Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
It used to be that raves were grass-roots organized, anti-establishment, unlicensed all-night drug-fueled dance parties held in abandoned warehouses or an open field. These days, you pay $40 for a branded party at popular riverfront nightclubs where age and status, rather than DJ expertise and dancing, shape your experience.
In Rave Culture sociologist Tammy Anderson explores the dance music, drug use and social deviance that are part of the pulsing dynamics of this collective. Her ethnographic study compares the Philadelphia rave scene with other rave scenes in London and Ibiza. She chronicles how generational change, commercialization, law enforcement, hedonism, and genre fragmentation fundamentally altered electronic dance music parties. Her analysis calls attention to issues of personal and collective identity in helping to explain such social change and what the decline of the rave scene means for the future of youth culture and electronic dance music.
About the Author
Tammy L. Anderson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Neither Villain, Nor Victim: Empowerment and Agency Among Women Substance Abusers. For more information about her work, please visit www.udel.edu/soc/tammya.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Corporate Raves, Weeklies, Underground Parties, and More: Defining the Rave– Club Culture Continuum
3. Loyalists, Spillovers, and Other Party People: Personal and Collective Identities in the Post-rave Era
4. From 1990s Massives to Raves’ Death?: Forces of Cultural Change
5. “Players and Their Tracks”: Types of Cultural Work in the EDM Scene
6. EDM as a Vibrant Global Scene
7. Twenty- First- Century Scenes, Sounds, and Selves
Appendix: Methods
Notes
References
Index