Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
Why we love it?
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase A lot of critics of the book complain about Reynolds’ highly opinionated views on the developments of electronic dance music. This is a mistake; a wholly academic research and categorization with no regards to the vivid, honest opinions of the people who were there is of no use when much of the magic is about what it represented, where the parties happened, who were its consumers and creators, and so on.
Some comments about this we saw on the web:
* /u/markday on /r/BurningMan Too wordy? Unlikely. Go directly to Simon Reynolds’ Energy Flash, young man, and report back.Here’s my ten cents.
It’s a well researched overview of the inherent tension that has long existed between people who want to bring electronic music to Black Rock City and people who would variously prefer there was a lot less of it.
Anyone who cites Adrian Roberts from Piss Clear as an academic source is OK by me.
The paragraph or two dissecting “douchebag” as a playa insult directed at EMD fans is, unfortunately, ludicrous.
I don’t expect any reportage to be all-inclusive, and the Dancetronaut controversy is as good a place as any to illustrate that these tensions, rooted in the mid-90’s have a modern-day equivalent, but I feel that time has passed the author by, and the lack of any mention (unless I missed it) of Robot Heart, and their aesthetic (more grounded in Burning Man than the relatively-mainstream, white-jumpsuited Dancetronauts by far, yet more divisive, in more nuanced and interesting ways) is a bit of a glaring omission.
Based on the mutual friends we apparently have on the Facebook, I’m making the broad assumption that the author is strong on psytrance, as a participant (name-checks the Blue Room, which was ground zero for me at Burning Man circa 1999) , but has relied too much on internet reporting of White Ocean and Dancetronauts, in his coverage of recent years, and failed to wrestle with the socio-cultural reverberations of the allegedly-elitist deep house beast.
Still, that said, a good read.
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