The body and soul of club culture

UNESCO Courier, July, 2000 by Hillegonda C. Rietveld

Hillegona C. Rietveld [*]

Electronic dance music is constantly spawning new strands of music like tech no and acid house. Behind the thudding beats, communities of DJs and dancers try to stay one step ahead of entertainment multinationals--and the law

United on the dance floor, revellers of different ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations and ages dance wall-to-wall, sweating, smiling and enjoying the DJ's clever acoustic tricks. The combination of loud, rhythmic music and visual distortion heightens the collective spirit as the sound enters the crowd--machine rhythms, pounding drums, overlaid with a gospel spirituality of peace, love and unity. Welcome to Body and Soul in New York City, where the dream of dancefloor Utopia lives on and (in the words of one dance music diva) "everybody's free (to feel good)".

At Body and Soul, DJs like Joe Claussel still embody the determination to mix and match--both styles of music and their audience--to remain aloof from the machinations of the global entertainment giants, to find more in "club culture" than getting high or getting paid. And it takes determination, for over the past decade or so, "dance" or "club culture"--based on electronic music and its derivatives--has become an international, multi-million dollar market despite the efforts of DJs like Claussel to promote the dream of cultural diversity, artistic independence and universal spirituality. For many of its devotees, this club culture represents an escape from the regimentation of modem life and even a return to a pre-industrial pagan shamanistic utopia.

But before delving into this global phenomenon, a little history and vocabulary is called for. To begin with, let's deflate the generic use of the term "techno" to describe anything with a thudding electronic beat. Techno is actually one strand of an ever-expanding genre generally called "electronic dance music". A veritable cannibal, this genre spawns a constant stream of variants as the technological wizards, DJs, re-configure any kind of music or sound--from a train whistle to the chant of a Tibetan lama--within the thud-thud-ding of a four-beats-to-a-bar rhythm. Two of the major sub-genres are techno and house.

The club culture surrounding the music is in some ways a reconfiguration of the disco era of the mid-to-late 70s. All of us probably remember that period as one of poor taste and excess, symbolised in the mainstream by John Travolta's white suit in the American movie, Saturday Night Fever. But before North America's white, suburban middle classes adopted the commodified BeeGee's Stayin' Alive version of disco, the music was considered an offshoot of funk and soul music. Commercial in aspiration, yes, but, at its best, fun and funky. Disco, under the pressures of the "disco sucks" campaign (orchestrated by disaffected rock fans) and the global over-exposure of Saturday Night Fever, waned in popularity as the three great anti-commercial genres of popular music emerged: reggae in Jamaica, punk in the UK, hip-hop in New York City. However, the disco principle of playing a smooth mix of long single records to keep people "dancing all night long" lives on in the endless stream of electronic dance music.

House music, in particular, is often held up as a kind of banner of cultural diversity owing to its origins in black and Latino discos, where it first found its audience (see p.45). One could point to the 1980s, when African American producers/DJs, like Frankie Knuckles, Marshall Jefferson or DJ Pierre, began refining the all-night dancefloor workouts at underground gay and mixed clubs in New York and Chicago, like the legendary Warehouse from which house music derives its name. Or there is DJ Larry Levan, whose residence at New York's Paradise Garage not only defined a distinct sub-genre of its own ("garage" is slower and more gospel oriented than "house") but set the tone for today's raves [1] -- no alcohol, heavy drug use, a mixed, "up for it crowd" and loud, pulsating music for 15-hour stretches without a break.

At the same time, in the post-industrialising concrete jungle of Detroit (Michigan), techno, a cooler, more futuristic form of house--intensely layered rhythms, often pierced by machine noises and reconfigured over diva-vocals--emerged from a cross-Atlantic dialogue between young, radical African American producers like Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May and electronic Euro-pop, notably by Kraftwerk, a German experimental group of the 1970s.

By the mid-80s, a series of influential independent record labels had appeared and the various strains of North American house, garage and techno were exported to Europe, triggering the rise of local variants and scenes. Which kinds of music were adopted where is a story in itself. Briefly, warmer, more gospel-oriented house music found a ready audience in Italy. Northern Europe, Holland, Belgium and Germany proved fertile ground for cold, hard techno, which those countries' own electronic traditions had a hand in creating. However, the UK took the lead in adopting and adapting the new U.S. sounds. Each variant found a British audience: soul- and gospel-tinged house was adopted by "soul" fans, while techno drew devotees from rock and even punk.