Putting the soul in the machine
It was 1987, just one year out from the second summer of love, when techno and house music—pioneered by Black artists in Detroit and Chicago—traveled across the pond to the UK, by way of Ibiza, and landed in London.
Acid house, as the music was called, took over the city’s underground scene. It was high-octane and hypnotic and it got the kids out to empty warehouses, ready to roll (on ecstasy, no less) at gatherings called raves. The trend sparked a moral panic among parents, the police, and policymakers. For the youth generation, it marked a revolution.
Now, in the 2020s, we’ve entered a rave renaissance. Unlicensed raves popped up in cities in the UK, US, and Europe during the pandemic—gatherings as reckless as they were revealing of what people craved during isolation.
It’s more than a dance, especially for marginalized and queer communities. Sure, there are techbros who’ve co-opted raves (e.g., Burning Man), and it’s become just as commercialized and gentrified as any other music genre (e.g., festivals like Tomorrowland). But for some, a rave is not an Instagrammable night out, but a form of spiritual communion, transcendance, and even liberation.
Before we wade into the crush, let’s set the record straight: A rave is a rave and a party is a party, and when the partiers are heading to bed, the ravers are probably just heading out the door. If it’s creeping towards 2am, the second set will be on soon, and the beat will be getting heavy. Grab your shades, it’s time to rave.
Origins of the term
Where did the word “rave” come from?
A clipping from a March 29, 1959 edition of a Brighton newspaper reading “Necking unlimited in cellar coffee bars… that’s RAVER TOWN.”
In the 1950s and 60s, the word “rave” was used to describe the “wild bohemian parties” of London’s Beatniks, as Helen Evans wrote in her dissertation “Out of sight, out of mind: An analysis of rave culture.” But the term was also used more generally across the UK during those decades to describe young people’s rowdy, jazz-fueled gatherings. (Cue movies like Beat Girl (1960) depicting dance parties in church crypts and candlelit caves.)
The word was revived again in the late 1980s with the birth of British rave culture, which took off later, as legend goes, in a fitness center on Southwark Street in London after house DJ Danny Rampling and his friends founded the club SHOOM. “Rave” may have come from the Jamaican Patois word for a party, Evans surmises in her paper. Given the large Caribbean diaspora in the UK, it is possible that the word could have spread from there into the more common vernacular.
A Trans-Atlantic tale
How techno got its beat
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. The sound of techno, an iconic style of electronic dance music (EDM) often played at raves, is like a machine. The similarity is no accident. The music’s origins are inextricably tied to the sound of the assembly line, the rise and fall of America’s Rust Belt, and technological visions of the future. No wonder then that the musical style was born in the Motor City—a.k.a. Detroit—in the 1980s, a period of economic recession for the once thriving industrial hub.
“Techno… derives its central premise from the act of African Americans dreaming of a future beyond the structural failings of a postindustrial collapse in the late twentieth century,” wrote media theorist DeForrest Brown Jr.
It was in that fallow time for the city that techno was created by three Black musicians known as “The Belleville Three.” Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson met in high school and bonded over their love of music and interest in instruments like electronic synths, sequencers, and drum machines. They took inspiration from the likes of Germany’s electronic music group Kraftwerk and Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO for short), who trailblazed beep-y, mechanical, and experimental tracks in the 1970s.
The Detroit bunch would all go on to make music of their own, creating a new aural vision that would come to be called techno. Atkins and Richard Davis, a fellow Detroiter, founded the group Cybotron in 1980, whose debut “Alleys of Your Mind” became a defining sound for the genre.
May was famously quoted as saying: “The music is just like Detroit, a complete mistake, it’s like George Clinton and Kraftwerk are stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.”
Quotable
“Will the members of the Midnight Funk Association please rise. Please go to your porch light and turn it on for the next hour to show us your solidarity. If you’re in your car, please honk your horn and flash your lights, wherever you are. […] This session of the International Midnight Funk Association is being called to order, Electrifying Mojo presiding. May the funk be with you, always.” —The daily introduction on the The Electrifying Mojo, a radio show hosted by Charles Johnson in Michigan from the 1970s to the 1990s, which helped to popularize techno
Worth noting
Raves as a queer space
Headliners at most EDM festivals these days tend to be straight, cisgendered white men like Skrillex or David Guetta. But make no mistake, raves were born out of Black and queer spaces. They also, culturally, have been a space for self-expression, freedom, and exploration for members of the LGBTQ+ community. Not only techno, but also house music—a musical style originating in Chicago’s queer and Black communities—became sonic safe havens for queer people, a kind of constructed, futuristic utopia where people could exist as they never could in mainstream society.
As McKenzie Wark, a professor at The New School, transwoman, and author of Raving, wrote for Frieze: “When I came out as trans, and began dancing again, the sound that captured me was techno… Dancing always made me feel more at home in my own body, even though a lot of dance music seems made for bodies other than mine. […] When it’s good, techno doesn’t sound like it’s made for any human body at all. It sounds like it’s made for aliens. Since all human bodies are alien in that sound, I feel as at home in it as anyone else.”
Pop quiz
Which of the following is NOT the name of a rave circuit DJ?
A. 808Donkey
B. Interplanetary Criminal
C. 999999999
D. Wet Hand Complex
Untz your way to the bottom of this email to find the answer.
Fun fact!
One of the longest raves in recorded history took place 500 years ago in the French city of Strasbourg. During the dancing plague of 1518 people grooved nonstop for three months. But it wasn’t because they were letting loose. One theory is that a superstition around Saint Vitus, known to punish sinners with dancing, may have triggered mass hysteria. Another is that consuming moldy rye bread may have had psychedelic effects on the city’s citizens.
Take me down this 🐰 hole!
Not everyone is a fan of rave music, but before you knock it, give this playlist a listen. The mix of full sets and single tracks below sample different genres under the EDM umbrella, from trance to industrial to house to disco. Headphones are recommended (the more bass the better).
🎧 Chimo Bayo – Asi Me Gusta A Mi
🎧 SPFDJ – Boiler Room set
🎧 HI-LO x Space 92 – Mercury
🎧 Peligre – All Gas No Brakes
🎧 Jyoty – Boiler Room set
🎧 Phase Fatale – Reverse fall
🎧 Jayda G, Ruby Savage – Mixmag set
🎧 Tzusing – 日出東方 唯我不敗
🎧 Folamour – Cercle set
🎧 Chloé Robinson, DJ ADHD – Steamin
🎧 Fred again – Boiler Room set
Poll
Are you thinking of heading to a rave?
- Naw, I’ll get those extra hours of sleep
- My interest has been piqued
- See you there 😎
Let us know if we should send you an invite.
💬 Let’s talk!
In last week’s poll about Swedish ivy, 67% of you said you’d gift a peace lily if you were a diplomatic ambassador, while 19% of you said you’d opt for a red chrysanthemum, to offer co-conspiracy. Just 14% of you would bring a gladiolus to project power. Special shout out to all the readers who sent photos of their own thriving Swedish ivy plants!
🐤 X this!
🤔 What did you think of today’s email?
💡 What should we obsess over next?
Today’s email was written by Julia Malleck (probably at a rave when not at a writing desk) and edited by Morgan Haefner (had a hard time keeping this email from going on for eight hours).
The correct answer is D., Wet Hand Complex—this name is definitely up for grabs.