UK - How rave music conquered America

[edgarshade]

Guardian

Simon Reynolds
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 August 2012 20.00 BST

With reader comments

After 20 years, electronic dance music has made it big in the US. And big means big. With Las Vegas's Electric Daisy Carnival grossing $40m, and DJ Skrillex commanding rock-star fees, the scene is leaving its druggy underground roots behind and being reborn as bombastic super-spectacle.

For anyone who lived through the 90s, the electronic dance music (EDM) explosion in America has an uncanny air of history-repeats about it. Massive gatherings of dancing youths dressed in garish freakadelic clothes? DJs treated like rock stars? Teenagers dropping dead from druggy excess? Didn't this all happen once already? But the phenomenon isn't so much deja vu as a rebranding coup. What were once called "raves" are now termed "festivals"; EDM is what we used to know by the name of techno. Even the drugs have been rebranded: "molly," the big new chemical craze, is just ecstasy in powder form (and reputedly purer and stronger) as opposed to pills.

In the early 90s, KLF and C&C Music Factory, Deelite and Crystal Waters took house into the Billboard Top 40, while raves both illegal and commercial sprouted on the east and west coasts – an escalation that climaxed with 1993's Rave America, which drew 17,000 to the Californian amusement park Knots Berry Farm. Then came a lull until the electronica buzz of 1997, when MTV threw its weight behind the Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers, and Underworld. In the immediate years that followed, Fatboy Slim and Moby achieved ubiquity in TV commercials and movie soundtracks, while trance music of the fluffy Paul van Dyk/Paul Oakenfold type spurred a resurgence of raves in southern California, which by the turn of the millennium reached the 20-40,000 range.

"The association of techno with ecstasy, we really had to overcome that stigma," says Gary Richards of the LA-based promotions company Hard Events. "If you approach a venue owner or local authority for permits and you use the word 'rave', your business model is doomed." Richards went further than most, actually banning from his Hard Festivals such rave-era "silly stuff" as glow-sticks, dummies, and cuddly toys.

More...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/02/how-rave-music-conquered-america

 

[edgarshade]

Banning glow-sticks, dummies and cuddly toys I can understand. But why ban ecstasy????

 

[the toad]

Lol ^

 

[J.Wallace]

From a business stand point, I totally understand why they would refrain from using the word rave. NYC rave scene is very much like that, a lot of legal venues will not host parties if they are deemed a rave. Oceana Hall, for example. One event, they are semi-cool. Next, they are checking everyone's shoes and even socks for drugs. It was a mad house. All because at first they weren't aware it was going to be a rave. Second time around, they were tight on security.