I had the most upvoted review of Berghain on Yelp for a few years. I eventually deleted it, because the last thing Berghain needs is more attention online. Now I edit the book reviews section for an academic journal as part of my day job. Overall, I love reviewing stuff. This all relates to why I decided to review McKenzie Wark’s recent book “Raving” for the Cambridge University Press’s journal Popular Music. The review is currently sequestered behind a paywall, but I’m happy to say more about it here, including some thoughts that didn’t fit in the published version.
When Resident Advisor posted a “Real Scenes” video from New York in 2013, the tone was one of struggle. The rents were too high, there were no good clubs, and techno devotees basically had to pore through event listings constantly just to catch the one or two decent warehouse events each month. Things have changed a lot since then, and Wark’s new book seems like it will be one of the most lasting impressions of our city’s new music landscape. The rent situation is worse than ever, but we have plenty of clubs, plenty of DJs, and a decent stable of cutty parties in weird locations too.
I’m going to switch gears now and share a few excerpts from the review:
Raving introduces several innovations to the rave-literature canon, centring topics previously underexamined. First, it is deeply rooted in twenty-first century New York City, documenting a recent club-culture renaissance that has followed twenty years of anti-nightlife policy and enforcement spearheaded by the mayoral administrations of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. By contrast, the famous scenes in Europe that are so preeminent, both in the electronic music industry and in related literature, are treated as a distant memory—literally, in the form of four quick paragraphs flashing back on time spent partying in newly reunified Berlin during the 1990s.
[…]
On the topic of drugs, Wark’s Raving also breaks raves away from their historically close association with empathogenic stimulants like MDMA (aka “ecstasy”). She devotes considerable space instead to the dissociative drug ketamine’s contemporary role in rave practices. In prior works of rave lit, ketamine was often positioned as a sign that any given scene was becoming unsavoury. For Wark, writing during a boom in legal usage of psychiatric ketamine products, the drug shakes users out of entrenched gender roles, reconfigures their relationships to embodiment, and thus lubricates the disruption of entrenched social practices. The role of the unsavoury drug, in this case, is played by the sedative GHB, which has become a topic of recent concern and debate among raving populations, and which is implicated in the book’s only truly negative drug outcome.
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The full review touches more deeply on issues of gender and identity, which are central to the book. But here I want to focus on the ways that techno infrastructures have changed in the last ten years. For Wark, the assemblages of sound system, lighting, fog, and drugs make proper raving more than the sum of its parts. This technologically mediated environment enables participants to shake out of their usual identities. For Wark this means feeling at home in a new expression of gender, but on a more banal level shrouding people in fog is also just a way to make them comfortable trying out new practices– dancing, drinking, taking drugs, meeting friends, making out, or maybe just sober focused listening.
The expertise required to assemble one of these technical environments can’t be underestimated. New York had a long and deep history with dance music even during the rough 2000’s and early 2010s. This translates into great record collections from old house DJs finding their way into thrift stores. It also means there are great old sound systems kicking around in storage just waiting to be revived– to the extent that old NYC sound systems are also creating the backbone for rave revivals far away from home when they’re snapped up and moved out of state.
I’m fascinated by the ways that this intergenerational equipment and expertise forms the hidden backbone of contemporary music cultures. Even after going underground for 20 years, the beating heart of rave remains vital. This is what separates a place like New York from a place like Austin (where I recently lived for a year). In New York, the thrift stores are full of house and hip-hop and techno. In Austin, they’re full of country and indie rock. There’s a rich Texan musical heritage to tap into, and plenty of people do interesting work (Growth in Decay records and Bill Converse‘s DJ work come to mind), but it has its own unique contours and the dance-music side of it feels a bit like it’s full of kids without role models. But maybe that’s just how I feel watching people suck down nitrous at a rave (which would seem pretty gauche in New York).
On the topic of drugs, Wark’s book offers a much-needed update. She details a notable affinity for ketamine in the New York scene these days, which has changed a lot since interviewees in Simon Reynolds’s canonical Energy Flash characterized it as something for “hardcore” or “cynical” ravers, people who also took heroin, and people who ended up “lying in hallways.” Nowadays, the DEA calls ketamine an “approved medical product” and it’s widely seen as a perfectly legitimate treatment for depression. You can also buy it from under-regulated online medical practices that supply users with so much of the stuff that they develop bladder problems.
Wark’s book is a snapshot in time. It doesn’t attempt to explain these long-term changes, and that’s perfectly fine. But reading it in conversation with historical sources, from Reynolds’ discussion of the 90s through RA’s depiction of the 00s, points out a gap in the literature for these hidden histories. It’s hard to get good information on illegal activities. Running a party in a warehouse is usually a little bit illegal, even if everyone inside is stone cold sober. Running a party where drugs might be present is all the more risky. People are understandably tight-lipped. Wark gives us a useful look into what people do when they’re hidden away in a club somewhere, but unfortunately it’s way beyond the scope of her project to explain what political-economic forces make those behaviors possible.
This is something that I hope we’ll one day learn about. It often takes decades. It’s not really controversial these days to point out how government agencies helped to pump the streets full of LSD in the 1960s, heroin in the 1970s, and cocaine in the 1980s. There’s also circumstantial evidence suggesting some sort of DEA involvement in the 90s MDMA industry, although I wouldn’t consider that theory to be quite as well-substantiated. What will we one day learn about the death and rebirth of American raving in the 2000s and 2010s?
Altogether, reading Raving now paints an accurate image of 2010s-2020s techno in New York City. The sound systems, the drugs, the crowds, and the music. It doesn’t scratch below the surface to explain the inner workings of techno’s technical assemblages, but it flags a number of topics for further research. Some of it will probably hit differently a few decades from now.
