What makes millions of people want to participate in this type of celebration? (credit: Adobe Stock/AI-generated photo)
Originally illegal, raves were intended to be spaces for musical and community experimentation, on the margins of society. If some have now been taken over by the festival industry, others persist in the shadows, carried by an alternative culture to well-established codes. A phenomenon where electronic music, spirituality, political commitment and social protest meet.
“Our emotional state is ecstasy, our food is love, our addiction is technology, our religion is music. Our choice for the future is knowledge and, for us, politics does not exist.”
This is how what we call the
Rave manifestos
published in the mid-1990s on the Alt.Rave forum. This text was born in reaction to a media campaign of denigration which then fell on these holidays. It is inspired by the words of New York DJ Frankie Bones, a major figure in the introduction of rave culture to the United States. The essence of the movement’s philosophy can be summed up in four words: peace, love, unity and respect (better known by the acronym PLUR, for Peace, Love, Unity, Respect).
What makes millions of people want to participate in this type of celebration?
The term “rave” means “delirious” in English. These festivals allow, through electronically manipulated music, to transcend individuality for the benefit of the collective. This is what sociologist Émile Durkheim called “collective effervescence”, a phenomenon also observable in other live music events.
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From the libertarian spirit to capitalist festivals
Raves were born in the 1980s. The very first were illegal parties organized in disused warehouses in London. Influenced by free festivals and new travelers (two libertarian movements linked to artistic and musical festivals), these free parties then stretched until dawn, to the sound of hip-hop, groove then, increasingly, house and techno from Chicago and Detroit.
In 1989, the United Kingdom experienced what became known as the “Second Summer of Love”. This period is marked by clandestine festivals where young people celebrate the collective through electronic music and psychotropic experimentation. Shortly after, in May 1992, the Spiral Tribe collective organized a large-scale illegal rave in Castlemorton, bringing together some 20,000 people.
Despite police repression and attempts at prohibition by Margaret Thatcher’s government, the phenomenon is already rooted in the festive practices of young people.
Quickly, many British clubs and discotheques integrated electronic evenings into their programming. Legally regulated, these evenings mark the emergence of a second model of raves: institutionalized raves. They then spread across Europe and the rest of the world, experiencing real growth and gradually becoming a product of cultural capitalism: commercialized, globalized festivals with little differentiation from each other.
The case of Spain
This model inspires, for example, an emblematic movement in Spain in the 1990s: the Ruta del Bakalao, a group of around ten giant nightclubs in Valencia. These clubs (Barraca, Espiral, NOD, ACTV, The Face, Spook, Puzzle, Heaven or Chocolate) open almost continuously for seventy-two hours during the weekend, welcoming thousands of young fans of mákina music.
As in the United Kingdom, the Ruta sank into oblivion in the mid-1990s. But with the proliferation of music festivals, commercial raves came back in force.
In Spain, they now occupy a central place in the programming, or even become the main element, as is the case with the Dreambeach, Monegros, Medusa or Sónar festivals.
As for clandestine raves, they waited until the beginning of the 21st century to gain popularity in Spain. They are found in particular in Madrid (in the Boadilla tunnel or at the Perales del RÃo monastery), in Andalusia (Granada, Almeria) or in Catalonia.
Also read | A brief history of nightclubs, from the basements of the United Kingdom to the beaches of Ibiza
More and more “ravers”?
More broadly, since the start of the 21st century, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic, the raver movement has continued to gain followers. Its supporters are attracted by its countercultural and hedonistic form of leisure, with sometimes ritual or even quasi-religious overtones.
Today, the two major trends coexist: commercial raves (integrated into clubbing and festival culture) and clandestine, or free parties. It is the latter which arouse the most controversy. Organized by collectives called sound systems, they are secret, self-managed, non-profit (the proceeds are used to finance the party), often last several days and are held away from urban centers to avoid conflicts.
They require significant logistics: speaker towers, generators, gasoline, wiring, decorations and sophisticated lighting. These festivals have always integrated a strong visual and scenic dimension.
They also constitute community spaces at odds with daily life: heterotopias or liminal zones where love, peace, unity and respect are the rules of living together. They want to be safe, non-violent spaces, where women are respected and not sexualized.
This philosophy also extends to the defense of the environment as evidenced by the Berlin Rave The Planet parade, to social justice as during the demonstrations in Beirut in 2019, or to the commitment against armed conflicts such as the raves organized in the Israeli desert in protest against the occupation of Palestine.
And this, despite the drug consumption associated with these events, where cannabis and ecstasy (linked to dance and fusion with music) are preferred to tobacco, LSD, cocaine or alcohol, the consumption of which can sometimes being frowned upon.
Sociologically, raves are distinguished by their heterogeneity and diversity. Depending on their predominant musical style (techno, hardtechno, electronic, house, psychedelic trance, breakcore), they attract clubbers, punks, hippies and other supporters of contemporary urban subcultures. And as indicated by
Rave manifestos
everyone is welcome:
“We are a massive entity, a global, tribal village that surpasses all laws established by man, as well as geography and time itself. We are countless. We are one.”
Par
Cristina Pérez-Ordóñez
(Professor and researcher, University of Málaga)
This article comes from The Conversation website
