Under Our Roof: Freedom in the Early Days of House

In 2009 BBC article, Andrew Poole explains how he saw his 30 th birthday party –

a barbecue consisting of “15 people eating burgers” (“Police helicopter sent to ‘rave’”)

and some music – get shut down by a helicopter, “four police cars and a riot van”

(“Police helicopter sent to ‘rave’”). His crime? Breaking section 63 of the Criminal

Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. Section 63 of the act applies to “[gatherings] on

land in the open air of 100 or more persons (whether or not trespassers) at which

amplified music is played during the night” (“Criminal Justice and Public Order Act

1994”), where the term music “includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by

the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” (“Criminal Justice and Public Order Act

1994”). Mr. Poole had just become the unfair victim of England’s war against raves. It’s

a war that the mainstream media and political forces the world over started fighting

against those “repetitive beats” the very minute electronic dance music culture began

developing, and its effects have had a social impact that go far beyond Mr. Poole.

In its infancy, electronic dance music culture opposed all the basic tenets of

mainstream society. The media and political forces responded to this opposition as if they

were under attacked. England’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 is a prime

example of the kind of legislative action that was taken to restrict electronic dance music

events. Just one example of the dangerous, sweeping authority it granted was to give “a

constable in uniform [that] reasonably [believed] that a person is on his way to a

gathering to which section 63 applies” (“Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994”)

the power to “stop that person” (“Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994”) and

“direct him not to proceed in the direction of the gathering” (“Criminal Justice and Public
Order Act 1994”) if that person was encountered anywhere “within 5 miles of the

boundary of the site of the gathering” (“Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994”).

The media played their part by fueling a “moral panic” (“Moral Panic”) among the

populace. The moral panic was provoked by “the use of the drug ecstasy” (Crichter),

something that the media covered heavily, sensationalized, and connected with electronic

dance music events. Of the three dimensions of moral panic, as defined by Chas Crichter,

the most important for the purpose of this essay is how “it marks the boundaries of

society”. In attempting to reject electronic dance music culture, society was publicly

drawing a line between the behaviours and mentalities that it accepted and those that it

rejected. Electronic dance music culture fell on the wrong side of that line. Suddenly,

according to Rupa Huq, “the continuation of free parties [had] become highly charged

political rhetoric in itself”. An examination of the history, production standards and

ideological fundamentals of electronic dance music culture will break down the message

that raves, newly politically charged, were spreading, and just how it represented a

radical response to, and rejection of, the contemporary music industry and social norms.

The Formative Years

The very seeds of electronic dance music – it’s ancestry, it’s birthplace, and it’s

early history – were planted in anti-mainstream soil. House music, the first form of

electronic dance music “[is] a direct descendant of Disco” (“House”). Up until Saturday

Night Fever became a hit in 1977 and distorted the view of what Disco actually was, it

had had “strong initial association with gay bars” (“Disco”), which really set it apart from
mainstream culture at the time. Ellen Koskoff, editor of the Garland Encyclopedia,

explains that disco parties existed as:

private, members-only events or for a more general clientele, largely by and for

segments of urban society that identified themselves as being on the margins of

the American mainstream. These segments consisted largely of gays, African

Americans, Latinos, and women.

It’s important to remember that although modern social standards strive to eliminate signs

of homophobia and racism, it wasn’t always the case. That “association of disco with

male homosexuality and ethnic minorities” (Koskoff) put it at odds with the mainstream

rock/pop establishment. That’s largely why those parties only appealed to those on the

margins of society. Anthony Thomas explains how dance clubs existed to provide those

marginal members of society with a relief from the oppression of more mainstream clubs:

Gay black dance clubs, like New York’s Paradise Garage and Chicago’s

Warehouse (the birthplace of house music) [had] staked out a social space where

gay black men [didn’t] have to deal with the racist door policies at

predominantly white gay clubs or the homophobia of black straight clubs.

Paradise Garage and Warehouse are the undisputed birthplaces of house music, and

therefore all of electronic dance music. It’s very telling of electronic dance music’s

cultural alignment that they were explicitly established to exist separately from

dominating social standards. Hillegonda Rietveld refers to house music clubs as

“temporary autonomous zones”. They are their own little worlds; worlds that are

completely free from the negative stereotypes of everything life. Michael Brody, Paradise

Garage’s owner, considered his club to be “a home mainly for Black and Latino men and
their friends, a two-thousand capacity haven from prejudice, a decompression zone”

(Silcott 20). The prejudices that people were trying to escape were the result of

contemporary society’s fears and stigmas; these were fears and stigmas that were not at

all shared by the electronic dance music community.

The haven provided by these clubs didn’t only extend to the clientele; as fresh,

innovative and unique environments they allowed the technical side of nightclubs to

flourish and evolve as well. These two clubs nurtured the development of the DJ as we

understand it today: someone mixing two records together. These DJs took “the first

tentative steps of a development which would eventually transform the DJs role from one

of ‘human jukebox’ to a position as the central creative focus of dance music culture”

(“DJs and club culture”). This was a tremendous development. For the first time, the

central figures in a musical movement were those that the music industry couldn’t

control. DJs weren’t necessarily producers, or performers, or anyone else that required a

contract to make their living; they were simply passionate people who took the music

they loved and shared it with the masses, and they were doing it in a way that made their

role more important than ever before.

Electronic dance music culture also evolved and spread in a way that was totally

outside of the music industry’s control. The major steps in its evolution came as a result

of an individual, or a handful of individuals, personally taking the music from one

country and importing back to their own; the dance music movement was very much a

human movement. After house music’s creation in America, it underwent significant

developments in the United Kingdom, specifically London. Silcott explains how house

music made its way to London in the fall of 1987 after DJs “had all taken their first
Ecstasy trips in [a] hippie-ish, under-the-stars, beautiful, open vibe” in Ibiza, “and wanted

to re-create it” (Silcott 31). Push, someone that Silcott interviews, describes them as not

being “trendy DJs […] they didn’t have major clout […] but they wanted their summer

magic back” (Silcott 31) and so they started throwing parties. Under the U.K.’s influence,

house music evolved into acid house, a sound that gained a massive following in the U.K.

and separated electronic dance music from its associations with gay culture; it was almost

instantly embraced by the young, rebellious generation in England. This was the first

appearance of rave culture. Under it’s new guise, acid house, and the rave culture

surrounding it, was brought back to America in the early 90s by Frankie Bones, who

discovered it while DJing a party in the U.K. He was struck by it when, at the event, he

“discovered he couldn’t see the end of the human sea: before him were twenty-five

thousand people in fluo, stripey ravey gear. […] Arriving home – totally gobsmacked by

what he’d seen and experienced – he was set on importing this double-wow crazy rave

idea to Brooklyn” (Silcott 43). From those seeds, and the cross-pollination of American

and British influences, the electronic dance music landscape, as we know it today, was

born.

The Production Standards

The production of electronic music also developed with considerable disregard for

the current music industry climate. The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music notes:

House also refers to the location of its production: in contrast to disco, which

was produced inside the recording studio, house music began as homemade

music. (Koskoff)
This meant that the music could be produced independently from the big music labels.

Anyone could pick up the hardware required to make electronic music and do so on a

professional level from the privacy of their own home. It provided the individual with the

freedom to develop music without having to compromise creatively over sales concerns.

Anthony Thomas explains that when producers also became DJs, they had the ability to

familiarize the audience with their music on their own, which bypassed all the filters that

the music distributers had in place that a music producer normally had to go through.

Major music labels became irrelevant in electronic music culture; smaller, independent

labels began cropping up, often headed by producers themselves. They understood the

niche market of electronic dance music and, thanks to that, were better suited to serve the

interests of their artists and their market.

In terms of production methods and tools, electronic music also managed to run

counter to the mainstream. A popular, and often essential, tool in early electronic music

production was the sampler. It functioned by playing back sounds that had been recorded

into it. This permitted producers to steal short loops and sounds from other records and

incorporate them into their songs. For some, this was done sparingly; while for others,

their entire song and/or album was constructed using the technique. This represented a

glaring disregard for the idea of music ownership and intellectual property. The record

companies could no longer keep a leash on their product; by simply putting music out

into the world, they were inviting others to steal and reinvent it, without the ability to

profit from it themselves, short of prosecution, which is something their certainly tried.

To stop this trend, they would have had to stop the release of music altogether; however,

as Ramzy Alwakeel notes: “to prohibit access in this way would be to erase the music
completely”. Electronic music culture was thus highlighting a fundamental flaw in

contemporary music business. The idea of musical ownership and intellectual property

rights inhibit the concepts of creative exercise and liberty. For the major labels to win

their arguments, they would have had to stop existing altogether.

The entire ethos of electronic music, both its production and its performance,

created a strong philosophical statement against the tenets of the contemporary music

industry. Electronic music production was completely free from two key concepts in

music production: auteurship and authenticity. Auteurship is the theory that a work’s

meaning is attributed “to the intentions of an individual creative source”

(“Auteur/Auteurship”) and authenticity is the theory that:

the producers of music undertook the creative work themselves; that there is an

element of originality or creativity present, along with connotations of

seriousness, sincerity, and uniqueness; and that while the input of others is

recognized, it is the musicians’ role which is regarded as pivotal.

(“Authenticity”)

Sampling and DJ performances completely undermined the concept of auteurship. A

prime example is The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu’s album 1987: What the Fuck’s

Going On?, which was a landmark in terms of sample based production. Alwakeel notes:

In treating the original texts in such a way that they were not only

decontextualised but made to look absurd, they turned violent the rave aesthetic

of inclusiveness. I a move almost reminiscent of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount,

they made it clear that neither The Beatles nor ABBA nor Dave Brubeck was

any more “important” than the Scottish voice shouting “Shag! Shag! Shag!”.
Suddenly, the original producers became irrelevant, and they music stopped being its own

product; it became an element that could be used conjointly with other elements to

achieve a new, different result. DJs achieved the same effect by taking music that was

produced by an individual and performing it alongside other songs, or sometimes

simultaneously with other songs, in a variety of different settings. He’s able to edit it as

he pleases, physically changing the composition and delivery, or highlighting certain

parts of the song while toning down others. Take, for example, Frankie Knuckles, who

could “mix, phase, cut, strip and edit records up into such a storm that the original song

became secondary to what you did to it” (Silcott 24). The producers no longer have any

real say over the meanings of their songs, as they’re often produced for the intent of live

performances by DJs. With thousands upon thousands of bedroom or professional DJs

out in the world performing their music, it’s utterly hopeless to try to exercise any control

over what your song means. The producer becomes some kind of a background player,

completely taken out of the drivers seat. This has created a scenario where often the DJs

gain all the international recognition, while producers see smaller paychecks and less

fame.

At this point, how electronic music challenged authenticity becomes fairly self-

evident. Sampling meant that producers no longer had to actually create the elements of

the song themselves, and they certainly didn’t have to treat those songs with any amount

of seriousness and sincerity. Likewise, DJs depended on the songs of others to make their

entire careers; they didn’t at all need to be the originators of the music they were pushing.

All these things succeeded in shifting the audience’s focus away from the individuals
involved in the music and onto the music itself. It’s something that couldn’t be packaged

or sold by the music industry; it was simply art for arts sake.

The Ideological Fundamentals

That hints towards what is perhaps electronic music’s most important, and

culturally jarring, contribution to the musical landscape: it’s deep rejection of established

social standards. The physical experience of a rave, and the relationship between the DJ,

the producer, the music and the listener, advocate a fresh, anti-hierarchal take on social

dynamics. It achieves this by promoting a level of inherent togetherness. Alwakeel

suggests that rave be identified as a communication, “not communication by an artist to a

listener, but communication by a culture regarding itself”. There’s no hierarchy in this

structure; no one person is in charge of rave. Instead, people gather together to benefit

from each other’s presence and to bask in their shared love of something. Raves

themselves were “devoid of objective” (Alwakeel); they weren’t trying to achieve

something other than to simply be themselves. They were only “perceived as subversive

at all because the government treated their apparatus as such” (Alwakeel), and that’s the

point: the governments rejection of rave culture cemented their stance on social

dynamics; they stood up and told the world “this is ok, and this isn’t,” and suddenly rave

found itself on the wrong side of the line, championing for the simple cause of wanting to

exist in liberty.

The philosophy behind rave culture also broke down the boundaries between

labour and leisure. It achieved this through its DIY aesthetic and reliance on volunteers.
Partiers were working and workers were partying. Tobias Van Veen explains just how

deeply this impacted the standards of everyday life:

By blurring the roles between participation and organization, rave culture

provided the constitutive elements for an ontological subjectivity in which

labour and leisure were no longer distinct modes of activity.

One didn’t have to live the every day 9-5 life of work versus private life. Suddenly, the

“once distinct existential spheres [of] ethics, community and politics [had been rendered

indistinct” (Van Veen). People’s lives were boiling down into one simple, streamlined

affair. They no longer needed to fracture themselves between work and private life, both

could co-exist in a permanent state; suddenly, simply being could be a job.

Conclusion

The tenets of electronic music culture turned it into a display of pure freedom,

while maintaining a balance of respect between the liberation of self and the liberty of

others. As an ideology, it was completely untouchable by the corrupt elements of modern

social structures. Socially, it encouraged freedom of expression and the acceptance of all

people, regardless of race or sexual orientation; creatively, it worshipped the act of

creation and art itself over capitalist impulse; and ideologically, people had the liberty to

be whoever they wanted to be, however they wanted to be it, and live off that. It was a

truly refreshing movement who’s benefits, thanks to oppositional forces, went largely

unappreciated by the general public. However, while arguably more popular today than it

ever was, at least in terms of its mainstream penetration, it no longer carries its radical

weight.
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