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Revision as of 20:27, 16 March 2006 by 195.93.21.40 (talk) (raving)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)- This article is about a form of party. For other uses of the term, see rave (disambiguation).
A rave (sometimes referred to as a rave party) is an all-night dance event where DJs and other performers play electronic dance music and rave music. The slang expression rave was originally used by people of Caribbean descent in London during the 1960s to describe a party. In the late 1980s, the term began to be used to describe the subculture that grew out of the acid house movement that began in Chicago and New York and flourished in the United Kingdom club scene.
The availability of drugs—particularly ecstasy—has caused raves to be targeted and criticized by law enforcement officials and parents' groups.
History
Mainstream raves began in the late 1980s as a product of, reaction to, and rebellion against, trends in popular music, nightclub culture, and commercial radio. See also list of noteworthy raves for more about specific events.
In an effort to maintain distance and secrecy from the mainstream club scene (or perhaps for lack of affordable, receptive venues), warehouses, rental halls, and outside locations most often served as raves' venues. In an effort to control and curtail rave parties, some police and governmental bodies effectively outlawed raves in some areas. Such laws consequently forced regional electronic dance music events to move to formal venues, such as nightclubs and amphitheatres. Some venues and jurisdictions additionally prohibited certain types of rave fashion and paraphernalia.
Early raves were completely do it yourself; only a small number of people contributed to event production and promotion. Self-styled production and promotion companies have increasingly organized raves; the "companies" were usually unofficial or loosely defined. Some of the more well-known rave promotion companies have included Brotherhood of Boom, Mushgroove, Freebass Society, and Pure. The companies promote their events by creating and distributing fliers and online bulletins.
As law enforcement agencies increasingly began paying attention to raves, concealing a party's location became important to an event's success. To that end, event organizers sometimes either promoted events solely by word-of-mouth, or would only reveal the date and location of the event to subscribers of an electronic mailing list or via voicemail. Some even went so far as to provide a series of clues or map checkpoints that ultimately led to the location of the rave.
1980s
What could arguably be called raves existed in the early 1980s in the Ecstasy-fuelled club scene in clubs like NRG, in Houston, and in the drug-free, all-ages scene in Detroit at venues like The Music Institute. However, it was not until the mid to late 1980s that a wave of psychedelic and other electronic dance music, most notably acid house and techno, emerged and caught on in the clubs, warehouses and free-parties of London and later Manchester. These early raves were called the Acid House Summers. They were mainstream events that attracted thousands of people (up to 25,000 instead of the 4,000 that came to earlier warehouse parties) to come, dance and take ecstasy.
The noise and disturbance of thousands of people appearing at rural locations caused outrage in the national media. Politicians spoke out against raves and increased the fine for holding an illegal party to £20,000 and six months in prison. This, along with ecstasy becoming scarce, ended the early raves.
Police crackdowns on these often-illegal parties drove the scene into the countryside. The word "rave" somehow caught on to describe these semi-spontaneous weekend parties occurring at various locations outside the M25 Orbital motorway. (It was this that gave Orbital their name.)
The early rave scene also flourished underground in some Canadian and U.S. cities such as Montreal, San Francisco and Los Angeles and as word of the budding scene spread, raves quickly caught on in other cities such as San Diego and New York City and in major urban centres across the European continent.
In several books about the evolution of the rave scene, Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV is often credited as being one of the earliest pioneers of the rave scene. Psychic TV released several early acid house albums, most notably Jack the Tab.
1990s: United Kingdom
Raves began to expand into a global phenomenon around 1989-1992, mostly on a grassroots basis: people who had travelled to attend the first raves in each region began setting up promotion companies, often informally, to organize their own parties. By the mid-1990s, major corporations were sponsoring events and adopting the scene's music and fashion for their "edgier" advertising, making the scene become more commercialized.
After a particularly large rave (near Castlemorton) the government acted. In 1994, the United Kingdom's Criminal Justice Bill passed as the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 which contained several sections designed to suppress the growing free party and anti-road protest movements (sometimes embodied by ravers and travellers).
Sections 63, 64 & 65 of the Act targeted electronic dance music, defining it as "wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act empowered police to arrest citizens who appeared to be: preparing to hold a rave (2 or more people), waiting for a rave to start (10+), or attending a rave (100+). Section 65 allows any uniformed constable who believes a person is on their way to a rave within a five-mile radius to stop them and direct them away from the area; noncompliant citizens may be subject to a maximum fine of £1,000.
1990s: Europe
Rave culture was becoming part of a new youth movement. DJs and electronic music producers such as Westbam proclaimed the existence of a "raving society" and promoted electronic music as legitimate competition for rock and roll. Indeed, electronic dance music and rave subculture became mass movements. Raves had tens of thousands of attendants, youth magazines featured styling tips and television networks launched music magazines on house and techno music. The annual Love Parade festivals in Berlin attracted more than one million partygoers between 1997 and 2000.
Raves had also spread to far away places like Australia, where the Melbourne Shuffle dance style has evolved over the last 15 years.
2000s
In the early 2000s illegal parties still exist, albeit on smaller scales, and the number of sanctioned events seemed to be on the rise. The few constants in the scene include amplified electronic dance music, a vibrant social network built on the ethos of the acronym PLUR, "Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect", percussive music and freeform dancing as a basis for drug use, and an ambivalent attitude toward "club drugs" such as ecstasy, methamphetamine, speed and Ketamine, also known as "special K". However, increased cocaine usage, preponderance of adulterated ecstasy tablets and organized criminal activity has been detrimental to UK-based rave culture, although free parties are now on the rise again.
According to some long-time observers, rave music and its subculture began to stagnate by the end of the 1990s. The period of grassroots innovation and explosive growth and evolution was over; the flurry of passionate activity and the sense of international community were fading.
By the early 2000s, the terms "rave" and "raver" had fallen out of favor among many people in the electronic dance music community, particularly in Europe. Many Europeans returned to identifying themselves as "clubbers" rather than ravers. It became unfashionable among many electronic dance music aficionados to describe a party as a "rave", perhaps because the term had become bastardized. Some communities preferred the term "festival", while others simply referred to "parties". True raves, such as "Mayday", continued to occur for a time in Central Europe, with less constrictive laws allowing raves to continue in some countries long after the death of rave in the United Kingdom. Moreover, traditional rave paraphernalia, such as facemasks, pacifiers, and glowsticks ceased to be popular.
Raves and ravers continued to be vilified by government authorities. For example, following a July 2005 violent raid by police on CzechTek, an annual techno music festival, the Czech Republic's Prime Minister said the festival's attendees were "no dancing children but dangerous people" and that many were "obsessed people with anarchist proclivities and international links," who "provoke massive violent demonstrations, fuelled by alcohol and drugs, against the peaceful society".
As with any trend that runs on for more than a decade, the Rave scene has recently been harking back to the old days of warehouse parties, with a surge in "old school" club nights, particularly in the Jungle scene, with DJs and producers who had dropped out of the business playing sets of music from the founding days of their genre, and producing new records in that style. Clubs are increasingly going back to the grimy days of warehouses in terms of styling, rather than the interior designed venues of the late 90s.
But more importantly, the rave scene has become its own culture rather than just a "party" term. Vibrant groups of like-minded individuals have united in the "underground" dance scene to form raver communities that share the same ideas that the raver community was built upon in the 1990's: Openness, Acceptance, and Positivism. A prime example of this culture would be the tight-knit community based out of New York City built around the Raveclick.Com website. Founded by Despina Simegiatos, the web site was created as a way to educate and keep people informed about the underground rave culture and scene bubbling beneath the Five Boroughs. Comprised of dancers, DJ's, producers, promoters, and fans of electronic dance music, the site has attracted over 1,400 members to its message board and has become a central hub of the New York rave scene while still retaining a core of friends who share the same ideals and desire. Other examples of such communities are NewRaveOrder.com (which is more focused on the New England and Northeast raves and features over 2000 members) and EuphoriaProject.org (which is focused on raves in the Southeastern region; primarily the Florida state area). These communities will strive to keep the rave scene and its culture alive and well in big cities across the United States.
Rave culture
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The upsurge in popularity of rave culture in the United States at a certain period in time often lends it characteristics common to a 'movement' or Subculture. Although raves have existed in the United States as long as in any other country, the sudden explosion of mainstream popularity in the late nineties led to more common approaches to defining rave culture as a youth movement, in a way that would not have been possible in the UK or Europe due to a greater diversity amongst participants, countries and musical styles. Accordingly, many of the descriptions listed below are only appropriate to groups within the USA, and may even constitute generalisations within the US itself.
Although not universally agreed upon by those in the rave movement, some of the central tenets of the culture are said to be:
- Openness: not to judge, condemn, or label other people's style of clothes, hair, makeup, costume, sexual orientation, musical preference, race, age, gender, class or income.
- Acceptance: not to try to convince anyone of the rightness or wrongness associated with most human activities.
- Positivity: to subscribe to the notion that if something makes someone happy without hurting someone else, then that something is okay. Accordingly, fights or scuffles at a rave are rare, and the atmosphere itself is welcoming and loving.
Although not a constant among all ravers, one philosophical tenet of rave culture is expressed through the acronym "PLUR", for Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. This terminology is found particularly irritating by a large number of clubgoers, many of whom have hope it will fade away and be replaced by better marketing terminology for positive thinking. As of yet no new terminology has emerged.
Ravers have been compared to both the hippies of the 1960s and the new wavers of the 1980s, due to their interest in non-violence and music.
Technology is, by definition, central to electronic music, and technological innovation has influenced rave subculture in many ways. For example, since loud music made it difficult to converse at raves, virtual communities are extremely important in rave subculture. Also, access to various affordable computer technologies empowered amateurs to compose or manipulate electronic music.
At rave parties, dance tricks of all kinds are very popular. However, these tricks are not always entirely safe and can sometimes lead to damages, so they are not always tolerated by the organizers of the rave. The rules for what kind of tricks are allowed differ from party to party.
In contrast to many other 'Youth Cultures', older people are often active members of the scene and are well represented at events.
Rave Clubs & Events
Types of ravers
The following are loosely defined terms generated by the rave community. They are generalized, and are not conclusive, complete, or necessarily current.
- Old school raver - refers to someone who has been a raver for some time, whereas a baby raver or a newbie refers to someone who is new to raving or at their first rave. Hardcore ravers are sometimes called pure ravers or true ravers or partykids. Something can be rave or have raveness.
- Jaded raver - one who has been in the rave scene for a long time or someone who is growing tired of 'the scene' and raving. The newness of the experience has long ago worn off and jaded ravers have noticed the seamier side. They may be annoyed at what the raving experience has become, or they may be lackadaisical about certain aspects of raving that they once held a fondness for. Quite often a jaded raver will not appreciate the influx of new ravers into the scene, because the new ravers are viewed as contributing to the scene's decay.
- Club kid - tends to dress in bright colors and flashy, sometimes gaudy clothes, including leather and fur. Club kids might also favor fluorescent plastic bead necklaces and candy bracelets. Many club kids also wear childrens' backpacks.
- Candy raver, Candykid or Kandikid - often wears brightly colored and child-like fashions such as day-glo wide leg pants, black light reactive or glow-in-the-dark bracelets/necklaces and t-shirts featuring cartoon characters. Candy ravers or candykids wear homemade bracelets and necklaces made of plastic, glass, or felt beads or candy. They are often found exchanging or giving out small gifts. These small gifts will usually be hugs, toys, glowsticks, CDs, necklaces, bracelets, and/or candy.
- Junglist - refers to a sub-culture of the rave scene defined by drum and bass (DnB) and jungle music. Some Junglists detest mainstream rave music and prefer darker and deeper vibes. Many junglists differentiate themselves from 'ravers' owing to the heavy connotations of the word. This may manifest itself in a number of ways, from styles of dress to comportment.
- Dark raver or Graver - the raving equivalent of a goth. Gravers tend to wear darker clothing and makeup and frequent events called dark raves. Like Junglists they tend to enjoy darker music and atmosphere. There is some overlap between the Dark Rave scene and the Industrial and EBM scene. "Traditional" Goths occasionally hold distaste for Gravers, as they prefer dark electronic music, or "electrosludge" as detractors have termed it, over Gothic Rock. Some go as far to say that bands popular with Gravers are causing decay in the Goth subculture by flooding scenes with more easily produced music.
Lightshows
Some ravers participate in a light-oriented dance called glowsticking, and a similar dance called glowstringing, lightshowing or poi. These dances, however, are independent of the raving community, and often the stereotyped association may be resented. Glow sticks in the dark stimulate the pupils, and it is claimed that they relieve the effects of Ecstasy. Therefore at some rave places they are presented as "safety materials." In some cases, the sale of glow sticks during rave parties has been presented as evidence of illegal drug use. Glow sticks have been considered drug paraphernalia because they are used in giving someone on Ecstasy a "lightshow." The recipient of the lightshow sits or stands facing the show giver who moves the glow sticks away and towards the face of the recipient in various stylized movements. This lightshow is sometimes accompanied by a massage, a vibrator and/or by blowing mentholated vapours into the nose, mouth, and eyes of the recipient. This is intended to increase the effects of Ecstasy.
Other types of lightshows include LED lights, flashlights and blinking strobe lights. LEDs come in various colors with different settings. For example, a slow light will produce a line of dots, while a strong light will produce an even line. There are many techniques used to make the lights "flow" with the music in order to "trip" the person who is receiving. The most basic lightshow move is the figure-eight followed by the circle. There are also combination methods where the lightshower holds a glowstick in each hand as well as LED lights.
Regardless, glowsticks and LEDs can be used at raves for interesting dance effects, because most raves (except some open air raves e.g. technoparades) are held in dark or nearly dark rooms. Because rave parties are popular with people who wish to show off their dancing, glowsticks can be an ancillary material for creative freestyle dance.
raving central ravers are good people a good example or raving is in the north east of sunderland the raving central e.g powerhouse(houghton le spring) or the new monkey (pallion road) ikon and many many more venues rave involves mcs that mc to rave tunes mc ace, mc scotty jay ,mc tazo and mc impulse any many many more good mcs it takes something to be a mc as you need to think of rhymes to go with the rave tunes makina
See also
- free party or squat party for the modern, illegal version of raves
- rave music for music and music styles at raves
- list of noteworthy raves
- Acid house party - forerunner of raves typically staged in US and UK warehouses in 1987-88
- RAVE Act, an American law targeting raves
- Better Living Through Circuitry - a 1999 documentary about Electronic music and Dance culture.
- Melbourne Shuffle - An underground rave dance style that has evolved over the last 15 years in Melbourne, Australia
External links
- Hyperreal.org - The original rave resource on the Net.
- Rave FAQ from 1995..
- Open Directory: Society/Subcultures/Rave/Regional - regional community links.
- Partyvibe - Global rave community site.