Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture |
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Simon Reynolds
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Pages: 576 (Paperback)
ISBN: 033045420X
Pub: Picador
Pub date: 2008-02-01
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 10980
Reader Reviews:
A serious trip - but it's a heady one... (0/0 people found this helpful)
An exhaustively researched, and extremely insightful book that chronicles the evolution of darn near every genre and sub-genre of dance - from Detroit to dubstep.
Despite the dire cover, which pointlessly signposts this as belonging over at the gurning end of the shelf, Energy Flash contains some brilliantly inventive prose, which Reynolds employs with apparent ease, maintaining your interest as the dna of dance morphs through its myriad remixes.
Written as an overarching analysis of rave, rather than just dance music, Energy Flash also builds into a record of how the entire movement has, and continues to, act as a potent - but not always positive - force for creative, social and political change.
Reynolds is expertly adept at evoking the moods of the time, and specific scenes, and is at his most effective - and sometimes unsettling - as the music and its audience warp symbiotically into places as gritty, hard and dark as the music often becomes.
In recording this simultaneous evo/devo-lution, the author also reflects on the longtail of contemporary drug use, following each new wave of incoming ravers towards their own conclusions. Some peel off to birth slower, more sedate scenes; others chase down some majorly unsavoury damage as they stay the course; but all are united in pursuing their own brand of accelerated experience - all enticed by a beat, and that opening, crashing (but long since faded) buzz surrounding Ecstacy and the promises of an MDMA-altered state.
My two main criticisms are that Reynolds, for all his preference for the inclusive, open-minded embrace of the scenes initial ethos, can display some blatant, and extremely barbed disdain for certain genres - at which point his personal becomes needlessly political, clouding his otherwise insightful judgement, subsequently making enemies of opinion when it does not match his own.
And the other... well, done to its sheer weight of information alone, the book eventually becomes a mind-bending trip all in itself: one that undulates incessantly, keeping constant time, refusing to let you up for air. Because his writing is so clever and packed with the same attention to detail as the breakbeats and affecting sound he chronicles, Reynolds' constant peeking of your senses with sharp focus, and the frenetic facts of yet another twist or turn through sub-genre, into sub-sub-genre, can become tiring.
But in truth the latter is not a negative - just an inevitability of such a large scale work. If you can pace yourself, the rave lifespan of Energy Flash will dilate your mind to how creative we can be with just some beat, sweeps of a synth, and the kind of sweetie treats that rot far more than your teeth if you much too much.
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Categories
Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories:
Books -> Subjects -> Society, Politics & Philosophy -> Social Sciences -> Cultural Studies -> Popular Culture
Books -> Refinements -> Language (feature_browse-bin) -> English
Books -> Refinements -> Age (feature_two_browse-bin)
Books -> Refinements -> Format (binding_browse-bin) -> Paperback
uk-shops -> Education Resources -> Books -> Social Sciences -> Cultural Studies -> Popular Culture