House Is A Feeling

I found this recent article in the Guardian about the birth of rave in the UK really interesting. I guess now these names, Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, Johnny Walker, etc have become synonymous with so many bloated dance brands that you don’t really think of them as people who played a role in popular culture anymore, just kind of behemoths, particularly Oakenfold (though Walker seems not to have done anything for years, at least as far as I can tell, the first time I heard his name was in The Streets “Weak Become Heroes”)

It’s quite cool then to read of them going to Ibiza and having acid house dawn upon them. For people who like dance music and indeed for the papers and TV producers these kind of stories are like a favourite fairy tale (”tell it again Uncle Oakenfold!”). Perhaps this is because the birth of the UK rave scene and its massive subsequent boom all seems to have happened out of such a hodge podge of circumstances.

It seems in hindsight like something really unlikely, and yet you can’t imagine the last 20 years without it. I always get the impression that these guys, Oakenfold etc, were like that bloke in your class in school who starts a mini-company selling clocks or something and makes a pile of money, as much bright sparks or entrepreneurs as musical figures. I suppose it wasn’t necessarily about musical talent at first, more like a talent for spotting an emerging trend of music. As Johnny Walker puts it in the piece “It was Alfredo’s (Alfredo Fiorito, above) influence. I always felt he never got the full credit. We were just in the right place and carried on the party”.

In this case the right place was an isolated farmhouse in Ibiza where Alfredo Fiorito played pop, disco and of course early acid house to people taking a new drug called ecstasy. Without romanticising things too much, it’s easy to point out that this sort of musical discovery seems like a relic of an age where information travelled far more slowly.

Are there cultural revolutions like this waiting to happen today? There must be, however it does seem to me, as I’ve mentioned before here, that the movements that truly shape today’s pop culture landscape are almost all likely to be based on technological advances. For example the omnipresence of broadband internet has undoubtedly changed music more than any musician, band, or movement in recent years. And this is how things shall continue as far as I can see. The net is the movement people believe in these days, and interacting about music online seems as popular a leisure pursuit as actually listening to it. The results of this culture can only become more interesting.

Here’s the Amazon link for the compilation pictured above, I haven’t heard it yet but disappointingly the tracklist perhaps doesn’t seem as off the wall as the descriptions of Alfredo’s sets in the article. Anyone have it? Is that an unfair suggestion?