Chapter 7: Conclusion

This thesis began with a statement concerning aims and objectives. In the conclusion of this thesis I therefore wish to examine the extent to which my aims have been pursued and achieved.

Chapter 1 was very tightly focused upon setting out the extent to which contemporary dance culture is political. Here I was moving towards the achievement of the first aim of this thesis, namely the countering of common-sense discourse on the nature of contemporary dance culture. Common-sense discourse views contemporary dance culture as a culture consisting of little more than reckless hedonism, feckless consumerism, and cultural texts of little or no aesthetic worth. In chapter 1 I examined campaigns and actions against the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 to counter the suggestion that dance culture was apolitical. I argued that, whilst it could be suggested that acid house in the late 1980s had elements of apoliticism, campaigns against parliamentary legislation meant that, in the 1990s, contemporary dance culture had become politicised. This process was continued in the following section where we saw how the Luton-based collective Exodus had developed a stance at least partially derived from anarcho-libertarian politics, irrespective of campaigns against parliamentary legislation.

Whilst the first two sections of chapter 1 showed us how contemporary dance culture is political, the next section on the Liverpool ‘superclub’ Cream showed us that, whilst contemporary dance culture is not ‘anti-commercial’, it does contain a form of commercialism that is different from the commercialism found within other areas of British capitalism. This section on Cream showed how participants in contemporary dance culture do not merely spend their money on whatever capitalist corporations tell them to spend their money on (common-sense discourse views dance culture participants as easily manipulated ‘cultural dupes’), but are aesthetically discriminating in the cultural decisions that they make. This theme was continued in chapter 6 where we saw at first hand how dance culture participants ‘read’ texts that represent their culture. Crucial to the section on Cream in chapter 1 was my suggestion that there are

elements of contemporary dance culture that, whilst not directly oppositional to the state, are nevertheless in opposition to the unfettered workings of the free market, and therefore in opposition to dominant social discourses concerning how society functions. Tied to this notion of a ‘radical consumerism’ was my suggestion that the consumption of Ecstasy is also perceived by dance culture participants to be a radical and political act. Here I showed the extent to which dance culture participants opposed the continuing criminalisation and demonisation of their drug use, and showed how dance culture participants described their drug use in terms of a rejection of common-sense values.

In the following section I suggested that, connected to the consumption of Ecstasy in dance culture, was an attempt by dance culture participants to disappear from the gaze of regulating authorities such as the police. Following this, my examination of the discourse of a ‘refusal of language’ within contemporary dance culture (also connected to Ecstasy use) suggested that one consequence of the relative lack of lyrics within contemporary dance music was an opposition to the power structures embedded within written and spoken language. Central to this section was my suggestion that "the lack of lyrics within dance music also ties in with the politically resistant nature of the Ecstasy experience, and Ecstasy users’ inability to translate their (communal) experiences into an English language which emphasises the bourgeois subject".

The penultimate section of chapter 1 drew a comparison between a specific rural French culture as described by Pierre Bourdieu and contemporary dance culture. In doing so I attempted "to show how the politicisation of dance culture is derived from contradictions in the structural location of young people in the late 1990s". In this section I emphasised the suggestion that it was the infrastructural location of contemporary dance culture that led dance culture participants to hold, express, and act upon, political beliefs. In particular I suggested that "the politicisation of contemporary dance culture is a logical reaction to the socio-economic conditions that young people find themselves in".

In the conclusion of chapter 1 I drew upon deviancy theory to both prepare the ground for the following chapter, and to move towards the completion of the ‘secondary aim’ of this thesis, which was to examine methodological and theoretical positions that have traditionally been sidelined by contemporary cultural studies. Crucial to this concluding section was my suggestion that

common-sense discourse claims that contemporary dance culture is purely hedonistic, and demonises it for its drug use. A return to deviancy theory acknowledges that if common-sense discourse labels a societal sub-group as ‘deviant’ then that sub-group is likely to form a culture based around the difference between their analysis of what they do and the analysis of the rest of society. This allows us to avoid an essentialism that suggests that certain acts are inherently deviant, and allows us to move towards a position where acts are only deviant because ‘labelling’ institutions such as print media and parliament define them as such. Having shown how contemporary dance culture is political in chapter 1, chapter 2 saw the provision of a critique of contemporary cultural studies’ analyses of youth culture. Having made the suggestion in chapter 1 that contemporary dance culture is a significant social development, chapter 2 saw an analysis of why contemporary cultural studies has chosen to ignore this development. In doing so I addressed the second aim of this thesis, the countering of contemporary cultural studies’ discourse on contemporary dance culture. In particular I provided an extended critique of the work that was produced in the 1970s at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Here I provided a critique of the suggestion that the youth cultures of the 1970s were "not political enough" or not "genuinely political". Broadening my analysis, I then examined the extent to which youth culture is viewed by academia as being either exclusively consumerist or exclusively rebellious.

Having outlined the extent to which contemporary cultural studies provided a Marxist metanarrative that sought to ‘explain’ youth culture, I then moved on to examine the extent to which this metanarrative collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. This collapse meant that contemporary cultural studies was particularly ill-equipped to analyse the development of youth culture in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular I suggested that, within the 1970s,

contemporary cultural studies saw youth culture as young people’s way of making sense of their position in society. What happened when young people couldn’t make sense of their structural location, or what happened when young people’s structural situation was ‘senseless’, was not specifically dealt with by contemporary cultural studies... [This] is precisely what has occurred with the rise of dance culture. The contradictions in British society in the 1980s were too profound to be solved, either through culture or through contemporary cultural studies’ mythical construction of "genuinely political" action. Having provided a critique of contemporary cultural studies’ discourse on contemporary dance culture (the second aim of this thesis), chapter 3 saw a shift of referent, with a move towards the provision of a critique of televisual discourse on contemporary dance culture. The start of this chapter contextualised the production of televisual representations of contemporary dance culture within the genre of youth television. Having examined the formation and development of youth television, I then looked more closely at the production of BPM, the only sustained attempt on the part of the British television industry to represent contemporary dance culture. In particular I examined two discourses that were instrumental in the commissioning and production of BPM; the discourse of post-Reithian public service, and the discourse of free-market liberalism. In the penultimate and final sections of this chapter I examined how, at times, these discourse competed with each other, and how the stronger discourse of free-market liberalism led the ITV network to ‘decommission’ BPM in order to make way for a roster of light entertainment and sport programmes.

Having successfully provided a critique of the two discourses of post-Reithian public service and free-market liberalism, chapter 4 saw a shift of analysis away from the commissioning and production of televisual representations of dance culture towards an analysis of texts themselves. In the introduction to this chapter I suggested that I wished to make a comparison between television’s representations of the contemporary dance floor and literary representations of the medieval carnival. Before I could complete this process I examined the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, and, using Bakhtin’s work, I drew a comparison between the contemporary dance floor and the medieval carnival, emphasising the destruction of social hierarchies in both. Having compared these two sets of cultural practices, I then went on to examine the extent to which there are similarities in the textual representations of these practices. In particular I made the point that both ‘carnivalesque’ literature and televisual representations of the dance floor reassert the primacy of ‘the gaze’, and that the television industry ‘decarnivalises’ contemporary dance culture, partially destroying its radicalism and its anti-establishment politics. This section was therefore central to the achievement of the third aim of this thesis, the countering of televisual discourse on contemporary dance culture.

The two sections on Bakhtin at the start of chapter 4 also saw the reintroduction of a theorist often sidelined or misused by contemporary cultural studies (within the second section of this chapter I was particularly critical of John Fiske’s misuse of Bakhtin’s work). The following section continued this work in the reintroduction of analyses derived from the work of Lucien Goldmann. In particular this section saw how Goldmann’s work on homological structures (work that was also adapted by Paul Willis in the 1970s) is of particular use in examining the relationships between contemporary dance culture and its televisual representations. Here we saw this thesis move away from achieving its third aim towards the achievement of its fourth and final aim, which was to counter common-sense discourse on the relationship between young people and television. Common-sense discourse suggests that young people uncritically accept anything shown on television, and suggests that televisual representations of the dance floor are mindless ‘pap’ programmed by the television industry to manipulate and exploit young people. Chapter 3 showed how the producers of BPM were attempting to both inform and educate their viewers (rather than merely package them and ‘sell them’ to advertisers), whilst the section in chapter 4 entitled ‘Dance Culture, Music and Television: A Goldmannian Analysis’ showed how television programmes such as BPM are not simplistic representations of a simplistic culture, but have a very complex relationship to the culture that they represent. The following section extended this analysis, showing how the use of Ecstasy within contemporary dance culture further complicated the picture. Within the Goldmannian analyses offered in these sections I drew the attention of the reader to a key facet of contemporary dance culture, that it foregrounds and recognises the inherently repetitive nature of modern daily life, and that this repetition is homologously present in the form of house and techno musics, and in the form of the Ecstasy experience.

Continuing this analysis of how repetition is foregrounded in contemporary dance culture and contemporary dance music, the section entitled ‘The Culture of the Weekender’ saw how the dance/rock crossover group Flowered Up provided an ‘auto-critique’ of the repetitive nature of contemporary dance culture in their track entitled Weekender. This section then connected contemporary dance culture and its televisual representations with the suggestion that

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. Common-sense discourse suggests that television programmes such as BPM are banal representations of a banal culture. My Goldmannian analysis showed how this is a somewhat simplistic view.

The next section broadened the formalist definition of homology to include content and style. Here I pointed to the psychedelic nature of the dance floor experience and the psychedelic nature of BPM. Again I drew a connection to the experiences offered by the recreational drug Ecstasy. This section concluded with the assertion that "here we have another facet to the homologous relationship between dance culture, recreational drug, and televisual representation: they are all psychedelic".

Continuing in my attempt to address the secondary aim of this thesis (the re-application of theoretical and methodological positions previously sidelined or misused by contemporary cultural studies) our attentions turned to the work of the Institute of Social Research (the Frankfurt School), and, in particular, the work of Theodor Adorno. In the following two sections I attempted to explain what Adorno’s analysis of the repetition found within contemporary dance culture might be.

The aim of the section entitled ‘Interlude; An ‘Adornoesque’ example of journalistic discourse’ was to give the reader a journalistic example of the kind of cultural elitism often associated with Adorno and his colleagues. In the following section I came to the somewhat surprising conclusion that Adorno’s work could be used to praise, rather than criticise, contemporary dance culture, particularly when considering contemporary dance music’s foregrounding of repetition.

Having completed my critical appraisal of dance culture’s repetitive aesthetic, I then went on to examine one sub-genre of contemporary dance music that takes an entirely different approach to the representation of the everyday lives of its adherents. As we saw in this section the dance music genre of jungle eschews the ‘four-to-the-floor’ repetitive beat of house and techno, and uses digitally manipulated break beats, along with dissonant chords, to highlight the speed and ‘darkness’ of urban and suburban life. The conclusion of this section was that house, techno and jungle musics do express social reality, albeit in different ways. Whereas house and techno fans attempt to ‘escape’ from the repetition of everyday life through subsuming themselves within the communality of the Ecstasy-fuelled dance floor, jungle fans prefer to listen to the stark (and dark) rhythms of drum and bass which force the listener to "face up to reality". Again, I quoted Adorno approvingly, in particular his suggestion that

music will be better, the more deeply it is able to express - in the antinomies of its own formal language - the exigency of the social situation and to call for change through the coded language of suffering. It is not for music to stare in helpless horror at society. It fulfils its social function more precisely when it presents social problems through its own material and according to its own formal laws - problems which music contains within itself in the innermost cells of its technique (Adorno, 1978b, p.130). Chapter 5 continued in the pursuit of the achievement of the fourth aim of this thesis. In this chapter we saw the development of a research method for the examination of what dance culture participants thought of televisual representations of the dance floor. In particular I looked at ethnographic methodology to see how it highlighted various difficulties in the obtaining of ethnographic data. In particular I looked at the speed of change within contemporary dance culture, and the extent to which this speed of change meant that a research method specific to this thesis had to be developed. I also looked at issues around ‘passivity’, and how the cultural activity of ‘chilling out’ could be related to debates concerning passivity and femininity in ethnographic methodology. I also addressed the notion of oppositionality and decided that, whilst many previous studies had used Stuart Hall’s reformulation of Frank Parkin’s notions of "preferred", "negotiated" and "oppositional" readings, to do so in the context of a television programme that represented a deviant ‘oppositional’ culture would be erroneous.

Chapter 5 concluded with an examination of the ethical concerns that my proposed audience research highlighted, and an examination (and consequent rejection) of current ethnographic language. Having rejected the language and ethics of traditional ethnography, I renamed my audience research ‘ethnoanalysis’, and outlined the specific method that I employed when gathering the material found in chapter 6.

In chapter 6 I presented data from eleven "viewing sessions". Within these viewing sessions we could see a split developing between the readings of those who were dedicated participants in contemporary dance culture, and those who were not. It became apparent that members of the first category paid far more attention to the soundtrack than those in the later category, who placed more importance on the visual image. I suggested that this was connected to the centrality of music within contemporary dance culture, the relative unimportance of visual texts, and the attempt to escape from ‘the gaze’ examined in previous chapters. In particular I suggested that "many dance culture participants take joy in subverting the specular hierarchy", and that my interviewees roundly criticised the gendered camera work of BPM.

Throughout chapter 6 my interviewees and I criticised BPM. In particular I suggested that its representational technique prevented it from doing what it set out to achieve; namely to provide a ‘running commentary’ on contemporary dance culture, keeping up to date with trends, and informing and educating participants and non-participants alike.

Having made this critical point, I would say that, at times, BPM did its best. It was staffed by people with a genuine love of dance culture, and a genuine awareness of the pernicious influence of multinational music corporations and an increasingly advertiser-oriented ITV network. This was all well and good, but the task that BPM set itself was impossible. In my view BPM’s emphasis on the representation of real dance floors, combined with its heavy reliance on promotional videos provided by multinational record companies, meant that it was destined to be shunned by much of contemporary dance culture, despite its neo-Reithian ethos. Its gendered dance floor footage should also be strongly criticised. It exploited those who were often unaware of the cameras’ presence, and presumably the presence of cameras in the club spoilt the untranslatable ‘vibe’ so evident in the best British dance clubs¹.

Having made these criticisms of BPM, I do not wish to give the impression that television can never capture the energy, euphoria and politics of contemporary dance culture. The question should not be whether any visual text is a ‘true’ representation of contemporary dance culture (all visual texts are representations, all visual texts are constructions), but whether it is fair, decent, informative, reasonable, accurate and of aesthetic worth. At times BPM was not. There are ways of achieving these aims, and in closing this concluding chapter I wish to cite the example of a representation of contemporary dance culture that does capture the pleasures, pains and personal politics of contemporary dance culture. To a certain extent, these concluding thoughts do modify my ‘verdict’ on contemporary dance culture and its televisual representations. Having defended contemporary dance culture from pernicious attacks from common-sense discourses, I now feel able to express my worries concerning contemporary dance culture. I want to achieve this through a critical appraisal of the promotional video/short film of the Flowered Up track Weekender. In doing so I hope to show that contemporary dance culture is now strong enough to allow a degree of internal political debate concerning its future development. In a sense Flowered Up tried to ‘kick start’ this debate in 1992, whilst, in the mid 1990s, this self-critique was at least partially taken up by jungle.

Written and directed by Wiz, the promotional video/short film for the Flowered Up track Weekender is so painfully evocative of dance culture that it continues to provide me with an insight into why young people feel so powerfully about the particular youth culture that this thesis focuses upon. I have shown the video to numerous dance culture participants who say that it precisely captures the euphoria of contemporary dance culture, whilst also evoking the painful emotions that dance culture participants feel when the Saturday night buzz is fading, and thoughts return to weekday toils.

There are a variety of reasons why Wiz’s Weekender is such a success. Firstly, running at 18 minutes and 20 seconds, the form of Weekender is neither simply promotional video nor short film, but somewhere in-between. In openly discussing drug use it was always destined to fail as a promotional video for a record, and has never been shown on terrestrial British television. MTV have shown edited highlights, but their sanitised version is but a mere shadow of the original. Weekender was not commercially successful as a short film either. As independent cinemas continued to shut down in the early 1990s (there are now none in Liverpool), and standard Hollywood fare became ubiquitous throughout Britain, the cinematic outlets for Weekender (originally shot on film) proved to be extremely limited (especially when considering the predominantly non-realist avant-garde nature of much British short film-making in the 1990s). Stripped of an overtly commercial imperative, those involved in the production of Weekender could delve deeply into their collective consciousness in their attempt to represent dance culture.

Part of the success of Weekender is also due to it making no attempt at contemporaneity, but preferring to concentrate on the endless pursuit of unadulterated pleasure that has characterised so many youth cultures since the birth of the teenager in the late 1950s. A great deal of the success of Weekender is also due to the creative genius of Wiz, whose original screenplay and directoral skills mean that Weekender is both evocative of a particular scene (the semi-legal London warehouse scene of 1992), yet timeless and pan-national. Wiz’s vision was ably interpreted by lighting cameraman Tim Maurice Jones, whose panoramic shots of the London skyline, and detail of urban decay, are stunning in their simplicity and elegance. In particular Wiz and Jones successfully captured the delightfully untutored acting of Flowered Up, who appear as extras throughout the film.

Wiz and Jones also manage to represent contemporary dance culture’s child-like sexuality through the sexually powerful, yet entirely innocent and fleeting, liaison between the lead character "Little Joe", played by Lee Whitlock, and "The E Queen", played by Anna Haigh. In this central scene Wiz resists the temptation to resort to a cheapened sexism so predominant in the vast majority of other visual representations of dance culture. An honourable mention should also go to the under-played naturalistic acting of Lee Whitlock.

Much of the creative success of the Weekender video is also due to the quality of the original Flowered Up soundtrack, a sprawling twelve minute epic described by Bruce Gray in a personal e-mail correspondence as "untouchable..., mercurial, a defining moment for the chemical generation, a Koh-i-noor diamond, a one-off, an MDMA in a world of MDA’s" (Gray, 1997, n.p.).

Weekender starts with the character of Little Joe simultaneously rolling a large cannabis joint and explaining to his work colleague, a ‘non-participant’, why he loves dance culture. A quotation of this opening scene seems a fitting conclusion to this final chapter, capturing as it does the central paradox of contemporary dance culture.

Dance culture participants take part in a culture that provides a joyous release from the weekday grind, yet is so emotional and physically exhausting that it makes Monday to Friday even more painful. Dance culture participants take part in a utopian micro-culture that, because it is situated in a capitalist macro-culture, costs more than it is worth (a basic capitalist principle), thereby making a return to the employment grindstone all the more necessary. Dance culture participants take drugs that, whilst providing a few hours’ relief, a few hours away from their frequently humdrum lives, leave them open to both physical and emotional illness. Dance culture participants take part in a brief ritual of communality before returning to the individualist norm. Dance culture participants love dance culture so much that they would willingly immerse themselves in it 24 hours a day, yet the structure of contemporary capitalism makes this all but impossible except for the lucky few. Dance culture participants take part in activities that are so powerful they find it impossible to put them into words, they find it impossible to explain to ‘the outside world’ why they feel so special².

Mate: You ain’t smoking that now are you?

Little Joe: Nah, that’s for later. I’m getting well loved up this weekend mate!

Mate: You seem to do that every weekend.

Little Joe: Yeah but look, when I’m out with my mates, and we’re all on one, buzzing off our nuts, all together, it feels like we could, like we could

Mate (interrupting): What? That you know it all. You’re a bit special?

Little Joe: Nah. Well sometimes yeah. No yeah, yeah, definitely, it feels like we could do fucking anything, know what I mean?

Mate: Yeah I used to think that when I was your age. But I’m still cleaning bloody windows...(Wiz, 1992).

Chapter 7 Footnotes

1.There were often times in BPM when you could see people reacting in a negative manner to the presence of the camera, waving the camera away, or quickly grimacing and turning around.

2.It should come as no surprise that Weekender consciously pastiches that other great visual representation of the weekender lifestyle, the film Quadrophenia. Like Quadrophenia, Weekender is successful because it captures the double-bind of the working-class hedonist, desperate for the weekend thrill, and desperately bored with the weekday job that both finances Friday and Saturday night, yet contrasts with it in such a painful manner. As suggested in the Literature Review of this thesis, the mod culture that Quadrophenia represents can be seen as an early prototype for contemporary dance culture.