Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion: An Overview 1

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive and critical overview of existing research that investigates (directly and indirectly) the religio-spiritual dimensions of electronic dance music culture (EDMC) (from disco, through house, to post-rave forms). Studies of the culture and religion of EDMC are explored under four broad groupings: the cultural religion of EDMC expressed through 'ritual' and 'festal'; subjectivity, corporeality and the phenomenological dance experience (especially 'ecstasy' and 'trance'); the dance community and a sense of belonging (the 'vibe' and 'tribes'); and EDMC as a new 'spirituality of life'. Moving beyond the cultural Marxist approaches of the 1970s, which held youth (sub)cultural expressions as 'ineffectual' and 'tragic', and the postmodernist approaches of the early 1990s, which held rave to be an 'implosion of meaning', recent anthropological and sociological approaches recognise that the various manifestations of this youth cultural phenomenon possess meaning, purpose and significance for participants. Contemporary scholarship thus conveys the presence of religiosity and spirituality within contemporary popular cultural formations. In conclusion, I suggest that this and continuing scholarship can offer useful counterpoint to at least one recent account (of clubbing) that overlooks the significance of EDMC through a restricted and prejudiced apprehension of 'religion'. KEYWORDS rave; youth subculture; dance culture; trance; neo-tribe; ritual phenomenon would soon go global. Youth were committed to being 'on one', getting 'loved up' and becoming 'ardcore' in abandoned warehouses, in open fields and clandestine clubs. The tabloid media had labelled this commitment 'rave', the parent culture waged a moral panic, the scene was legislated against, and cultural and music studies scholars were either unprepared or uninterested. The discipline most likely to make sense of all this (given its early investigation of youth subcultures) is rooted in a cultural Marxist tradition ill-equipped to consider questions of play and the body, and indeed offering little insight into religious experience or spiritual life within youth cultures. As Angela McRobbie (1990) noted in 1980, dance-the domain of girls and young women in Britain in the 1970s-was dismissed by the mostly male researchers at Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), who enlisted heroic, spectacular and aggressive subcultures to support their models of class 'resistance', however styleladen, 'imaginary', 'inconsequential' and ultimately 'tragic' such turned out (Clarke et al. 1976;Hebdige 1979). 3 If disco was dismissed because of its remoteness from the heroic-tragic model, and dance dismissed within cultural and music research paradigms devoted to the verbal, aural and visual, then how would commentators respond to acid house and the (post)rave phenomenon? Lamenting rave as its 'pleasures come not from resistance but surrender ', Stuart Cosgrove (1988, in Melechi 1993) supplied the answer. But while critics were tu...

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“…Research has since explored how such subcultures carry “traces of the spirit” – often through the achievement of transcendence or a “natural high” (e.g., Saldanha, ; Takahashi, ; Takahashi & Olaveson, ) – and function “in the same way as a religious community, albeit in an unconscious and postmodern way” (Sylvan, , pp. 4–5; see also St John, ). Notwithstanding the value of such work in unravelling the intersections of music, affect and religion, it has failed to advance more theoretical engagement with the spatial affectiveness of sound and the ensuing possibilities for spiritual connectivity.…”

“…The spatial modalities of sound have been advanced by scholars of cultural and sound studies (see, for example, Augoyard & Torgue, ; Camilleri, ; Henriques, ; LaBelle, , ), with geographers also contributing understandings of how music can enable various forms of socio‐spatial connection and intimacy (Saldanha, , ; Wood et al., ; Woods, ; see also Gallagher & Prior, ; Gallagher, ). Consolidation of the field of “rave studies” in the 1990s brought about a more sustained focus on the presence of religion and spirituality within musical subcultures (see St John, , ). Research has since explored how such subcultures carry “traces of the spirit” – often through the achievement of transcendence or a “natural high” (e.g., Saldanha, ; Takahashi, ; Takahashi & Olaveson, ) – and function “in the same way as a religious community, albeit in an unconscious and postmodern way” (Sylvan, , pp.…”

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“…Like in most subcultures (Hebdige, ), electronic music developed its cultural boundaries around rituals and tacit codes that set the dividing line between itself and mass consumer culture (Kühn, ; Lange & Buerkner, ; Schüßler & Sydow, ; St John, ; Till, ). Rave parties during the late 1980s and early 1990s were quintessentially rituals that challenged the centrality of masculinity, authenticity, and meaningfulness of pop culture (from classical music to rock, Hennion, ; from corporations to private properties) through the illegal occupation of public and private areas and the creation of temporary spaces centered on the body and the dancing experience (Garcia, ; Gilbert & Pearson, ).…”

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