Explaining Rave Culture to Americans
finelikewine
"ONCE UPON A TIME, I HAD A VINYL." http://www.discogs.com/user/permabulker 1,416 Posts
Check this article:
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/rave-culture-a-handy-guide-for-middle-america
Yeah, it's the shitty vice magazine, but on this one they nailed it.
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/rave-culture-a-handy-guide-for-middle-america
Yeah, it's the shitty vice magazine, but on this one they nailed it.
Comments
It's the reason why it's called Molly, as it's missing a Molecule from MDMA...and it's basically packs more speed and less euphoria than MDMA.
Question now being...where has all the MDMA gone? In comparison, this MDA shit ain't cutting it and I'm wondering what happened to all the X, otherwise known by British doofuses as E?
I haven't checked for it since a few months after gavin mcinnes left. it seemed like the period afterwards was entirely written by fanboys doing their best impression of him. i will revisit a newer issue on your recommendation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/business/media/05vice.html?_r=0
Tom Freston is what happened. I wouldn't say they've upped their game all that much, they're just pumping out way more content than they used to, so the odds of them putting out something good has increased.
from what I understand MDMA is harder to synthesize than MDA, and I think the people who used to make it have mostly been shut down. There's a surprisingly small circle of people who make drugs like MDMA and LSD, since it takes more advanced chemistry knowledge and an expensive set up. Unless you're a lab in China making unscheduled substances to sell on the internet, it's hard to have the set up necessary to make the stuff without the feds taking notice.
here's a somewhat related video, also from Vice:
this is another one, about the man who let MDMA loose on the general public
http://www.vice.com/hamiltons-pharmacopeia/sihkal-shulgins-i-have-known-and-loved#ooid=J3NWhpMjr2dP6udgQK4vEpscvcOHB0_u
full disclosure: I worked on both those pieces. I used to do freelance work for Vice until about a year ago, when I moved out of NYC.
the vice SPORTS department?
fucking hilarious.
I remember in the early 90s i met this older chick that moved east when her mormon family booted her out for being a latter day saints black sheep. I think i was 14 and she was 17 or 18. i used to sneak out of my moms house, and she would pick me up and take me on these scavenger hunts just to get tickets to some asbestos infested warehouse party. i always thought those people at the smart bar looked stupid as hell. And i REALLY didnt understand how someone would want to listed to techno in the car. Basically anyone that thinks this amounted to a culture, or sub culture, is TRIPPING. You took drugs and danced like an idiot... congrats
American Rave Culture = Euroman Hip Hop
haha yes!
Talmbout asbestos filled derelict warehouses
Sounds like your parents.
OK, well, that's interesting. I'd assumed they were attempting to write their way out the hipster-trash rut they seemed to have dug themselves into a few years back. Of course, they still do the same shit they've always done (for better or worse), but there now appears to be greater emphasis on the kind of reportage that was a hallmark of The Face at its mid-80s-to-mid-90s best, which is something worth aspiring to. The music content is much improved, too; solid and diverse, and far less trendy-wendy than it used to be. I get the impression the long-term objective might be to turn it into a hipper version of Vanity Fair, as opposed to a hipster version.
Vice bought i-D at the end of last year, much to the dismay of a friend of mine who used to edit it and was working on a proposal to revamp and reposition it. She's convinced they're going to fuck it up.
the owners have always looked at Rolling Stone as their model in a way - at least in the sense that RS won a pulitzer the first year it was published, and that's their dream, to get a little RESPEK. But the magazine at this point is a bit of a sideshow for them, even if it's how they made their name. The idea is to turn them into a new MTV kind of brand, in the same way MTV was sold to advertisers in the 90s - they can claim to have access to an audience that traditional media outlets can't reach, which consists of mostly young people with expendable income.
Gavin took a good chunk of the hipster-trash content with him, as you can tell by visiting his current website:
http://www.streetbonersandtvcarnage.com/
now that they're trying to attract more mainstream advertisers I think they've toned things down a bit, and they've added areas that they would never talk about before, like sports and US politics. On that front, what I've seen so far is pretty weak and at times completely clueless. For example, they've always had stories that sympathize with left-wing movements abroad, yet their new political writing about the US often toes the libertarian/Fox News line of thinking. The sports stuff is just aimless, they don't know what they want to talk about or what audience they want to reach. Occasionally something good pops up, usually produced by one of their foreign offices. And they can do the niche stuff well, like Epicly Later'd - I could give a shit about skateboarding, but people I know who are into it really love that series.
Spot on. There's noticable shift to the mainstream and I'm sure the ads were a factor but (at least in the London office) there's also recognition that Vice had become too self-indulgent. and associated with the wankiest kind of hipster in too many people's minds. It always had good pieces, just not enough of them. Much bigger focus on music for them now with Noisey which I think will be a success.
i'm imagining someone saying "talmbout" with a british accent...lulz
Exactly!
Rave Culture = Perfect Oxymoron
My job in Berlin in the early 90s got me in touch with many of the promoters, djs, designers, club owners etc of the techno scene. Most of those individuals were leftovers from various 80s music scenes who because of lack of talent, vision or creativity had never amounted to anything the first time around. The obvious stupidity and mental bleakness of these individuals was staggering and it was completely alienating to see how these guys managed to never allow for a bright moment in which they would have had to realize what an empty bubble this whole "culture" really was. Not only empty, this was basically an intellectual, spiritual and cultural vacuum. The only art I could notice was the art of embarrassing yourself in the most ridiculous ways in front and together with a big mass of other useless bodies. A herd of lemmings, sadly without a cliff in sight.
More or less grown people jumping up and down (their idea of dancing) like a pack of lobotomized children, waving glow sticks in the air... I had to attend numerous of these raves and had the most vivid napalm phantasies imaginable.
The end of the Love Parade, although much too late and not remotely as bloody as I would have wished for made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Says American speaking MY language
so you're not one to party then?
Dude, I party harder and have been at it for longer than most if any on here.
sorry, you sounded like a goth
Haha!
I do not disagree, though I am struggling with the replacement...?
Do you even have a good time while you pollute and shake your body about to bass purity?
Do you even enjoy yourself in a crowd of people while music is present?
See what I mean?