of dancers from that dance that survived’ (Apollo 2001: issues 32 and 9). And, further,
house music ‘was born from the souls of all those boy dancers of the seventies who
left us with their energy and love of music’ (Apollo 2001: issue 9). In a period of
deep uncertainty, self-loathing, guilt and despair not dissimilar to the process of
deep intellectual questioning preceding Christian redemption, house music
lifted our souls above the ruin [and] made the sexuality and the spirituality
positive life-giving forces for us.... The house music came from people ...
defiant in the face of death. People who were determined to celebrate sex and
spirit and create light in the darkness.
(Apollo 2001: issue 22)With influences ranging from gospel to Hi NRG, electronic dance music was thus
born from the context of ‘oppression, mortality connected to sexuality, and the need
for redemption and release through communal dance’ (Apollo 2001: issue 34).
Post-rave is remote from the ecclesiastical grip of faith detected in millenarian
movements promising ‘an eternity of justice, bliss and glory in the light of God’
following the Second Coming (Weber 1999:33), or the revival of a communitarian
Golden Age. Nevertheless, as dancers often report being changed, converted,
redeemed, ‘born again’, traces of millennialism, salvation, a longing for release are
detectable in the immediate and, as already indicated, indeterminate party.
Oftentimes such is over-determined by the imperatives of market forces, like huge
commercial operations such as Resurrection, where the ‘release’ of dollars for tickets
is promoted to ensure ascension. Othertimes events—like Toon Town’s
‘Psychedelic Apocalypse’ held on New Year 1991/2—resemble extreme-psychedelic-
sports parks. Conjured as ‘a theme park for your brain’ (Silcott 1999: 64), such
events may evidence the ‘new narcissism’, where the ‘prevailing passion’ is to live for
the ecstatic moment (Lasch 1979:5). In environments where young people
encounter addiction to a cocktail of ‘religious experiences’ amounting to little more
than psychedelic novelty rides, the atmosphere approximates that of living the
Apocalypse now, making the end of the world last longer. And if burnout from
excessive alterant use is risked at parties designed with the Psychedelic Apocalypse
cookie-cutter, perhaps in them we witness the possibility of psychological
Armageddon. In other events, the power of dance is harnessed for the purpose of
community development, as it is with spiritual dance communities such as San
Francisco’s Sacred Dance Society, a ‘non-profit religious organization’ for whom
dancing is the core religious practice of its members, who aim to convene a Council
and Church of Sacred Dance in the Bay Area.^20 And in others still, events possess a
strong resonance of rapture, as with Spurgeon’s neo-chiliastic faith that ‘Heaven is a
rave on Earth’. Once, he states, ‘we bridge the gap between that which is “above”
and that which is “below”...the Party can really begin’.^21 Perhaps with its most
infamous appearance in the annual Burning Man Festival— where the blazing and
exploding ‘Man’ sublimates the ‘private apocalypse’ sought by a great many of the
34 GRAHAM ST JOHN