Rave Semiotics
The rave movement began in the mid-80s as a result of the spread of house music, the discovery of MDMA’s (a.k.a Ecstasy, E, X, Adam, XTC) recreational uses and the simultaneous emergence of a new counter movement. To the rest of society, and especially after the punk movement, ravers did not seem to have any clear philosophy or goals. They appeared to be rebellious youth that enjoyed the consumption of mind-altering drugs during all night parties where they danced to strange, mechanical and repetitive music, which to most observers seemed completely unnatural and nothing more than noise.
The movement definitely made ‘Noise’, but not just from their late night music fests. The ravers, who soon came to form a strong underground subculture, were jamming mainstream capitalistic ideology with their non-conformist music, fashion, philosophy and appropriation of space. The media soon caught unto the trend that was becoming more global as the 80s were coming to an end. Soon enough the word ‘rave’ had lost its original underground meaning, and was filled with new distorted meaning by the mainstream media. ‘Ravers’ became those dissident youth that danced like hooligans to repetitive beats, took that new ‘killer’ drug ‘E’, and performed wild sexual acts during their communal gatherings.
It only seems appropriate to start an essay on the semiotics of rave subculture with an examination of the word ‘rave’. The association of this verb to the acid house scene that began to proliferate in the Europe and North America around 1986 can be traced back to its usage in 1966 to describe an all night party where groupies ‘raved’ all night with “The Soft Machine” and “Pink Floyd”. At the time, it was used to evoke the nymphomania of the teenage girls that participated in this event. The word did not reappear much until the mid-80s and by 1989, it was common ‘parlance’ among members of the house community in verb, noun and adjective format (Reynolds 1998: 64).
The word itself has...
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