Rave On: Global Adventures in Electronic Dance

Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect. Cultural liberation and musical innovation. Pyrotechnics, bottle service, bass drops, and molly.Electronic dance music has been a vital force for more than three decades now, and has undergone transformation upon transformation as it has taken over the world. In this searching, lyrical account of dance music culture worldwide, Matthew Collin takes stock of its highest highs and lowest lows across its global trajectory. Through firsthand reportage and interviews with clubbers and DJs, Collin documents the itinerant musical form from its underground beginnings in New York, Chicago, and Detroit in the 1980s, to its explosions in Ibiza and Berlin, to today’s mainstream music scenes in new frontiers like Las Vegas, Shanghai, and Dubai. Collin shows how its dizzying array of genres—from house, techno, and garage to drum and bass, dubstep, and psytrance—have given voice to locally specific struggles. For so many people in so many different places, electronic dance music has been caught up in the search for free cultural space: forming the soundtrack to liberation for South African youth after Apartheid; inspiring a psychedelic party culture in Israel; offering fleeting escape from—and at times into—corporatization in China; and even undergirding a veritable “independent republic” in a politically contested slice of the former Soviet Union.Full of admiration for the possibilities the music has opened up all over the world, Collin also unflinchingly probes where this utopianism has fallen short, whether the culture maintains its liberating possibilities today, and where it might go in the future. Matthew Collin is the author of Altered State, the definitive story of acid house and rave culture in Britain. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, Al Jazeera and Agence France-Presse, and as editor for i-D magazine, the Time Out website, the Big Issue and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. He has also written for many newspapers and magazines, including the Wire, Guardian, Observer, Mixmag and Mojo.

Introduction Let the Music Use You 1 Techno Cities #1 Detroit 2 Techno Cities #2 Berlin 3 Fantasy Island Ibiza 4 Electric Dream Machine Las Vegas 5 House Nation South Africa Interlude Pirates of the Black Sea 6 Temporary Autonomous Zone France 7 The Party at the End of the Road Israel 8 The Outer Limits Shanghai 9 Aliens in the Desert Dubai 10 The Promised Land New York Acknowledgements Photography credits Selected bibliography Notes Index