Remembering Rave and the Culture it Made
This morning, I told a friend I had recovered some memories over the weekend...
"geeze! I hope they were good ones," she said.
Actually, they were *very* good ones!
The past two weeks I've been struggling to put together a presentation for the Ad Club of Western Mass on blogging and word of mouth marketing. So, I started reading whole bunches of articles and blog posts of people I know who are In the Know, and finally settled in to read The Cluetrain Manifesto when something in my subconscious started itching. It was the whole "markets are conversations" thing, and how for my adult life, the Internet has always been a means/mode of communication more than anything else...
I always attributed that to spending my Adult Formative Career Years (34-40) in college most of the time (where I had unlimited Internet access) or working in small businesses that had little need for tech beyond the average word processor (and were too cheap to get dial-up.)
Yet something kept itching at me and itching at me...like a springtime mosquito bite on the back of my knee--and I kept thinking back to the time before The Great Illness, which pushed me out of the workplace and into college...
There was a time in the early '90's, when all the shoes were black and music was changing--when I'd got bored with the remnants of New Wave, and grunge hadn't quite made its way out of Seattle. But I had A Friend--y'all know him as Ed--who was working on some super-secret kinds of computer geekery, and had access to stuff called mail lists.
This was a time Before the Internet (BI) when it'd cost ya several hundred thousand dollars in computer equipment and another several hundreds of dollars for a connection that made AOL's dial-up service look like broadband IF you wanted to communicate with others via computer. The only folks who could do this kind of thin--or who even wanted to--were walking the hallowed halls of places like Stanford and MIT, or getting lunch at the company cafeterias at AT&T and Hewlett-Packard, or cloak-and-daggering it in defense.
The rest of us were OUT of the loop. Except for me--the hard-working working-class dilettante in search of the next good party...
At that time--somewhere around '92-93, Rave culture was just beginning to come together. Raving's got a bad rap over the years as it's become associated with young folks and Ecstasy--but in the Early Years it was something of a super secret society that was whispered about among the young geeks in academia, the computer industry and defense. It was about Techno, and dancing all night, and swilling stuff called Smart Drinks....
And the only way you could find out about a rave--the few that there were--was from that high-geek inner circle. If you were cool enough...
I wasn't working in a place where I had direct access to the postings of NE Raves...but I knew folks who would show me the stuff from that list on their home-based work computers. I wasn't a hard core tech geek like them, but I was cool enough to be part of their Inner Circle. (Ed reminded me of how much I was in the Inner Circle when we started talking about Laura Lagassa, and some of the early talk of PLUR, and how she met Brian Behlendorf, and I was sitting in the living room when a lot of that stuff was going on...)
Through the geeks who were planning and executing Raves and just generally being young people with the toys of the Gods, I learned that communicating via computer could be the greatest way to promote a super-fabulous, ultra-hip party where the music was made by people you'd never see on MTV. (funny thing though, the song known as "Are You Ready For This?" that is now so ubiquitous came out of all that)
How raves were promoted was something of the root of a thing we now like to refer to as word of mouth marketing--because the only way one was hip and cool enough to learn about a Rave was word of mouth from another hip and cool person across the wires of a thing that would later become the Internet.
And I was there--ringside seat and all that.
So, yes, I was a Raver--more or less. I went to the historic Storm Rave of September '92 (you know it's a great party when people are still talking about it 14 some odd years later) and I went to NASA and a couple of other places, and I remember where Moby *used* to live, before I got too sick and too old to be hanging out at raves...
It's strange how a thing that was nothing much more to me at the time than a new music fad, another wave I caught, another cool scene I managed to be part of, would foster a new way of communicating with other people....
Over the past few years, I've had something of a cognitive dissonance--a sense of knowing things about communicating online and how this strange new terrain functions--and I could never figure out how it was I knew all this stuff. I never worked around it, and I'm certainly no savant...
No, I was just at the epicenter of a lot of it, along with the young people who built many of the widgets that power the tools we use every day--and with building the tools came a culture that is, to this day and this very moment confounding some of the greatest minds of our day (can we say "walmarting across america?").
Gad! it's weird to situate oneself as a footnote in such a big history....but comforting. At least now I know where I've been and where some of my bright ideas eminate from--a rich and geeky social life.
It's where I'm going next that I'm not so sure just yet.
"geeze! I hope they were good ones," she said.
Actually, they were *very* good ones!
The past two weeks I've been struggling to put together a presentation for the Ad Club of Western Mass on blogging and word of mouth marketing. So, I started reading whole bunches of articles and blog posts of people I know who are In the Know, and finally settled in to read The Cluetrain Manifesto when something in my subconscious started itching. It was the whole "markets are conversations" thing, and how for my adult life, the Internet has always been a means/mode of communication more than anything else...
I always attributed that to spending my Adult Formative Career Years (34-40) in college most of the time (where I had unlimited Internet access) or working in small businesses that had little need for tech beyond the average word processor (and were too cheap to get dial-up.)
Yet something kept itching at me and itching at me...like a springtime mosquito bite on the back of my knee--and I kept thinking back to the time before The Great Illness, which pushed me out of the workplace and into college...
There was a time in the early '90's, when all the shoes were black and music was changing--when I'd got bored with the remnants of New Wave, and grunge hadn't quite made its way out of Seattle. But I had A Friend--y'all know him as Ed--who was working on some super-secret kinds of computer geekery, and had access to stuff called mail lists.
This was a time Before the Internet (BI) when it'd cost ya several hundred thousand dollars in computer equipment and another several hundreds of dollars for a connection that made AOL's dial-up service look like broadband IF you wanted to communicate with others via computer. The only folks who could do this kind of thin--or who even wanted to--were walking the hallowed halls of places like Stanford and MIT, or getting lunch at the company cafeterias at AT&T and Hewlett-Packard, or cloak-and-daggering it in defense.
The rest of us were OUT of the loop. Except for me--the hard-working working-class dilettante in search of the next good party...
At that time--somewhere around '92-93, Rave culture was just beginning to come together. Raving's got a bad rap over the years as it's become associated with young folks and Ecstasy--but in the Early Years it was something of a super secret society that was whispered about among the young geeks in academia, the computer industry and defense. It was about Techno, and dancing all night, and swilling stuff called Smart Drinks....
And the only way you could find out about a rave--the few that there were--was from that high-geek inner circle. If you were cool enough...
I wasn't working in a place where I had direct access to the postings of NE Raves...but I knew folks who would show me the stuff from that list on their home-based work computers. I wasn't a hard core tech geek like them, but I was cool enough to be part of their Inner Circle. (Ed reminded me of how much I was in the Inner Circle when we started talking about Laura Lagassa, and some of the early talk of PLUR, and how she met Brian Behlendorf, and I was sitting in the living room when a lot of that stuff was going on...)
Through the geeks who were planning and executing Raves and just generally being young people with the toys of the Gods, I learned that communicating via computer could be the greatest way to promote a super-fabulous, ultra-hip party where the music was made by people you'd never see on MTV. (funny thing though, the song known as "Are You Ready For This?" that is now so ubiquitous came out of all that)
How raves were promoted was something of the root of a thing we now like to refer to as word of mouth marketing--because the only way one was hip and cool enough to learn about a Rave was word of mouth from another hip and cool person across the wires of a thing that would later become the Internet.
And I was there--ringside seat and all that.
So, yes, I was a Raver--more or less. I went to the historic Storm Rave of September '92 (you know it's a great party when people are still talking about it 14 some odd years later) and I went to NASA and a couple of other places, and I remember where Moby *used* to live, before I got too sick and too old to be hanging out at raves...
It's strange how a thing that was nothing much more to me at the time than a new music fad, another wave I caught, another cool scene I managed to be part of, would foster a new way of communicating with other people....
Over the past few years, I've had something of a cognitive dissonance--a sense of knowing things about communicating online and how this strange new terrain functions--and I could never figure out how it was I knew all this stuff. I never worked around it, and I'm certainly no savant...
No, I was just at the epicenter of a lot of it, along with the young people who built many of the widgets that power the tools we use every day--and with building the tools came a culture that is, to this day and this very moment confounding some of the greatest minds of our day (can we say "walmarting across america?").
Gad! it's weird to situate oneself as a footnote in such a big history....but comforting. At least now I know where I've been and where some of my bright ideas eminate from--a rich and geeky social life.
It's where I'm going next that I'm not so sure just yet.
posted by Tish Grier at 9:46 AM
2 Comments:
I know I risk making you feel very old, but signing up for an e-mail address was part of my freshman year of highschool. Just when I wanted to be communicating with a bunch of people, I suddenly was handed the means to do it. I had no idea how much this had shaped my life until this job I'm working at right now. Where I've got people in their 70's who would otherwise be considered VERY computer literate asking me for some piece of information. I realized that I have a fearlessness in that I just open another tab in Firefox (other than the ones I've ALWAYS got open so that I can obsessively check my 5 e-mail accounts) and do a quick google search for what they need. I never realized how much I depended on it until I saw how little everyone else at work does.
old, Mim? the only way I feel old, really, is when I look in the mirror and see actual wrinkles...
I think a lot of people don't realize how profoundly their lives have been changed by computers. But there are gaps in knowledge all over the place. Things have moved so fast in here that for so many people it's just difficult to keep up (heck, I fell out of the loop when I was ill and it's taken me years to get back into things...)
Another odd thing: there were a number of events that laid the groundwork for alot of the tiny commuities we find online. Chris Anderson talks a small amount about music in the early '80's and how it started fracturing into small segments. Which I also remember distinctly--there was Top 40 and then there was this other stuff, mostly from England, that made it to college radio but never mainstream (at least not until a couple of years after it had been on college radio.)
Sometime it wasn't even on college radio, just in clubs. Clublife was always its own thing, but this was one step beyond clublife.
The other distinct thing I'm remembering more clearly is the party I used to run--which was about a year or two before the rave scene took off. It was small, and promoted word of mouth, not online, and its largest attendance approached 200 (before it combusted)....that was the thing young people did, and so it was only natural, I think, that even bigger parties, where the music was more esoteric, would be promoted online--because online at that time was a niche, a select group, in and of itself. When people go off into small groups they create their own cultures. Lots of people don't stay in those cultures, eventually becoming part of the mainstream but that's a whole different story...
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