1990s: Rave Culture

March 22, 2019

By AHNZ

This makes my job easy…

“..the Prodigy, they didn’t conform…they were, I’ve called them, the Sex Pistols of the Rave Culture.”- DJ, Edward Adoo

Keith Flint self-terminated earlier this month, frontman for the band Prodigy. Rave Culture peaked in the mid-1990s and it was, indeed, simply the latest iteration of one of the on-going history cycles I estimate at about 20 years at a time.

The previous occasion was Punk, the previous animal to occupy the niche were the Sex Pistols. The ‘strange attractor’ or logos of human history keeps generating people like Keith Flint and Sid Vicious. Their anti-establishment stance plays a brief but essential role in demolishing an Old Guard so that someone new can come along. The social role of a Vicious or a Flint is not to build or produce but to upset the status quo and clear the path.

I don’t know anything. But…..I suppose Flint was very much of-the-moment, stuck in the previous Demolition Cycle and unable to update or re-invent himself. Faced with having no place in the latest iteration perhaps he couldn’t hold a sense of identity. The clock says it is time for a new Punk, a new Rave, a new Vicious, a new Flint. Old employees need not apply.

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image ref. Let Forever Be; Chemical Brothers (1999)

Note: I never took to Prodigy but a contemporary rave band, Chemical Brothers, seemed promising and I kept a couple tracks but never looked deeper

See also the upcoming post: 1978: Punk

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