The biggest trend in British dance music isn’t DJs rinsing Spice Girls edits or men in dressing gowns playing trance on TikTok, depressing as those actualities may be. No, the real shift underway is that clubs are in decline. Festival lineups may be packed with cost-effective DJs, but dedicated venues continue to shut down at an alarming rate – by one count, we’re losing five a week in the UK. Parties are more expensive to put on, tickets are harder to shift, and raving as British weekend culture is being crushed by everything from the cost-of-living crisis to dating apps and gym culture. While big festivals from Glastonbury to All Points East are increasingly dominated by dance lineups, many small clubs – the spots where the new, weird and interesting music actually happens – can barely afford to keep the lights on.
What’s weird, though, is that I can’t remember a time when people talked about dancing as much as they are right now, despite apparently not doing it as much. In the last few years I’ve bought three books specifically about dancing – more than in 10 years of writing about dance music – and noticed rave-themed reading groups popping up to analyse them. At the ICA in London, for instance, participants have been discussing “what it means to rave in the contemporary moment” via close readings of writers and choreographers. It’s now standard practice for festivals to run panel talks alongside the music, talking about issues like inclusion on dancefloors and creating safe(r) spaces.
What’s going on here? Could it be possible that the idea of “the rave” has become more appealing than actually going out? It’s certainly a Friday night feeling I’ve had once or twice. But there’s a strange contradiction to be untangled: we seem to be celebrating and analysing raving at the very moment that it’s in retreat as a cultural mainstay, no longer such an inevitable rite of passage for British youth, nor such a powerful engine for transmitting sonic vanguardism to the masses. So why now?
Thinking back to my first experiences in London clubs in the mid-00s, I don’t remember anyone talking about dancing much. “Dance music” was a term that described the music itself, not the varieties of self-expression on the dancefloor, or anything like moves, routines or choreography. Dance music as a pastime was about collecting and organising specialist knowledge, and then gatekeeping it in myriad ways. In her 90s sociological study of dance music, Sarah Thornton described club culture as a competitive attempt to hoard cultural capital – a game that men usually won. That chimes with my early club experiences, when women DJs were still extremely rare, and the emphasis on (knowing about) music over (feeling about) dancing was made clear on overcrowded dancefloors where the DJ was always the focal point, whether you were in a premium superclub or under a grotty railway arch.
But the current interest in talking about dancefloors suggests an inversion of the dance-to-music hierarchy. It’s not that there’s suddenly more room to dance, or that our moves are any more interesting – it’s more that the focus of clubbing has shifted away from records, labels and genres; away from ranking, cataloguing and classifying; away from the content of dance music and towards its context. DJs might dispute this. Fine – it’s their job to be custodians of the knowledge, conservators of the lineage and all that. But if you’ve been hanging around dance music for long enough, you may also have sensed this reorientation back towards the dancefloor: a heightened sensitivity to vibes and moods, a preoccupation with the makeup of the crowd and the inclusion and exclusion of various groups, and at the very edge of all that, dancing itself.
The three books I mentioned capture this change in different ways, each of them framing dancers as the true centre of club culture: Emma Warren’s Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through The Dancefloor, McKenzie Wark’s Raving, and Luis-Manuel Garcia Mispireta’s Together Somehow: Music, Affect And Intimacy On The Dancefloor. (A bonus mention might also go to Rainald Goetz’s Rave, an impressionistic memoir of ‘90s Berlin which was finally published in English in 2020.)
Warren’s extremely readable book upends the usual rave-historical approach by centring her own experiences of dancing, not just in clubs but in live venues, community centres, after-school classes and living rooms, before expanding to dancefloors throughout time and space, from the jazz panic in Irish dancehalls to dubstep nights at Plastic People. It’s a book about “improvised, ordinary dancing,” as she puts it, and in particular it’s written for those like Warren – a longtime music journalist – who love to dance but don’t consider themselves dancers, perhaps due to shyness or even dyspraxia. It also reads as a gentle rejection of dance music’s knowledge-hoarding and gatekeeping tendencies, and a feminist rebuttal to the shelves of dance music history that care more about drum machines than people. Her point is not just that dancing is good for you, both physically and mentally (there’s plenty of research to prove that) but to encourage us to dance more freely than we do, regardless of our perceived talents.
Some people don’t need any extra encouragement. Wark’s compact book of “auto-theory” takes just one type of dancing as its example, reflecting on her nights out in New York’s growing underground rave scene in the years before, during and after the pandemic. The music is important (with the kick drum paramount) but specific records are not. She names a few DJs but tells us more about the clothes she’s wearing, a dancefloor crush that doesn’t pan out, and the chemical rituals that offer dissociation as a homebrew method of processing both her gender dysphoria and her life of alienated labour: “Techno pounds the living shit out of my brain, freeing it from nagging worries about emails unsent.”
Are books like these a reflection of a changing mood on dancefloors, or does writing about raving have its own influence on club culture? I’m tempted to think that the latter could be true, because Wark, a philosopher and academic, is one of the curators of Writing on Raving, a reading and performance series that continues where the book leaves off, with the lofty intent to “celebrate, critique, contextualize and vibe-check the rave”. At the ICA, the raving reading group was directly inspired by Wark’s book, while at Nowadays, a club in Queens, DJ Voices’ Late Nites Book Club has led discussions of Mark Harrison’s Spiral Tribe memoir and an ethnography of Goa trance.
Another book chosen for the Late Nites series is Together Somehow, written by Garcia Mispireta as an ethnographical study of the minimal techno clubs of Berlin, Paris and Chicago in the late 2000s and early 2010s. This academic book is not a typical sociological portrait of a subculture and its rules and symbols, but an attempt to theorise some of the most nebulous aspects of the rave experience, like the spontaneous intimacy that arises between strangers on the dancefloor. Garcia Mispireta (also known as a co-organiser of queer Berlin club night Room 4 Resistance) catalogues the tiniest of interactions – conversations, gestures, limbs brushing against each other – in order to reveal the paradoxes lurking behind these momentary utopias. In one section, he looks at how strict door policies function to create a vision of “managed diversity” on the dancefloor that in fact disguises acts of discrimination against undesirable bodies. Raving, in his opinion, is not some kind of proto-revolutionary social panacea, but it is a useful compromise in the here and now: a temporary obfuscation of difference that’s nonetheless powerful.
Having taken a 20-year break from clubbing and since transitioned, Wark thinks that any revolutionary potential once embodied in rave has long faded – but even still, “a good rave, on a good night – that is where I can feel like my body is not an anomaly, or rather: not the only anomaly.” Dancing offers her a feeling of dissociation that extends from her body to time itself, opening up a temporary void of “world-historical dissociation” that allows her to switch off from the bleak headlines and “forget that there’s no future”.
It’s probably no coincidence that none of these authors are straight men, whom Wark identifies as the group least likely to take up rave’s offer of bodily euphoria and dissolution, pitying those who “can’t let the beat take them. Can’t dissociate out of their masculinity.” That’s a sentiment I felt but couldn’t quite articulate back in the mid-00s, when I mostly went to straight techno clubs and got bored with dancing that felt regimented and lacking in expression. Dancing is a technology for escaping our bodies by submitting to the beat, says Wark – therefore rave “is for the ones who can dissociate out of the enclosed shell of their bodies, into the mix.”
This is rarefied language in which to talk about getting off your box and dancing until daylight, an experience plenty of people have had without wanting to write a book about it. Still, Raving belongs to a tradition that stretches back to the mid-90s, when techgnostics and cyberpunks were cooking up their own theory-fiction about “the chemical generation”, coining neologisms adapted from the hard sciences of computing, virology and genetics. This time, though, academic writing on rave is fleshy and gaseous, focused on bodies, moods and vibes – which itself is a reflection of the so-called “affective turn” in philosophy and cultural studies, subjects that attract more than their fair share of ravers and DJs as students.
The essayist Geoffrey Mak, who co-founded the Writing On Raving series, suggested to me in an email that the “academisation of the rave” is related to the culture’s “increasing proximity to the art world, which relies on critical theory to justify itself.” At first I didn’t see the connection. Why would rave culture be any closer to the art world than it was 20 years ago? But Chris Zaldua, another American writer and DJ who wrote an essay for Writing On Raving, thinks the “academisation” has been fuelled by the increasing inaccessibility of the institutional art world. “The kind of young, smart, arty people who would’ve written about visual art in ArtForum [magazine] before are turning their analytical mind toward rave,” he told me by email, “because it still feels transgressive, and because it’s a community-focused activity just as that becomes harder to find.” Feeling atomised and alienated by a world ruled over by privatised platforms, surveillance technology and engagement metrics, we might approach a mass of sweaty bodies in a room as the beginnings of a counterculture.
One confusing factor is that while clubbing in the UK has slowly retreated from its mainstream position as a driving force of youth culture, the opposite has happened in North America, where rave culture has shaken off the baggy PLUR vibes of the 90s underground and been juiced up by a generation who discovered electronic music after the 2010s EDM explosion. This expansion has been a boon for rave-theorising, too. LA-based journalist Michelle Lhooq has been following these developments for years in her Rave New World newsletter, clocking the interactions between America’s post-EDM underground and the West Coast stoner-psychedelic scene, embodied in her own non-alcoholic Shroom Rave party. (To close the circle, Lhooq recently joined Wark for a recorded conversation about the “phenomenological, spiritual, and cultural aspects of raving” for the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society.)
Looking on from this side of the Atlantic, I wonder if I sometimes detect a note of puritanical moralism in the American academisation of rave? There seems to be a need to justify all this hedonism and excess pleasure as, in fact, an important technique of self-actualisation or community building or other meaning-making activity, in a way that doesn’t occur so readily to Brits, for whom alcohol is the problematic cornerstone of social life. That’s not to deny the possibility that raves can be zones of personal and political transformation, but I’m reminded of the wellness lingo that’s attached itself to the “psychedelic renaissance” in clinical and therapeutic settings. People are now paying thousands of dollars to have a life-changing epiphany at the ketamine clinic, even though they could roll the dice on the same experience – or a totally different, much weirder and more entertaining one – for a hundredth of the price at 5am in the club.
This tendency towards academisation has turned the dancefloor into a kind of ideological zone of contestation rather than just a receptacle for weekend hedonism. It has also coincided with an increasing politicisation of club culture over the last decade, from the 2010s rejection of #allmalelineups through to the current mobilisation around the genocide in Gaza. In music magazines, artist profiles and scene reports are often framed around a political or identitarian aspect of club culture, from the reclamation of Black and queer histories within a white-washed mainstream, to lesser-heard narratives around mental health, neurodivergence and disability.
Mostly this development has been a welcome course-correction for club culture, even if we’ve had to cringe through brand activations like Smirnoff’s Equalizer, a campaign designed to embarrass you into listening to more women producers on Spotify. But sometimes the desire to trace progressive politics onto partying has produced paper-thin readings of club culture, particularly when simplified for mass consumption. In a pessimistic polemic for The Baffler recently, Hubert Adjei-Kontoh dismissed dancefloor politics as a mixture of revolutionary cosplay and clout-chasing hypocrisy. Criticising the music press for their performative allyship in response to Black Lives Matter, he suggested that what “socially aware” clubgoers actually want from politics “is the relevance that a superficial commitment to identity politics provides along with a justification for hedonism.”
He isn’t wrong to detect the self-serving motivations of the music press, though I doubt he’s going to the kind of parties that Garcia Mispireta hosts, where dancefloor politics means something concrete, whether it’s harm reduction initiatives or solidarity with Palestine (even when that comes at a cost). Adjei-Kontoh’s conclusion is that raves, as events “curated to a self-selecting minority”, cannot lead to successful political actions. But recent history suggests that communities built on dancefloors are highly capable of mobilising when events demand it, whether internally, like setting higher standards for community care after Covid, or externally, like the protests and boycotts against the genocide in Gaza led by Strike Germany and Ravers 4 Palestine.
The fact that this conversation made it into the pages of The Baffler, the “magazine of art, criticism, and political analysis,” only demonstrates the broad relevance that raving now has to another self-selecting minority, that of highbrow magazine subscribers in America. What have we gained in this transition, then? Does imposing academic jargon onto a party help to document the culture for posterity? Or, as journalist Emily Witt suggested in her New Yorker review of Wark’s book, does it subject raving to a process of “museum-ification”? Does the academisation of rave do anything to secure its future? There’s no real mechanism for this in the UK or the US, where the academy is already viewed with suspicion by politicians and the media. Let’s see if UNESCO’s badge of recognition for Berlin techno prevents any clubs from being shut down. (As it happens, Witt is about to publish her own book about dancing, a memoir of NYC raving in the 2010s called Health And Safety: A Breakdown.)
The rave experience, like the psychedelic experience, is highly resistant to being recreated through language. No amount of theorising is likely to change that; I doubt that the “wrong” ideas will take hold, or even that the wrong politics will be inscribed into the scene. Nothing is ever so concrete. Just as the existence of trip reports on Erowid never ruined anyone’s acid revelation, trying to pin down the route to Wark’s so-called “xeno-euphoria” (a “euphoric state of welcome strangeness”) could never subtract from its glow once you get there.
Raves and trips exist in similar in-between zones, where two things can be true at once. Partying is political; partying changes nothing. Raving is reconstitutive; raving is self-destructive. Reconnect with your body; dissociate from your body. Thousands of people already go clubbing every week without ever being exposed to this discursive niche-within-a-niche, and that’s just fine. The important thing is that they’ve still got somewhere to go next weekend, and the weekend after that. I would hope that our late-onset celebration of rave doesn’t also serve as its eulogy, but as I said, two things can be true at once.
