Article
Awe and wonder
Culture
Digital
Music
5 min read

The rave: a last bastion of hope?

Was the Brat summer the last chance for rave culture?
Ravers pose together for a selfie.
The anniversary party.
Rhythm Section.

The Rave is a site for communal epiphany, a burst of divine revelation. Illegal raves and alternative club culture seeps into the popular imagination, informing it in ways unbeknownst to most.  But it wasn’t until last Summer’s Brat (Charli XCX) landed on the global charts that people began questioning the importance of Rave and Club culture again. Is our Brat the herald of a new golden Rave dawn? I think not.  

However, undergirding the Rave is something far more profound, perhaps even religious. Raving suggests that the world might be otherwise, and it does this through a temporary release from this world’s demands.  What might this say about our cultural moment? 

Coordinating the Rave’s aesthetic is the dance between the DJ and ravers, accentuated by the practicalities of a decent sound system, lights, and a bit of fog. Inaugurating Rave’s epiphany, though, are the diverse motions of bodies to a singular beat. Techno reduces digital sounds to their basics and then pushes that to its boundary. Circumventing the rigidity of technology’s logic are the gestures of human spontaneity on the dance floor. The rave asserts that technology doesn’t have the last say over human life. 

At the Rave, those traditionally on the margins of society become the center: a temporal expression of eternal longing, momentarily experienced as a shared catharsis and liberation. The dance floor is a bulwark against an increasingly de-ritualised and dehumanising society. It is a testament to the body being a medium for hope. Whether an intoxicated body or, in a growing trend, a sober one, it is the human fleshyness which takes priority. Both options respond to how one might cope with and confront the technological barrage.  

Techno began as a language for African American youth, finding a future amidst the industrial ruins of Detroit. In our late modern moment, Rave culture acclimatises the body to the persistent sound of our technological age. It subverts the dehumanising tendencies of digital culture: mass impersonal media and abstracted global conversations.  Instead, a momentary online connection is used to gather offline. When you’re there, you’re not concerned about telling the world. It is an attention to the present moment.  

The Rave harbours a liminal threshold between appreciation for this life and the longing for some next one. 

Worryingly, some have warned that clubs will dwindle to their knees this decade, squeezed out by neighbouring property developers or no longer economically viable amidst the cost-of-living crisis. The only thing being pushed out, however, is the possible resistance to a particularly greedy homogenisation of culture. In dislocating alternative discourses of ritual, we simultaneously assert that human bodies only have one particular “rhythm”: the rhythm of ceaseless economic expansion.  

The Rave resists an uncomplicated acceptance of technology’s gift.  Its goods are re-scaled to an embodied celebration of life. 

In Raving (2023), McKenzie Wark expands upon this, saying, ‘Techno, not as genre but as technique, lets digital machines speak. Not unlike the way jazz lets analog instruments speak… Sounds at the limit of what the machine or the instrument can do to get free. Blackness in sound as the technique of making the thing free to sound off as itself and to take the human with it, into movement, into feeling, into sensation.’  Rave’s sound quite literally brings technology’s language to the end of itself. 

For some, raving is what holds them to life. For others, it’s a momentary release from it. Whilst our bodies cannot exceed techno’s interchange with technology, we do learn how to harness the potential humanness within it. The Rave harbours a liminal threshold between appreciation for this life and the longing for some next one. In twisting its technological medium into a more human configuration, rave culture participates in hope. 

Back in 1965, theologian Jürgen Moltmann wrote, ‘Hope’s statements of promise, however, must stand in contradiction to the reality which can at present be experienced. They do not result from experiences, but are the condition for the possibility of new experience… They do not seek to bear the train of reality, but to carry the torch before it. In so doing they give reality a historic character.’  While Moltmann is writing concerning Christianity and the crucified Christ, his framework for thinking about hope is helpful. Hope never occurs outside of history. The Rave embraces this historical moment and attempts to inhabit it as a contradiction. 

Recently, I went to Rhythm Section International’s tenth-anniversary party at EartH, Hackney. Rhythm Section was founded as a music collective and is still curated by Peckham’s own Bradley Zero (BZ). Known globally, its parties and label imprint span techno, house, jazz, funk, spoken word, and RnB. 

I first danced to BZ’s DJing at a record shop in 2018 while still living in Melbourne. The beauty of this particular community is that it provides a bridge for what Wark identifies: just as jazz brings analogue instruments to their limits, techno does the same for digital. As experienced recently at EartH in Hackney, Rhythm Section tries to push digital and analogue sounds to their threshold across the night. In contrast to the pure techno rave, BZ’s selection causes a polyphonic liberation. Joy is found through the instruments slapped just as much as in the DJ faders pushed.   

This joy was evident in the diversity of ages and cultures present. “Mature heads” danced alongside students; some swayed, while others vogued. Without spaces such as these, where else can we celebrate the diversity of human responses to the same sound? 

My concern with club culture’s demise is that those places of contradiction are swallowed up by a faux vision of “smoothness”. We replace spaces of alternative being with sameness. A diversity of aesthetics is converted into another apartment complex. We make room for the novelty of Brat but not the culture she draws upon. 

Rave culture attempts to redefine the dominant technological language of our day, making the body its lens and not the periphery. By privileging the human body, Rave’s hope acknowledges profound discontent with the world but understands that all “escape” is temporary. This re-calibration enacted in Rave’s ritual de-escalates the supposed importance of technology’s ceaseless expansion. Thus, it exposes a more profound longing, one where it will be an eternal dance that deepens the love of life by going ever deeper into the particularities of individual bodies and their movements.  

Because it offers a form of explicit hope, the Rave is a ritualised space filled with the belief that there can be “something more”. And this more-ness is, ultimately, encountered in the face of those we dance with; whether in a fleeting glance to ask, “Are you alright?” or the mutual smile that says, “I love this song”. 

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Review
Culture
Film & TV
Monsters
Sport
5 min read

Horror turns pro: when greatness demands blood

The pursuit of sporting glory turns into a fever-dream of sacrifice, madness, and mythic violence
A player holding a finger to his lips stands in front of an indoor American football pitch.
Marlon Wayans.
Universal Pictures.

October is here…spooky season. Naturally, I’ve decided to pivot exclusively to the horror genre, beginning with HIM

The promotion for the film has placed Jordan Peele (who stormed onto the scene with Get Out) front and centre, so much so that one might be forgiven for assuming that he is the writer/director. He isn’t. His Monkeypaw Productions have produced the picture, and so one can assume he has had some creative input, but the film is helmed by Justin Tipping. This is Tipping’s second feature film. He co-wrote it and directed it. Sophomore, but no slump here. The film is superb! 

All horror fiction explores contemporary themes in the mode of the ‘unnerving’, and often by adopting and then playing with the conventions of another genre. In the case of HIM it is ‘sport’ that takes a horrifying turn. We begin by meeting our protagonist, Cameron ‘Cam’ Cade, as a young boy. He is watching his favourite American football star, Isaiah White, take lead the ‘San Antonio Saviours’ to victory. In the process Isaiah is injured. Cam looks away. His father forces him to look at the television screen and take in the violent scenes, while giving a speech about the necessity of ‘sacrifice’. 

A decade or so later the father has died, and Cam is a rising star in the sport, tipped to be the next ‘GOAT’ (Greatest Of All Time), the most worthy successor to Isaiah White’s legacy. While practicing late one night he is violently assaulted by a figure in a goat costume. The resulting head injury puts his prospects into question. It is doubtful that he can even play football going forward. He and his family are devastated.  

‘Salvation’ seems to come when his agent calls him with an offer that seems too good to be true. The ‘Saviours’ are seeking to sign him as their quarterback, replacing Isaiah. All he must do to earn this great opportunity is to spend a week with Isaiah at his specialised training compound, to demonstrate his potential and win Isaiah’s blessing. He accepts, and travels to the remote compound. As his car pulls up, he encounters a number of Isaiah’s demented ‘fans’ (who operate more akin to the Manson Family) decrying him in violent screams. He brushes this off and enters to meet Isaiah. He finds him engaged in an odd form of taxidermy with the skulls and skins of goats. The two embrace and share warm words of respect and welcome. The training begins.  

What follows is a rapid descent into bloody madness. 

I won’t say much more for set-up; only that the following week quickly becomes less a training camp, and more a psychedelic fever-dream of physical and psychological torture. The film is gruelling to watch in the best way. Tipping directs this masterfully, disorientating the viewer with sudden jumps from wide shots to close-ups to X-ray inflected visions of the appalling damage endured by athletes seeking to achieve their best. The cinematography of Kira Kelly keeps this relentless confusion running throughout the entire film, playing with angles and stillness and sudden swoops. 

These visuals are supplemented by some terrific performances. From the exceptionally creepy ‘fans’, led by Naomi Grossman, to Jim Jeffries reigning his comedic persona in to play Isaiah’s jaded and sardonic personal doctor (who is constantly drawing Isaiah’s blood…uh oh!), to Tim Heidecker’s unctuous agent always grasping for more. The standouts, however, are Tyriq Withers as Cam and Marlon Wayans as Isaiah. Wayans, of the ‘comedy’ dynasty, is best known for dreadful ‘funny’ (not ‘dreadfully funny’) films, including the Scary Movie franchise. Every now and then he has demonstrated his serious acting chops, shining in Requiem for a Dream, but this performance ought to cement his reputation as a genuine talent.  

He is mesmerising as Isaiah, switching in an instant from quiet melancholy, when reflecting on this past glory and the nature of sporting sacrifice, to outright unhinged menace – screaming directly in Cam’s face when trying to motivate him to go further and further. He dominates every scene he is in and is the lynchpin of the film’s mood, his performance (effortlessly walking the tightrope above measured and manic) driving the bewilderment the film seeks to force upon its audience. He is aided by Withers’ straight-man, who masterfully maintains a quiet yearning in the face of bafflement. He is muted and introverted without ever disappearing into the background, and so is instrumental in supporting Wayans as he gives the performance of his career. 

In spite of all of this brilliance, I have one small critique. The film’s theme is…messy. It is also far less subtle than it thinks it is. Its focus on the pain and suffering of sporting excellence – which is displayed in the literal brutality of injury – and the idea of selling one’s body, health, and even soul for glory, is often undermined by supernatural and theological symbolism which interrupts the dramatic thematic force. The use of the goat, both as a verbal and visual symbol, is overdone, and is rather obvious to anyone who knows even a little of biblical or esoteric literature.  

Added to this, the constant reference to sacrifice, and to behaviour resembling the cultic, continues the on-the-nose hammering; cemented at the end when an actual pentagram is emblazoned on a football field. This is a shame, as the final scene is a well-earned, wonderfully slapstick celebration of horror-movie gore and splatter, undermined by the symbolic silliness. None of this is enough to ruin the film – I still think it is superb – but I would have preferred Tipping to make a choice: subtle realism, or all-out commitment to the supernaturally sinister. In trying to have-its-cake-and-eat-it the film compromises the bake…a slight soggy bottom of a denouement. 

The film just fails to be the GOAT of this year’s horror fare. Still, a jolly entertaining cinematic experience which I highly recommend for October viewing. 

4.5 stars. 

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