EDGE Philadelphia

Rave is pretty much dead in the United States, and it’s not much better off elsewhere. Tammy L. Anderson tells us why from a sociological perspective in Rave Culture, a study of how the rave scene peaked, changed, and subsided in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

The book is a sociological study, complete with theories, conclusions, graphs, and references to other scholarly works. But it’s also a look inside the workings of the "electronic dance music," or EDM, scene, of which rave is a subset.

Moreover, the book is entertaining, as far as scientific studies go. (Since when did terms like "rolling," slang for tripping on ecstasy, enter the scientific lexicon?)

As any ethnographer or sociologist does, Anderson conducts field work in the course of her investigation. This means that Anderson, a self-professed fan of the EDM scene, gets to party at big music events in Philadelphia and elsewhere. But even as she’s dancing, Anderson is watching, assessing, quantifying, and putting things together. Dance has many social applications: it brings strangers together, sweeping away barriers and even allowing for shared experience between individuals who do not speak the same language or come from the same cultural context.

Where EDM and other scenes begin to diverge is in the purpose of the crowd, and this is where Anderson finds the meat of her thesis. Rave started out as a place where people could congregate and dance with a shared set of values--defined as PLUR, "Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect"--even though they might have been socially awkward in other settings. Rave also attracts the musically interested and the technologically skilled, Anderson observes, meaning that the DJs who provide EDM music can be appreciated for their technical prowess as much as for their aesthetic taste and their artistry at taking ravers on a musical "journey" through skillful music mixes.

But rave, Anderson notes, is different from other big dance scenes. Whereas concerts and dance clubs might be sexually charged and brimming with alcohol, rave tends to be asexual and driven more by drugs: courtship is not the point--rather, a deep (if temporary) sense of spiritual communion seems to motivate ravers.

Or used to, at any rate. Anderson catalogues the participants in the EDM scene, showing how the ideology of the core loyalists transforms into (or resists) commercial opportunity, with mainstream moral panic and the influence of encroaching outsiders into the scene for reasons of their own (reasons as simple as raves continuing on later than most commercial dance venues, leading to a "spillover" effect) tend to dilute and transform. PLUR thus changes into commercial venture; DJs abandon the democratic status that once put personality second to music, and superstars emerge, requiring better business management and a relocation to legal venues, complete with licensing.

That means that younger people--those under 21--were left out of the rave scene as it relocated from remote outdoor locations or out of the way warehouses and into legitimate night spots. As weekends of drug use took their toll and the PLUR ethos wore thin, ravers began to "age out" of the scene, Anderson argues, and younger people didn’t have a chance to hear the music or participate in the culture: they ended up gravitating toward hip-hop or other music scenes, such as the newly emergent "mashup" scene.

For various reasons, Anderson documents, rave abroad, particularly in England, has survived more successfully. For one thing, clubbing is open to younger people than in the U.S.; for another, the use of recreational drugs (which Americans, spurred by the media, automatically associate with raves) is more socially acceptable.

One relic of rave that has endured in America (but is also seemingly fading) is the gay circuit of big parties. As Anderson, who is openly gay herself, notes, circuit parties, for all their economic success, have accrued an aura of danger because they are attended by gay men and have a (more or less justifiable) notoriety for drug use and sexual promiscuity. Some of the same forces that led to rave’s demise stateside are also eroding the circuit party scene: Anderson estimates at one point that circuit party attendees mostly range from their 30s to their 60s, with younger participants not much in evidence. In another decade or so, that last vestige of rave may also have stalled or transformed into something new.

Anderson’s larger questions concern group identity and the ways in which individuals fit in. Others have examined the dynamics of musical scenes; Anderson makes the subject feel applicable to last night’s all-night party.

by Tammy L. Anderson

Publisher: Temple University Press. Publication Date: June 13, 2009. Pages: 231. Price: $25.95. Format: trade paperback original. ISBN 978-1-592-139-347