Let’s Rave not Rage! New Age Techno Hippies and Digital Electronica

Abstract

What is Techno? This seems like an innocent enough question to ask, but the answer is mystifying and perplexing. Techno’s spectacularity is out in full display in the streets of Berlin’s Love Parade and Paris’s Techno Parade. A million young and old people alike, many half-naked, move and gyrate their bodies, waving their hands to a steady beat as a procession of floats filled with similarly gyrating bodies passes by. Raves and love parades seem to be celebrating “something,” but aside from sometimes a too obvious nationalist display of colors and painted flag-faces, it is difficult to figure out just what that “something” is. In this “interlude” I make the case that these “events” and the House music of Techno clubs propose “something” more universally inclusive than just misguided nationalism. It is a fantasy of Love, Peace, and Unity celebrated by what I refer to as New Age Techno Hippies—an allusion to the “Flower Power” children of the 1960s. The comparison is made on the grounds of the “spirit” of intent rather than the music, except for Techno’s acid and psychedelic inflections. However, the geographical displacement of Europe with America is not unlike Techno music itself, which has had back and forth cross fertilizations from the black community dance scenes of New York and Chicago’s “(Ware)House” style, and Detroit’s DJ culture via Acid House music in Britain to Germany and beyond (Richard and Kruger, 1998).