—In a room or field with no agenda other than a 120 beat-per-minute pulse, a few thousand intimates could liberate ourselves from conventional closed-mindedness and aspiration-induced unconsciousness for long enough to touch something else. While we had many names for this 'other' - from the strange attractor to God herself - it all boiled down to experiencing ourselves and one another in a new way: as a collective, in motion, and evolving. Blindly but boldly, we would go where no man or woman had gone before - save, maybe, some indigenous tribe that didn't have the electronic gear to broadcast their findings, or the presses to provide a map point to others.
—Somewhere along the way, it seems, we lost the plot. Except for the few places around the world where rave is still brand new. the vast majority parties I've been to in the past several years have lacked the cohesive and unifying spirit that defined the 'movement' when it began. Whither the heart?
—I resisted even mentioning my suspicions for several years. How dare I? I remember so well the ex-60's who stood on the periphery of my own first raves, complaining that we were a mere carbon copy of the real drive for group consciousness that they had launched decades earlier. If the raves of the late 90's didn't meet up with my expectations for what a rave should be, I thought it best to keep my mouth shut. Everyone gets the party he or she needs, and who am I to tell them they're not doing it right?
—I withdrew and started a novel instead. The Ecstasy Club was to be an indication of the road home. I wanted to create characters so earnest in their efforts to forge a new template for our culture that they wouldn't fail the same way we had But the characters wrote another story. They showed me how such a scene can only implode when it doesn't have a clear sense of the values it hopes to impart.
—See, the beauty of the ecstatic experience, whether you're using Ecstasy (MDMA) or not, is the very freedom it offers from value systems. On E, everything is delightfully up for grabs. What distinguished the 90s Ecstasy kids from the 60s acid generation was just this. The hippies picked up signs and fought the war, their parents, and the system. The 'man' was seen as real, and someone who needed to be brought down. Eight the power. Make love not war.
—By the 1990s, and perhaps thanks in part to the efforts of the love generation, these enemies could no longer be held as real. In the United States, the president that most of us grew up with actually resigned his office in disgrace. In the UK, well, the monarchy had been deconstructed by Monty Python and then reassembled using bits of their own illicit phone conversations in the tabloid press. It seemed as if the establishment's faulty foundations would crumble under their own weight. Just turn up the bass a little to speed up the process.
—All we had to do is dance, and the rest would take care of itself. As we told ourselves with our music, everybody's free to feel good. We believed in the power of love, and cheered as watched everything from the Berlin Wall to apartheid topple in its wake.
—So much for letting us middle class white kids run the show.
—The problem with having no agenda is two-fold. First, you have no way to gauge your progress. Liberation of neither the soul nor the oppressed comes as surely as dawn does at the end of the party. We'd have these terrific times, and mean truly terrific times, but it wouldn't add up to much except an occasional knowing wink in the street from a kid who you saw at that great party last week. Second, and worse, you're open to the agendas of others. The scene can be co-opted.
—I understand why we strove for rave not to be about anything in particular. If it got too grounded in one or another brand of politics or religion, the scene would lose its healing levity. Besides, politics and social issues were all part of the fixed and needlessly heavy scene that had trapped our forefathers. None of the distinctions - right left, rich poor, black white, gay straight - were even real. The sooner we understood that, the better for all.
—Government cast itself as the enemy to our intentions, ill-defined though they were. The Criminal Justice Act in the UK and over-zealous police forces in the US made it clear to us that the people who make the laws were the most threatened by our dissolution of their arbitrary absolutes. Although we had a sense that it would diminish a certain something, we took our parties indoors to commercial venues. Who cares, I remember thinking, as long we have the music and the people? A few extra bucks to the police let us keep the right chemicals in the mix, and a few more to the club owners kept the power on through morning.
—But now we were becoming part of the system we had so successfully evaded for so long. When we were off the map, we could keep our bearings. Traveling three hours to a rave and having to spend the night in an open field forces an intentionality all its own. The trip requires a commitment, and the event itself is a tribute to pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
—Today, you can find something calling itself a rave almost every night of the week at a pub within walking distance. Some of these parties are taking place in the very same rooms where your parents went every Friday night after a long week of work to let off steam - with booze and boogie instead of tryptamines and Tricky. By current estimates, a million hits of E are consumed every weekend in the UK. If that's really true, then why is club culture so devoid of everything that E appeared to herald?
—For one, because E just doesn't work if you take it every week. Sure, the chemical has effect. But when taken in weekly closes, the empathic qualities quickly give way to simple stimulation, There's simply not enough serotonin in the brain to support this much induced bliss. The drug tends to act more like speed, provoking the same sorts of hooliganism that everyone else succumbs to on their weekend binges.
—More significantly, rave deteriorated because we allowed the movement to become part of business as usual- a weekend release, no different from the pub crawls that characterize the experience of any other worker who, given a break to blow off some steam, can go back to work on Monday morning without complaining.
—No, it wasn't entirely our fault. Even in America we were getting busted for throwing parties anywhere but in a sanctioned club. Mainstream culture did not have the apparatus for dealing with a non-commercial social phenomenon as big as rave was getting. But we are all to blame for failing to figure out exactly which parts of the rave experience were most important to bring indoors.
—Rave parties had been part of what could only be considered a gift economy. Collectives would form spontaneously collecting enough money to rent a sound system and print up some flyers. If there were extra cash from a successful event the money would go to pay for a few meals for the organizers and the rest towards the next party.
—While the cops and government officials hated the idea of kids doing drugs and making noise in abandoned spaces and remote fields, business hated it even more. The young people who should be buying alcohol, top-forty records, and paying for admittance to the disco were instead participating in an alternative economy - dropping psychedelics, exchanging remix tapes, and driving to the country.
—When rave became a club event, it merged this gift economy with the business of nightclubbing - and this is where it all went bad. We all know the story by now Clubs make money selling drinks, but kids at a rave ingest E not booze. The solution? Sell bottled water to the dehydrated trippers. To insure this lucrative business, club owners began confiscating any water that the kids brought themselves and shutting off the water in the bathroom. Thus, the first vastly publicized deaths due to 'ecstasy overdose', which were really just cases of simple dehydration. The kids weren't killed by the drugs, but by the water sellers.