I Can't Stop Raving
It was our Friday night ritual. After school, after work, after the rest of the world started to slow to a halt, we would just be getting started. With our veins pumping nothing but caffeine and sugar, we'd shed our daytime clothes for neon in-your-face t-shirts and nylon pants big enough to hold a compact car. Following the directions on the backs of purple and blue high-gloss fliers, we'd pack the back of a heavily modified Honda Accord and set out in search of music, longing for the sounds of a bass beat. We were young, we were energetic, and we were obsessed. We were party kids.
On any given weekend, we would drive anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours to find the best rave. Sometimes we would end up in a warehouse in downtown Atlanta, sometimes in an oversized barn in southern Georgia, and one time even in a large field somewhere in Alabama. But even when the location changed, the scene never did. When we arrived, there would always be a menagerie of brightly colored Hondas, Acuras, and Mitsubishis in the parking lot, and a long line of other party kids waiting outside the venue. The bass usually penetrated the walls, shaking the night outside, and teasing us as we waited to make our way inside. It was midnight, and our night would be just beginning.
It was like entering something out of a hazy midnight dream. The rooms were always completely dark, broken only on occasion by the flashing of strobe lights and lasers. Ravers wore glow-in-the-dark accessories and carried glow sticks that would fly through the darkness like maniacal lightning bugs, while smoke machines would obscure all details with large quantities of gray mist. It was all very disorienting; sight became a secondary sense, our ears took over our awareness, and we were left at the mercy of the DJ.
In this underground (as in: not completely legit) subculture, the DJ was our Pied Piper. We traveled to hear him spin, and his music put all of us party kids under a spell. On the dance floor the music was so loud, and the bass so intense, they were tangible. Everything else in the world subsided when the throbbing sound waves entered our bones and lifted us away. Bodies packed onto the floor would pulse in tune, unconsciously, lifted by the sounds like spirits in a primal dance.
Dance halls were growing increasingly popular, on average, most people attended at least once a week. Twenty-five percent of San Francisco youths regularly attended their local halls, according to American Mercury magazine. Admission ranged from fifty cents to dollar and a half (McCutcheon 217). Many times women would supervise so that the proper rules of dancing were overlooked. Proper dance rules were that the p...
Kate's family had rented out a ballroom in a neighborhood country club, and we intended to dance the night away. As I approached the scene, disco lights streamed through the large windows and ran all over the lawn. Music enveloped the parking lot as my adrenaline began to elevate. I sauntered in, waving to my friend...
Roll the windows down, turn the music up, and drive slowly. Now you're cruising. Cruising is the art of seeing and being seen, and in Tucson the center of this art is Speedway Boulevard. This six-lane street runs east to west through Tucson and is one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city. It hosts a mix of commercial and private buildings: small shops, offices, restaurants, grocery stores, apartment buildings and older homes, as well as the University of Arizona. Despite the apartments and occasional houses, Speedway is mostly a commercial street populated with strip malls and other businesses. Cruising is most visible along the more commercial, business-oriented East Speedway, which for the purposes of this essay is defined as the three mile stretch of road from Alvernon to Wilmot. Like most streets, Speedway was built for an entirely practical reason: to conduct automobile traffic from one place to another with a minimum of waiting. This utilitarian reason is inverted by cruising. The purpose of cruising, unlike driving, is not to arrive but to not arrive. Cruising is a social activity wherein the cars become tools for meeting other people as well as a means of getting from one place to another. The reputation of cruising, and of the nighttime Speedway, is not nearly so benign. As traffic slows and the music increases, the character of Speedway as a place - that is, a focus for human memory and experience - changes to reflect the activities and desires of the cruisers.
In Justin Pearson's memoir, From the Graveyard of the arousal Industry, he recounts the events that occured from his early years of adolesence to the latter years of his adulthood telling the story of his unforgiving and candid life. Set in the late 1970s "Punk" rock era, From the Graveyard of the Arousal Industry offers a valuable perspective about the role culture takes in our lives, how we interact with it and how it differs from ideology.
Rock n’ roll gave people the voice they did not have in the early years. As the genre of music became more wide spread, people actually began to speak out. Altschuler touches on the exploration of how the rock n' roll culture roughly integrated with replaced and conflicted with preceding cultural values. Many of these values were very touch topics. Besides black civil rights, sexuality were one of the most sensitive t...
The nightclub, is an aged, small wood structure in Rhode Island. The club is reported to have a capacity of 182 people. On February 20th 2003, more than 400 fans packed into the small club to see the band. Although there are discrepancies between reports of how many people were in attendance, it is obvious that the number is well over twice the club's capacity. During the performance, as part of the act, pyrotechnics were deployed.
I was probably only twelve years old when it started, a time when bike riding and rolling your jeans were the "cool" thing to do. I was at an impressionable age, and I was trying to grow up. I wanted to be just like all the high school girls who went racing through my neighborhood in their sporty little cars, music blaring from the windows. On that particular afternoon, I was sitting in the grass next to my mailbox waiting for my friend in the next neighborhood to ride over. I heard the bass first. I didn't see anything yet- but I heard, far off, a distinct beat. I liked it already. As the noise got closer, I realized it was a song.
The sound of music can fulfil someone's ears with the rhythm of the beat or the sweet tone of the melody. Some people enjoy music with a little more “experience.” Rock, rap, and heavy metal are examples of music genres that has a reputation of using drugs to enhance the experience of the music. One other common music genre that has a reputation of drugs is EDM. Electronic Dance Music. It is a type of music typically created by using electronic devices, like a laptop, generated by a person with some talent. This music genre is known for it’s “club drugs” like ecstasy, methanamine, or magic mushrooms. (“CRC Health”) Some people use drugs at raves to “enhance” the experience and also people have tried or are trying to push the usage of drugs at rave to a certain that you can take. Many people want more security checks at raves so they can reduce the injuries and deaths at raves.
It could be argued that ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ served exemplary as testament to the changing attitudes towards rock music and psychedelic acid rock of the time. The prevalence of the genre was tangible, even the AFVN (American Forces Vietnam Network) added a special channel in 1968 for those soldiers serving overseas who had reported an interest in the musical style (Kramer, 2006). Perhaps this song was indeed the natural progression of music in a time of so much uncertainty for an entire generation fraught with equal parts revolutionary ideals and Cold War paranoia. The track’s tone, ambiance were defined by an eerily dark otherworldliness unheard of up until that point in rock music and arguably not replicated again until Black Sabbath’s NIB
So we figured everything out and and figured that Alex Kramper, Tori Main, Trevor Waller, Kristen Kesler, and me were going to the concert, the next day we met at Alex’s house to all ride in the concert together in Trevor’s truck, it was a planned booze cruise through St.Louis. So I woke up early in the morning for the Saturday concert and did my chores early in the morning so I wouldn’t have to do them the next day all hungover. I finally finish all my chores and then take a shower and head out to Alex’s house dressed in rock concert material, with a Captain Morgan handle and a case of Stag.
"Psychedelic 60's: Foreword." University of Virginia Library. 16 Dec. 2009. Web. 29 May 2010. .
While the Beats experimented with drugs, they were more mild in their departure from the mainstream culture than the counterculture of the hippies and acid-heads . Tom Wolfe observed that, ““Kerouac was the old star. Kesey was the wild new comet form the West heading Christ knows where”” (Lytle, 4). Even though Kerouac was a major part of the Beat movement and experimented with drugs, he was not cut out for the world of LSD. When considering On the Road, Sal Paradise, does in the end return home to his mother just as Kerouac did when Neal Cassady tried to get him to join Kesey. In Howl, Allen Ginsberg laments over the deprivation of his generation. He addresses one of the roots of the problem, “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!” (Part II, l.5). He blames the mechanization of the mind, prefer a more steeped in nature approach, drugs as bringing us closer to our own nature The ideas of the Beats echo in the ideas of the counter: a rejection of materialism, an embrace of experimentation with drugs, sexuality, and forms of expression, especially music. The change from the Beats to the Hippies was not so much a ra...
AUM 154.3 Music Analysis Essay - Nathan Morrissy ( Dubstep/Trap ) Include links to recorded materials (aka links to song).
The Beat Generation was a subculture that arose from the post World War II Bohemian culture in the United States. Bohemians can be defined as persons, artists, who live an unconventional life, usually amongst others also practicing this lifestyle. Bohemianism, as such, has always had a strong affiliation with the development of avant-garde as movements within art; significantly, Bohemia has been called the “underworld of art.” The Bohemian culture itself “is characterized by an active, though perhaps, irregular communalism and group dyn...
Sisario, Ben and James C. McKinley. “Drugs Deaths Threaten Rising Business of Electronic Music Fests”. New York Times. 9 Sept 2013. Web. 1 Apr 2014.