Dancefloor-Driven Literature: The Rave Scene in Fiction

Abstract

This book uses the ‘rave’ subculture as a route into an analysis of literary representations of a music scene. Almost as soon as this sonic subterranean culture took hold – during the Second Summer of Love in 1988 – and the sociopolitical impact of the nascent rave scene became clear, it quickly appeared on the radar of journalists, filmmakers and authors, all keen to use society’s cultural preoccupations as source material for their output. By first defining, and then expanding, the neologism re/presentation, this book questions why such cultural artefacts appear – secondary representations that orbit the culture itself – and what function they may serve. Further focusing on the medium of literature, the book then defines the genre of Dancefloor-Driven Literature – stories born of the dancefloor – using new primary input from three key case study authors to analyse three separate ways writers might draw on the pulse of electronic music in their fiction, interrogating that very particular intermedial intersection between the sonic and the linguistic. The book progresses to explore how such authors write about something so subterranean as the nightclub scene, considers how they write lucidly and fluidly about the rigid, metronomic beat of electronic music, and analyses what specifically literary techniques they deploy to accurately recount in fixed symbols the drifting, hallucinatory effects of a drug experience. The book describes two key functions such a literature might serve: first, in terms of its enculturative potential within the contemporary society into which it is published and then, almost thirty years since the Second Summer of Love, the importance this collection of texts might have, archivally. Finally, the book concludes by proposing a theory by which all sonic subterranean cultures might be decoded; not through the music, but through these secondary literary artefacts. It is there that stories of that scene are locked, told to a silent beat.