPM being dropped from the schedules, with Gadsty stating "it’s my weekly regeneration" (Potter, 1995).

26.It is worth noting at this point that the author of a cultural text need not be aware of the meaning inherent within the text’s structure. Here the Goldmannian analysis is a direct reaction to Leninist and Zhdanovite emphases upon Tendenzliteratur (overtly political texts). Goldmann’s analysis is heavily indebted to his one-time tutor Georg Lukács, and is part of the tradition started by Engels’ analysis of realism and naturalism, where Engels suggests that the political intentions of an author are less important than the objective social content of the text itself, and, crucially, the writer might well be opposed to the social meaning derived from the structure of his or her text (see Jay, 1973, p.173, Laing, 1978, pp.12-59, Steiner, 1967, and Lukács, 1963). This ‘para-Marxist’ approach should be born in mind when reading the section entitled Adorno: Modernism, Music and Repetition later on in this chapter.

It is also worth noting that Goldmann can be used to reject any notions of individualism or individual authorship of textual forms. As Goldmann suggests, his description of the complex structural similarities between the novel and society "is obviously a particularly complex structure and it would be difficult to imagine that it could one day emerge simply from individual invention without any basis in the social life of the group" (Goldmann, 1975, p.6). Here Goldmann’s thesis predates the more fashionable claim by Roland Barthes concerning "the death of the author" (see Barthes, 1977, pp.142-148) by four years (Goldmann’s Towards a Sociology of the Novel was first published in 1964, whilst Barthes’ essay ‘The Death of the Author’ was first published in 1968).

27.Or as Tagg puts it; "[an] almost continually metronomic kick drum knocking out the crotchet pulse" (Tagg, 1994, p.214).

28.This track can be found on the compact disc bound within the cover of the British Library copy of this thesis.

29.For a polemical critique of the continual usage of this time signature from within contemporary dance culture see Thompson, 1995.

30.Tagg uses the phrase "rave" to refer to the style of dance music that his daughter has introduced to him, with Tagg citing The Stereo MC’s Everything (Sabres on Main Street Mix) (see Various Artists, 1993), Usura Open Your Mind (see Various Artists, 1994), Frequency?X Hearing Things (see Various Artists, 1990), Snap Exterminate (Endzeit 7") (see Various Artists, 1992), B.M.O. Mastermind (see Various Artists, 1993), and Capella U Got 2 Know (see Various Artists, 1993).

31.Hegel suggests that

This is not to suggest that "pure sensation" is not a goal of contemporary dance culture, indeed the idea of music making the dancer ‘rush’ is central to house and techno music. ‘Rushing’ itself is not a refusal of meaning, it is the opposite, it is the investing of meaning within a cultural practice. "Pure sensation" is a culturally constructed concept.

35.There is however one aspect of BPM that disrupts repetition. BPM’s slot in the ITV schedule was continually shifted from month to month, thereby making advance programming of one’s videocassette recorder based on the previous week’s time-slot a precarious activity. This can be put down to three broad factors. The first of these is the low cultural capital of contemporary dance culture; ITV Network Centre felt able to alter BPM’s slot in the schedule with no prior warning, making way for such ratings’ grabbers as American Gladiators and ITV Sport Classics. Secondly, the scheduling of BPM was completed within the market rather than the post-Reithian paradigm. The ITV network considered the needs of advertisers over the needs of the audience. Thirdly, the ITV Network remains unsure of the role of night-time television; it has yet to settle down into a stable format, and has yet to appeal to a stable definable audience, if such an audience exists.

36.Such a suggestion is not new; Jock Young suggested in 1971 that "drugtaking is almost ubiquitous in our society - the totally temperate individual is statistically the deviant; it is only the type and quantity of psychotropic drugs used which varies" (Young, 1997, p.71).

37.Sheila Whiteley points towards the austere modernist work of Terry Riley and Steve Reich as a precursor to contemporary dance music where "the constant reiteration of a harmonic/rhythmic cell induced a hypnotic effect" (Whiteley, 1997, p.129).

38.Simon Reynolds hints at this when he suggests that young people in Britain "‘like the music you can drug to’, the music that best intensifies the chemical’s effects" (Reynolds, 1997, p.107).

39.Rietveld, in her analysis of the British acid house movement, implicitly highlights a similar homology between a musical form and drug, where both are ‘used’ for purposes specific to the culture in hand; "the sense of community which can be found in American house records, fitted the idea of being pitched against a society which legislated against parties as well as the fact that people under the influence of the drug ecstasy wanted to be ‘nice’ to their fellow human beings" (Rietveld, 1998a, p.7). In a footnote to this statement Rietveld continues, suggesting that

41."Low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector" (Coupland, 1992, p.5). Although originally a term used to describe American youth, the publication of Coupland’s book in Britain in 1992 popularised the term here.

42.It could also be suggested that the musical structure of Weekender is, in itself, a critique of house music’s repetition. A sprawling fifteen minute epic, Weekender takes on board elements of rock and jazz, and is noticeably different from the ‘four-to-the-floor’ structure of most house and techno.

43.Compare my analysis of Weekender with Simon Reynold’s analysis of The Easybeats’ song Friday on my Mind which reached number six in the British singles chart in 1966.

45.To ‘eq’ a sound is to alter the relative strengths of different frequencies within that sound. Tim Oliver explains further;

47.Rietveld makes a similar same point when she posits an almost dialectical relation between drug, psychopharmacological effect and house music:

49.The exact piece Steyn quotes is worded as follows "Like rappers with nothing to say, I crush these idiots and throw them away, Doesn’t matter how fatter the wallet, I’d rather get it together, and splatter whatever egotistic mystics with macho poses. If you heat more plastic, you get Guns and Roses, Understand?" (see Steyn, 1990, p.14).

50.For a more detailed analysis of the ‘art versus technology’ argument see Frith, 1986. In the meantime it is worth comparing Steyn’s article with Adorno’s comments on the "cult of the matser violin", where Adorno suggests that the modern audience

51.For a more detailed, if outdated, examination of the role of the club DJ see Langlois, 1992. Rietveld also gives a compelling description of the role of the DJ in house scenes, and this certainly bares quotation in the context of this thesis:

53.Many DJs avoid using the often beat-less intros or outros of individual dance tracks, preferring to mix together a DJ set with little respite from the 4/4 kick drum. This DJing style is taken to the extremities of physical dexterity by Jeff Mills whose use of three record decks and rapid changes between records mean that he often plays an average of 60 records an hour, mixing together the aggressive eight or sixteen bar percussive peaks of specific records. A Jeff Mills DJ set has no beginning, middle or end, rather it is an intense celebration of the tribal metronomic 4/4 beat.

54.Herbert Marcuse, a colleague of Adorno at the Institute of Social Research, could be seen to disagree with Adorno:

56.There are two suggested etymological origins of the word ‘jungle’ in the context of contemporary dance culture. Firstly ‘junglist’ is Jamaican patois. Within this definition, Push and Bush suggest that a junglist is a resident of Trenchtown in Jamaica (Push and Bush, 1995, p.90). MC Navigator of the London pirate radio station Kool-FM has a similar story;

57.It is this origin that led to jungle’s frequent emphasis on the first two beats of the bar, the traditional waltz beat that characterises hip-hop, which can be contrasted with house and techno’s traditional march (four-to-the-floor) emphasis.

58.For a more detailed analysis of the formal characteristics of jungle see Noys, 1995. For a critical appraisal of hardcore see Reynolds, 1992.

59.Garage is a slicker, more traditionally ‘musical’ vocal form of house music that is predominantly American in origin.

60.For a brief history of the origins of jungle see Headon, 1994.

61.Gurning is a side-effect of Ecstasy whereby Ecstasy consumers’ facial muscles are contorted. During the early 1990s gurning was seen to be part of, to borrow the phrase that Bourdieu employs, the ‘habitus’ of the dance culture participant, in that is part of the grammar of actions that allows dance culture to differentiate between members and non-members (see Lechte, 1994, p.47 and Bourdieu, 1962). The usage of Bourdieu’s adaptation of Marcel Mauss’s concept of ‘habitus’ (see Lechte, 1994, p.25) is particularly suitable at this point, as Bourdieu’s initial usage of the phrase, and its attendant concept of ‘hexis’, were first used in the analysis of the role of dancing in Béarns, France examined in chapter 1 of this thesis.

62.Rietveld, in her ethnography of the Dutch house scene, describes the genesis of gabber culture within the Netherlands;

63.My italics.

64.At this point, it is worth noting how the language of a Goldmannian analysis and the language of ethnography are similar. For instance the following quotation is from the ethnographer of deviance James Henslin;

65.Whilst Noys’ prediction was correct, he cites a different reason to my interviewees;

66.Ambient jungle is characterised by its use of ‘natural’ sounds such as whale and bird song, whilst intelligent jungle makes more use of strings, either synthesised or sampled. However the intelligent and ambient prefixes are often interchangeable. This is at least partly due to the suggestion that the intelligent prefix is derogatory and/or racist due to its implicit suggestion that there are ‘unintelligent’ sub-genres such as ragga jungle. This debate is, to a certain degree, a re-run of the arguments around ‘intelligent techno’, although, unlike intelligent jungle, intelligent techno did (in a somewhat patronising manner) explicitly define itself against the perceived ‘low intelligence’ of hardcore rave music.

67.For a brief examination of drug usage within jungle culture see Saunders, 1995, pp.190-3.

68.Skunk is a particularly potent form of herbal cannabis, characterised by its strong odour. The consumption of skunk has been widespread in the liberal political climate of the Netherlands for a number of years, but its increased popularity in Britain can be traced to the arrival of sophisticated ‘hydroponic’ indoor growing systems that have meant that drug suppliers can gather a large crop from a relatively small initial investment (see Headon, 1995c).

69.Simon Reynolds takes a slightly different view, suggesting that cannabis use, combined with an increase in popularity of cocaine, led directly to the rise of the jungle genre itself: