hmm..
i didn't do E until i was about a year into the scene, then did a bit for a while and stopped, because of tolerance and concerns about negativity.
as far as i'm concerned i get to give myself the oldskewl title because i have highly legitimate claims towards raverization in 1995 and that's old enough. at any rate, i've been in the scene a whole damned lot longer than 98% of the other kids, who are therefore in no position to tell me i don't get some special title in exchange for it.
raving is pretty harsh: you deal with social turnover, physical exhaustion, watching the scene decline and stuff like that. therefore, after some period of time you get to call yourself oldskool and wow, it's worlds of plur. (not that i'd call myself oldskool around anyone who wasn't new. especially someone who started with the orbital parties...)
on true ravers: i am a true raver, trust. after a few minutes, i could tell you if you were too... you might roll, you might not, but if you're true you will have some special quality that makes this your scene.
like this:
We are and were the few and the great of the ended world, who chose not to become trapped in the gears and wires of the great machine, but to become one with the iron and copper, and to celebrate the crackling energy at each moment.
For a blazing eternity we seized madly at the levers and wheels of the machine, we groped in the darkness for a pulsing mass of life, we cried in the thunder for a kindred spirit, and we found in the madness what it meant to be alive...
... which should show you there aren't many people in the true raver category at all.
so, these labels... all of them have negative connotations. any newbie will throw you into the reject bin if you call their all-night techno dance party a "rave", once they find that out. therefore people seem to think of dirty candy e-tards when they think of "ravers".
[i think either of the glorious eight-foot-tall heroic knights in phat pants that once towered above me in the elder days, or of the snobby little bastards that replaced them, depending on context. =)]
"party kid" makes me think of someone who's experienced enough to know about the toxicity of the R-word, but not really fully matured. they're there primarily for fun, to party, and it actually makes me think of e-tards more than "raver" does.
then you got your subgenres, all of which have some negative connotation to various incompatible groups. mean junglists, techno snobs, e-tarded candies, mainstream tranceheads, and so on.
this is why, after 6 years of electronic music, i still do not have one of those neat little classifications.
