RAVING, by Hari Kunzru

Reviews of:
ALTERED STATE: THE STORY OF ECSTASY CULTURE
AND ACID HOUSE
by Matthew Collin and John Godfrey.
Serpents Tail, 314 pp., £18.99, 10 April, 1 85242 377 3
and
DISCO BISCUITS
edited by Jane Champion.
Sceptre, 300 pp., £6.99, 5 February, 0 340 68265 6

'ECSTASY' is a brand name. According to tradition, the tag first
became attached to the drug MDMA (34
methylenedioxymethamphetamine) some time in the early Eighties,
when it moved out of the American psychotherapeutic community, in
which it had circulated for over a decade, and into wider use as a
recreational drug. The streetdealers needed something punchy, and
with its connotations of sexual abandon, the word 'ecstasy' propelled
the drug into mass use, international prohibition and ultimately a social
significance only matched, in the pharmaceutical stakes, by the
flowering of an LSD culture during the Sixties.
First synthesised in 1912 by the Merck pharmaceutical
company of Darmstadt, MDMAintended merely as a base for the
preparation of other medicamentshad been largely forgotten until
Alexander Shulgin, a Californian chemist, made up a batch in I966.
Shulgin, whose unusual psychopharmacological research had begun to
get him into trouble with his employer, the Dole Chemical Company,
was the first to recognise MDMA's moodaltering effects; he called itan
'empathogen'. So deeply affected was he by his MDMA experiences
that he eventually resigned his job, built a laboratory in his garden shed,
and embarked on thirty years of research into the drug and related
compounds, In PIHKAL ('Phenethylamines I Have Known And
Loved'), his autobiographycumpharmacopoeia, he gives details of
179 of them.
In 1977, Shulgin gave MDMA to Leo Zoff, an elderly
psychologist. Zoff, on the verge of retiring, instead became the drug's
most zealous convert, travelling around America, introducing the
substance, which was beginning to be known as 'Adam', to an
estimated four thousand other psychologists and psychiatrists. This
community of believers, many of whom had seen their hopes for LSD
therapy dashed when LSD became a drug of mass abuse, tried hard to
keep Adam a secret, discouraging press coverage and even the
publication of scientific papers. But Adam's transformation into Ecstasy
had its own momentum, and in I985 possession was made a criminal
offense in the United States.
Saatchi and Saatchi could not have improved on the choice of
the word 'ecstasy'. In the ten years since the drug burst into the British
popular consciousness, the 'ecstatic' aspect of MDMA has gripped the
imagination of the press. The enduring tabloid version of Ecstasy use
depicts the interior of a club; seminaked girls with Iycra tops and water
bottles; boys with their shirts off, chewing gum; dilated pupils,
hormones and sweat. The drug's name is enough to make
commentators feel they understand what is going onan unhealthily
Pavlovian form of pleasuretaking, vacuous, escapist and pernicious.
Combine this with the shyly smiling face of Leah Betts, who took 'just
one tablet' on her 18th birthday and promptly died, and you have a
powerful story. Here is a drug that transforms your daughter from a
well broughtup girl into a banshee nymphet, and in the process could
very possibly kill her: a persuasive argument for prohibition. Public
debate now places Ecstasy firmly in a medicolegal context the only
acceptable framework for discussion of any proscribed substance. As a
means of understanding the drug's impact on society, this has obvious
limitations: the rhetoric of 'escapism', 'illegality' and 'selfharm' is
powerless to explain the rich and diverse culture which has rapidly
developed around the drug.
At the centre of this culture is music. The evolution of House
and Techno, synthetic descendants of Seventies disco and European
electronic pop, has been largely driven by the Ecstasy experience. In a
process begun by the pioneers of black dance music in the Sixties,
familiar elements of traditional popular songversechorusverse
structure, harmonic resolutionswere stripped away, leaving eerie
cyclical patterns of bass and drums, overlaid with the barest remnants
of melody. These hypnotic, tranceinducing rhythms and sparse,
repetitive melodic loops, almost incomprehensible to ears accustomed
to more conventional musical forms, can make startling and beautiful
sense when combined with MDMA.
House music (the term has come to stand for only one genre,
but is a plausible generic label) has no regard for the ideal of virtuosiq
which governs not only 'classical' music, but rock and jazz. In place of
the guitar hero, and the quasireligious cults of personality which drive
popular music marketing, are artists who may never 'perform' in
public, may make music under a plethora of different names, and
distribute their work through an underground network of DJs and
specialist record shops. At the receiving end, the listeners and dancers
may never even have a sense of the individual 'work' at all,
experiencing it merely as an element in a DJ's mix of sounds, which,
though usually derived from recorded media, may also include live
elements produced by manipulating electronics or (more rarely)
traditional instruments.
Music is only one element in the most visible product of
Ecstasy culturethe parties. From the famous M25 raves of the late
Eighties to the current proliferation of commercial nightclubs, Ecstasy
has changed the patterns of British leisure. For many people, Saturday
night now continues until sunrise, rather than stopping when the pubs
shut. Though the combination of music, lightshow and dancing has
welldocumented origins in the psychedelic allnighters of the Sixties, in
its modern form the illegal rave (now an endangered species) can be an
experience of unprecedented potency. The sense of affirmation and
shared purpose, of celebration, almost of religious ritual, not to
mention the sheer uncomplicated fun of a large number of people
brazenly doing something illicit, together produce events which, while
centring on a drug, are not fairly represented by the mindless lotus
eating of tabloid myth.
A 1994 Home Office survey estimates that up to a million
Britons have tried E; and something like a million tablets are consumed
every weekend. At ten pounds a dose, that represents an industry
turning over half a billion pounds annually, supported by 2 per cent of
the population, all of whom are breaking the law to participate.
'Ecstasy culture', then, is a name for rather more than a collection of
ephemeral trends in music, fashion or the visual arts.
Matthew Collin and John Godfrey have interviewed many of
the key figures in Ecstasy's journey from a Californian 'penicillin for the
soul' to a blackmarket leisure industry. From this material and their
own experiences, they have put together a fascinating history. While
the authors make no secret of their allegiances (the book is dedicated
to 'all the friends who lived it with us'), Altered State examines
policing strategies, media coverage and health scares with the same care
that it devotes to the diverse cultural roots of Acid House music and its
more recent offshoots.
Unlike LSD, which from Aldous Huxley onwards attracted a
selfappointed avant garde, concerned with shaping and directing the
'consciousness revolution', Ecstasy, in its postShulgin incarnation, has
been a resoundingly democratic drug. Collin and Godfrey emphasise
the diversity of its devotees, from snobbish New Romantic starlets in
the VIP rooms of midEighties London nightclubs to itinerant thieves on
the beaches of Ibiza. A classless drug for a newlyproclaimed classless
society.
As Collin and Godfrey put it, 'Ecstasy culture seemed to ghost
the Thatcher narrative echoing its ethos of choice and market
freedom, yet expressing desires for a collective experience that
Thatcher rejected and consumerism could not provide.' The
proponents of LSDdriven psychedelic revolution have tended to
excoriate E culture's lack of ideology, portraying its appropriation of
the loveandpeace rhetoric of the Sixties as debased or superficial. An
American researcher, quoted in Altered State, recalls that 'the man
who first named it "Ecstasy" told me that he chose the name because it
would sell better than calling it "Empathy". "Empathy" would be more
appropriate, but how many people know what it means?'
In the climate of Tory Britain, MDMA's biochemical effect
took on an oppositional character. Shulgin's 'empathogen' provided a
powerful counterargument to the bleak vision of atomised individuals
competing for scarce resources. Hugging a complete stranger in the
centre of a crowded dancefloor is still something worth driving zoo
miles for; it is worth the risk of arrest on drugs charges, worth a face
off with the police in a muddy field. Indeed, the fact that the state has
seemed so concerned to prevent the formation of such obviously
communal events is a source of moral confusion for many young
people.
The language of epic struggleWar on Drugs v. Freedom to
Partyis deployed on both sides of the Ecstasy divide. In the late
Eighties and early Nineties, a period of huge, illegal outdoor raves,
there was a sense that a battle was being waged for the soul of Britain.
Local worthies whose communities were disrupted believed they were
engaged in a lastditch defence of the citadel. To the ravers the issues
seemed equally clear. When the drug that catalyses your most intense
and positive experiences is declared illegal, when (in the absence of
unbiased medical information) governmentsponsored doctors seem to
be brokering scare stories, when the police attempt to prevent you and
your friends from coming together, could you not be forgiven for
feeling that you are at war?
Conspiracy theories aside, the spectacle of parental authority in
the guise of the police attempting to halt parties is almost a parody of
youth culture's primal scene the kids v. the straights, the town where
the preacher and the police chief ban dancing. Yet this opposition, the
stuffof musicals or light comedy, has now been enshrined in law. The
Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 includes various anti
rave provisions and, notoriously, the first ever legal definition of a
genre of music, enabling the police to break up gatherings where
people are listening to amplified sounds 'wholly or predominantly
characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats'.
This description of House or Techno music is included in the
CJA's list of criteria by which a policeman can tell he is in the
presence of a 'rave', and may legitimately close it down (it must also
be at least 'partly' outdoors and disturbing local residents). It doesn't
always work, however, as I discovered at a small park on the South
Coast. Things were well underway, with the soundsystem pumping and
two or three hundred wideeyed people dancing by firelight when, as
expected, the police arrived. Immediately the DJ switched from techno
to 20thcentury choral music. The bemused coppers were treated to
the spectacle of a couple of hundred people stumbling around to the
work of the Estonian composer, Arvo Part. They hung about for ten
minutes, powerless to stop the event then left, much to the
disappointment of a group of partygoers who had been enjoying the
flashing blue lights.
The CJA definition has confirmed what the dancers already
suspected: that as far as the authorities are concerned, drugs are not
the only problem. Implicit in the whole lifestyle, the parties, the
hedonism, even the simple act of staying up all night is a rejection of
the 'traditional' values of continence, moderation and the moral value
of work which it was, for 18 years, the mission of Conservative
government to inculcate. With the CJA, dancing became, in a small
way, a political action, and 'ravers' (in 1997 already a quaint word)
joined travellers, immigrants, single mothers and the unemployed in
Conservative demonology.

MUSIC, fashion, photography, computer animation and club
visuals have all done well out of E. Writers, on the other hand, have
relatively little to offer the scene, except in an afterthefact way as
reporters, chroniclers or mythologists. The sleeve note and the club
review don't offer much scope for verbal creativity, which in a party
setting is the sole preserve of the MCs who whip up the crowd in clubs
and rap over the music on pirate radio. Disco Biscuits, a collection of
new fiction from the chemical generation', is a conscious attempt to
create the canon of Ecstasy fiction which has conspicuously failed to
appear in the last ten years. It is a difficult project. To many observers,
the lack of 'serious' Erelated cultural material (which almost invariably
means writing) is an indicator that the experience of Ecstasy is
ultimately vacuous. When I mentioned Disco Biscuits at a (non
dancing) party, I was asked whether 'people who take E' actually read
books. From Shulgin onwards, grandiose statements have been made
about E's ability to enhance emotional articulacywhy, then, the
literary silence?
Disco Biscuits is unlikely to make many converts. The writing is
at its best when, as in Gavin Hills's 'White Burger Danny', it restricts
itself to a neardocumentary account of parties and people. E culture's
variety is well represented, and Martin Millar's squatland South
London, Alex Garland's backpacker Thailand, Jonathan Brook's Ibiza
and Jeff Noon's fantastical Manchester have little in common, apart
from the constant presence of narcotics. Ecstasy is only part of the
roster of drugs, real and imaginary, which seems to form the
collection's primary raison d'etre. At times this obsession with the
brute act of drugtaking degenerates into something very like chemical
pornography, texts which exist only to record heroic feats of
consumption. The reader comes away with little from 'Two Fingers'
Puff' or Nicholas Blincoe's 'Ardwick Green' other than a desire to skin
up and to avoid mixing acid, speed, Ecstasy, cocaine, smack and amyl
in the men's room of a provincial nightclub.

A SENSE OF PLEASURES guiltily taken pervades the book, as
if the sheer weight of moral sanction against drug use had forced much
of the writing into its present shape. Several of the stories get no
further than attempting to convey sense impressions of paradoxically
compressed and edgy good times. Many seem to be struggling against
the influence of the canonical drugwritings of the Beat and Hippy eras.
Burroughs looms large, as do Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. In
these respects, the book is accurate: the guild darkness hovering at the
edges of pleasure, and the Oedipal battle with a generation of former
rebels turned cultural arbiters, are authentic aspects of Nineties
experience. After Aids and the massive comedown ofthe Eighties, the
sense of childlike celebration which characterises many classic Sixties
drugculture texts is no longer available. We are not allowed to forget
that pleasure has a price, nor do we have the luxury of believing in
permanent revolution or the imminent dawning of the age of Aquarius.
The aura of teen rebellion which surrounds the battle between
E culture and British Conservatism tends to obscure the seriousness of
the issues it raises. While Disco Biscuits rarely rises above the ephemera
of the scene, Altered Statc keeps politics in the foreground even as it
tells picaresque stories of rave promoters with suitcases of cash,
Manchester lads breaking into warehouses or Spiral Tribe's Iain
Sinclairish attempt to topple the state by setting up a soundsystem on
an occult spot near that symbol of Eighties greed, Canary Wharf. As
the idealism of the early years of Acid House fades, buried by mass
market clubbing and the current revival in the popularity of cocaine,
this kind of stocktaking is needed if we are to understand the long
term impact of an era which pitted the state against the young, and
created an endemic distrust of authority.