Rave Culture and Religion

I’m sixteen years old, don’t know anything about gay people, so I’m sitting on

the wall the whole night, you know, guarding my butt and everything, right.

And anyway, after a while...you start to see the people having fun and getting

into the music and these people [are] just so free. I mean, just animated, arms

all over the place, jumping on top of speakers, dancing with this person,

prancing over this side, on the wall, climbing the walls on top, above ’em.

(Bidder 2001:18–19)

This quote illustrates the uneasy, yet curious, relationship between gay club culture
and heterosexual masculinity. The dance style described was called ‘jacking’, a
dance-floor variant of copulating movements. The term itself is a mechanistic
metaphor, creeping into the early house imagination preparing for a discursive
development towards techno. People jacked with each other to the music, with
walls and with the speakers (Bidder 2001; Rietveld 1998b).
Deep house is tantalizingly tactile in its deep penetration and full embrace of the
body through its loudly amplified low-frequency bass lines. The 4/4 ‘foot’ of the
bass drum, mostly an analogue sound, has a warm ‘feel’, while its African-American
and Latino syncopations move the body in a variety of directions, in contrast to the
unidirectional macho ‘motorik’ of trance. In the dark space of the dance floor, the
dancer gives in to the musical soul of communal intimacy, a ‘subject-subject’
spirituality. There are some forms of techno which manage to achieve this as well,
mostly African-American and mostly a crossover with deep house’s bass lines and
soulful analogue feel. In current deep house, deep in its emotional response, the
sexual is often less explicit. While the ‘motorik’ accompanies a possession trance,
with the machine as its imagined ‘animal’ (Rouget 1985), deep house’s orgasmic
ecstasy articulates a relationship with a communal soul. In both cases, however, such
rituals strengthen vulnerable identities in times of change. Gay club cultures and
African-American forms of dance music have pioneered in this, as subjectivities
which have been under siege so long that powerful forms of dance music and
partying have been produced to heal this sense of unease, this continuous need for a
rite of passage.

Conclusion

Despite its transcendental and universal appearance, the spirit is produced in and by
the material and historical context of the self’s relationship to the ‘other’; spirituality
is thereby always embodied. In the case of raves, the favoured musical form is a
marriage between techno (functioning as a man—machine spiritual interface) and
house music (producing a powerful ritual framework). In the early 21 st century,
trance comes out on top in terms of global popularity, stripping house of its African-
American and Latino syncopated rhythms and replacing these with a Germanic
‘motorik’ pulse. One could, perhaps, conclude that techno and trance are genres
which help to make sense of a troublesome post-industrial relationship between
human and ICT.

HILLEGONDA C.RIETVELD 57