[Dancecult-l] violence

Fri Apr 27 04:48:54 CEST 2007

> I'm interested in your elaboration on your comment involving Detroit techno
> "Going Alien."  What exacly are you implying here?

Brief shorthand for AfroFuturist tendencies in Detroit Techno, but also
think Afrika Bambaata (birth of electro, techno & hip-hop) as resampling not
only Kraftwerk but Sun Ra. Sun Ra literally went alien: the black diaspora
as descendents from Saturn, operating on alien sonic frequencies, able to
transport those tuning in back to Offworld (see the classic Sun Ra flick,
SPACE IS THE PLACE).

Or think of it this way, a thesis sampled from  Kodwo Eshun: whereas
(various kinds of) hip-hop attempts to 'Get Real,' representing the ghetto,
the street (Straight Outta Compton), AfroFuturism goes Alien: it's not about
getting Real but Surreal (think Dr. Octagon, or even the reimagining of
Queens by Wu-Tang Clan as samurai battleground of clan wordsmiths, or Public
Enemy's reimagining of the Black Panthers as a Militant Dance Patrol).

I take the cue here from Kodwo Eshun, in _More Brilliant Than The Sun_ --
really I am just riffing on his work some 10 years ago now -- who writes of
Detroit Techno (as well as jungle and strands of hip-hop and black science
fiction such as Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delaney) as AfroFuturist: that
is, of the Alien dream, going Offworld, the sci-fi alien embodiment. Escape
velocity from postslavery, not as "escapism" -- ie a fantasy -- but as
effective escape hatch. Like hiphop's The Game, Black Wallstreet, going
Alien is counterindustry. It's not a theoretical presupposition, but rather
comes out of (Detroit) technoculture itself, notably in the members of
Underground Resistance, from Drexicya (aquatic race of Afrofuturist ocean
dwellers that are the 'black mermen', born from black slaves thrown
overboard off the slave ships of the Atlantic -- halfway between Africa and
Jamaica, one could say) to DJ T-1000 (the assembly line, the AfroFuturist
black body as machinic, nameless, identity displaced into machinic
repetition) -- or Jeff Mill's X-101 series ("rings of saturn"), the entire
Axis label.

Eshun pushes Going Alien a bit over Getting Real, something of a polemic,
though I think anyone far into hiphop knows that hiphop always gets Surreal
at its most creative points -- think Outkast's 1996 album ATLiens, which
opens with "Are you alien...?" on one track, or "Greetings, Earthlings....".
Of course Dr. Octagon is key here, Kool Keith, but so is the uber_realism of
NAS or Mobb Deep, a kind of displacement of the steet into
counterimaginaries that become increasingly offworld (think NAS' track off
album 2 where he rhymes from the point of view of an intentionally misfiring
gun). And of course DJ Spooky wrought AfroFuturism not only by bringing dub
into the hiphop equation, thus illbient, the tripped out sphere of the
spook, but by remixing theory and sociopolitical realms, a kind of
transversal spook flitting in-between the dancefloor and the lecture hall...

Going Alien is a way to move postracial, think postracial, post identity
politics, for we can all go alien, as Sun Ra invites us to, as Underground
Resistance calls out for us to join in "deprogramming the progammers" -- as
RAMM:ELL:ZEE writes, if it's about race, then who's racing? RAMM:ELL:ZEE,
one of the early graf writers and noted MCs (he's in the movie WildStyle),
took graffiti burners, armed them, then took them off the wall, and animated
them three-dimensional into letter racers [ check it --
http://gothicfuturism.net ].

Going Alien is everywhere... we're living it... it's the way to handle, one
another tip, alienation... and everywhere an inverted twist to Marx's
alienation, which becomes here the -- in Hegelian terms -- reappropriation
of the alien not to synthesize identity (self-conscious through overcoming
alienation, commodity fetishism, etc.) but rather, embracing alienation to
become alien. We are inseparably machinic now, we cannot disassociate as
Marx envisioned. In fact AfroFuturism points toward strategies interior to
alienation: Alien Nation, which communicates along the levels that UR
proposed... Nation 2 Nation, Galaxy 2 Galaxy, Universe 2 Universe...

http://afrofuturism.net

cheers,

    tobias

> 
> "tobias c. van Veen" <tobias at techno.ca> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> + yes most of rave culture has had deep ties to the criminal underground:
>> all kinds of conflict over drug dealing territory, distribution and
>> production; raves used as money-laundering channels; raves used by
>> organisations such as the Hell's Angels to do all the above but also to make
>> a significant amount of petty cash (i.e., literally a cash bill resource).
>> 
>> + that the PLUR'red out ravers often knew little about what went on to me is
>> in part because of the *ideology* of the PLUR -- that it puts blinders on
>> where critical perception is needed. hence the numerous and global attempts
>> to counter rave culture, to twist it from the inside to see its potential
>> and its weaknesses.
>> 
>> + now I also agree that one of the attractions of rave culture was its
>> ability to create safe atmospheres regardless of this environment, but more
>> importantly, to produce autonomous or indie events that had little or
>> nothing to do with the (usually large-scale) criminal events. here,
>> alternative sexualities and nonviolent atmospheres flourised; but even then
>> let us look at Spiral Tribe whom openly embraced a much more punk and
>> anarchist ethos hinting at violence against the state through sound and
>> occupation and intervention; violence is by no means foreign to rave
>> culture.
>> 
>> + i realise the thesis and at one time supported it, but i now think that to
>> equate alcohol with violence might be a sly reduction, for let us say that
>> the network that distributes meth and ecstasy and coke undoubtedly has just
>> as much violence linked with it, and the reaction to meth / coke can also
>> produce outbursts of violence.
>> 
>> + in the UK acid house scene, as far as I understand it, it became necessary
>> to take in & incorporate criminal elements as well as security drawn from
>> football organisations -- as raves became involved in football territories
>> --; in Canada it became necessary for large events to employ White Knights
>> (off-duty police, a la corrupt police essentially) -- point being that
>> violence works at many levels even if unseen. the distribution of violence
>> evidently differs from locale to locale and it is possible to throw events
>> without these elements whatsoever whereas elsewhere it becomes unavoidable.
>> studying the contortions of the TAZ in various locales would be interesting,
>> for whenever one goes beneath the radar one finds all kinds of creatures,
>> some ugly, some beautiful.
>> 
>> + then there's invasive violence: at many events i threw indoors, we had
>> security literally battling "undesirables" we didn't want in; when busted in
>> (illegal or otherwise) warehouses we witnessed extraordinary and extreme
>> police brutality; and when outdoors in the woods we often had to delicately
>> negotiate and seduce local hicks into not turning violent... underneath the
>> dj turntables at our outdoor events was bear spray and a case of beer,
>> several already, let us say, prepared. when the hicks would show up in their
>> 4x4s shining the brights on us, gawking at the ladies, racing around in the
>> ATVs, whooping and hollering and frightening the sh*t out of the kids, we
>> would walk up, give them a beer, but always with one hand fingering the bear
>> spray (or, let us say, whatever else we had). and yes there were serious
>> incidents of ravers vs. hicks conflicts over backcountry territory with
>> people beaten or worse. this pushed some ravers to become more militant,
>> some in the Spiral Tribe manner, others in a path that linked meth with a
>> more urban, street mentality (the raver methhead was often packin' as much
>> as the gansta'). and not all such identity construction is reactionary; in
>> NYC, Philly or in the UK dnb scene the identity of the music, like hip hop,
>> is connected to conditions of poverty and street territorial violence from
>> its inception. not all of it went the Detroit techno route of Going Alien
>> rather than Being Real, or rather even in Detroit one had to have protection
>> and be on the awares.
>> 
>> + and then there is protest violence, the violence of Reclaim The Streets or
>> wherever soundsystems are used for protest situations, occupations,
>> interventions, such as with eco-activists in BC, using the soundsystem to
>> block logging roads. ravers fighting truckers was yet another reality,
>> nasty, violent and bloody.
>> 
>> best,
>> 
>> tobias
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> There was certainly a good deal of violence, including shootings, at the
>>> Hacienda in Manchester in the late 80s. Most of this was, according to
>>> the film "24 hour party people" related to drug deals and was solved but
>>> taking the dealers on as security.
>>> 
>>> p g-b
>>> 
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>> 
>> 
>> 
>> tobias c. van Veen -----------++++
>> http://www.quadrantcrossing.org --
>> McGill Communication & Philosophy
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> 
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> natalemarie at yahoo.com
>  
>   
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tobias c. van Veen -----------++++
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org --
McGill Communication & Philosophy