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120810
Top 12 enemies of rave!
This month we bring you a dozen of enemies of rave. Who is the biggest enemy for you?
12. Eminem
His 2002 single “Without Me” slated "36-year-old bald-headed fag" Moby, then announced, "Nobody listens to techno." Quite apart from the "fag" thing, he was talking tosh - everyone listens to techno, and Moby's creative edge is more than a match for Eminem's.
11. Guilty Pleasures
Just a bit of post-modem fun, right? Sean Rowley's night where you can dance to naff 70s nonsense without wearing an afro wig? No! Guilty Pleasures marks a defeat, a lazy retreat from exciting club scenes to wallow in soft rock putrescence and Hall & Oates B-sides. Yeuch!
10. The Mayor of New York
It was once the global capital of club culture, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his predecessor Rudy Giuliani crippled the scene with cabaret laws and licenses. "If you're going to stay up all night long... it’s the city's business," said Bloomberg, possibly not a pal of Danny Tenaglia.
9. The Strokes
Post-millennium, the superclub phenomenon imploded and, for the first time in 15 years, rave was not the coolest kid on the block. The competition, sadly, was not Dayglo Android core. Instead, it was five posh Yanks playing guitar pop - as vibrant and futuristic as Rolf Harris.
8. Poor quality MP3s
Dance music relies on fidelity of sound. When your mate decides to DJ on a big sound system using an iPod full of low-res tunes downloaded off skanky bit-torrent sites, the resulting sonic catastrophe of distorted tinniness frightens the entire building off clubbing forever.
7. Henry Rollins
The fierce American punk raconteur regards all dance music as drug-addled cretinousness. A sample: '"What are you? 'I'm a musician, I'm a DJ.' You're a fucking thief of music, you're a record-player player. You can kiss my fuckin' ass, OK'." All spat out with genuine loathing.
6. Pre-1988 ravers
The original ravers - especially the first wave of house DJs - often claim that dance music which doesn't sound like lightly remixed Whitney Houston is just 'heavy metal' or 'drug music'. Back in '88 they were already referring to newcomers who liked things tougher as 'acid teds'.
5. Morrissey
As well as that "Hang the DJ" lyric, the portly miserablist has called dance music "sterility at its utmost", telling the now-defunct Select magazine, "I could never begin to explain to you the utter loathing I feel for dance music". What an overrated, Luddite bore.
4. Ken Tappenden
The pantomime baddy of rave. When the original raves were going off in the late 80s Chief Superintendent Ken Tappenden's Pay Party Unit spent weekends tapping phones, chasing E'd up nutters round the M25 and arresting gurners with pupils the size of dinner plates.
3. Middle America
Many US cities - New York, Detroit, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, LA - have dance music pedigree, but try playing 4/4 beats to the average red-blooded American away from the coasts. They'll baulk at your 'faggot music' and reach for their manly Godsmack albums.
2. John Major
Fancy partying to "Sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats"? Tough -1994's Criminal justice Act passed by John Major's Tory government made such naughtiness illegal. Oddly, not one military brass band was arrested.
1. The neighbors
Whether you're a bedsit technohead or at Space in Ibiza, whoever lives next door is always likely to try to spoil the fun. "Bang, bang, bang" go the beats, the sound of giddy exhilaration. "Bang bang bang," goes the neighbor’s thump on the wall. Down, down, down, goes the volume, and fizzle, fizzle, fizzle goes the party. Possible solutions: invite them over, buy them off or move somewhere either too remote or too much of a dump for anyone to bother. The government should just give the ravers Cornwall and allow us to make as much noise as we fancy. Having said that, Devon would probably start banging on the wall...
