The ersatz version of a scene can siphon off the people who don’t require it for a sense of belonging, as McKenzie Wark puts it in her new book, “ Raving,” a monograph about the original, more subversive notion of the rave as she experienced it recently in its revival, over the past several years, in certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. In dance music, as in many cultural pursuits, the wrong people have tended to make all the money, but subcultures can also be protected by this kind of misunderstanding. This February, the electronic-pop music producers Fred again., Skrillex, and Four Tet billed a sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden that ended at midnight as a “pop-up rave.” Elon Musk threw a nine-thousand-person promotional “rave” at the Tesla factory outside Berlin in 2021. and a sound system that its organizers wanted to give a frisson of hedonism. The word “rave” lost meaning, and came to refer to any kind of happening involving a d.j. The profits of a denatured, commercially engineered version of the sound enriched a coterie of mostly white male artists who remixed pop hits and played festivals sponsored by corporations. Like many other subcultures, the rave was quickly co-opted. There was also an expectation of endurance, of a collective experience that would continue through the night and into the morning. Renegade in spirit, they were conceived of in part to engineer an alternative reality for a few hours, a place where ordinary rules of consciousness and comportment would not apply. Raves were often illegal in the sense that they violated licensing rules, and because people often used banned substances. There’s no strict definition for what constitutes a rave, but in the past the word connoted an underground gathering, usually at some kind of repurposed space, such as a warehouse, a skate park, or a farmyard. The word “rave” to describe a certain style of partying associated with electronic music came into general use in England in the late eighties, after Detroit techno and Chicago house d.j.s began crossing the Atlantic to perform and inspired their British and Continental imitators. The scene and the sound globalized rapidly, but as an American subculture early electronic dance music was characterized by a science-fictional Futurism pursued through experimental sound, social mixing, free-form radio, pride in Blackness and queerness, altered states of consciousness, style, discernment, and technological innovation. Techno was invented by a group of Black artists from Detroit in the early nineteen-eighties.

Wark defines ravers as people “who seek out k-time, who need ravespace, enlustment, and/or xeno-euphoria.” Photograph by McKenzie Wark

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