"We'll Cut Out Raving"

 

I think they are referring to the 'rave-up', an excitingly frenzied feature of their song performances. The feature says are they going to tone down their act for America - I wonder why? 

Earlier post on the 1960s Brit use of the words 'rave', 'raver', 'raving'

the family that raves together

 

https://www.thebuttermarket.co.uk/event/immature-ravers-xmas-family-rave-in-the-cellars/

This reminds me of when I doing my on-the-ground research into the 2-Step / UK garage culture, around 1999. I came across this flyer for an event that provided a creche. .So you could go to the rave and bring your toddlers and small children with you and they would be left in the care of a qualified child-minder. 

I'll never forget the kicker to the sales pitch: "So there's no excuse, bring the fucking kids".  

And that's why the piece ended up being called "Adult Hardcore" - the idea was that the teenravers of 91-92 were now settling down, starting families. (Another bit of evidence: seeing a guy behind the counter of Rhythm Division in E3, bottle-feeding a baby nestling in the crook of his arm, backdropped by a wall of UKG white labels).

But  this is different - this is going with your kids and raving together with, albeit in the dance music equivalent of those hardcore matinees for under-21s that used to have in the USA. 

Raving en famille? That really is the absolute end of the generation gap.

I wonder if this an outlier, or whether there'll be more and more events like.

 C.f. rock festivals today, which are real family affairs. You hear of a teenager who'll go to the festival with their parents and they'll all stay in a tent together. Or groups of schoolfriends going to the festival, along with all the parents - the kids going off on their own, the parents likewise socializing mostly with the other parents. Regrouping back at the tents. 

A friend of ours did that with her daughter and her daughter's friends and the friends's parents. Each generational grouping would wait until the younger / elder grouping was out of sight before getting their drugs out. 

raving about Raving

 

Here's a book that will interest Energy Flash readers and that's getting a ton of well deserved attention right now:  McKenzie Wark's Raving, a slim volume that weaves together speculative theory and experiential sense impressions drawn from the micro-raves and queer + trans clubs of Brooklyn, into a seamless rush of readability.  

Here's my blurb: 

"Raving is an electric mingling of memoir, theory and participant-observer ethnography. With loving precision, McKenzie Wark’s eyes and ears pay attention to the innumerable tiny interactions, gestures and rites that make up the all-night drug-and-dance party. This book radiantly understands the rave as a construction site for transitory kinship structures - a pocket in timespace that serves as a haven for fugitives from consensus banality and the intolerable pressures and oppressions of normality - a miniature home world for the aliens already on this planet. Tribal initiates in the night as an adventure playground, ravers occupy the city’s abandoned places and turn them into zones of abandon, where identities dissolve. Where you can lose yourself and find yourself.  Above all, Wark’s work is a font of deliriously inventive and witty language - immerse in her text and learn how a rave can be cute and discover what unearth are speaker demons, rave condoms, punishers, and sidechain time" 

Other testimonials can be found at the publisher's website, where Raving can be purchased. 

There's an excerpt from the book at Resident Advisor

And McKenzie has been doing a heap of interviews and parallel pieces around Raving: 

Essay about rediscovering raving in her fifties, for The Guardian

buzz in The Cut

interview in Interview

profiling in Nylon

documentation in Document

advising about xeno-euphoria at Vice

another essay about techno rebirth, for Frieze

dialogue with Pauli Cakes at Cultured

podcast with LARB

And that's not even all of it...