Reynolds — Energy Flash

Author: Simon Reynolds
Title: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
Year: 1998
Type: Book (Picador; US edition as Generation Ecstasy, 1998; updated 2008, 2012 and 2013)

Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture is a history of rave by the British critic Simon Reynolds, published by Picador in 1998 and in the United States the same year by Little, Brown as Generation Ecstasy, with updated editions in 2008, 2012 and 2013. It follows the music from Detroit techno and Chicago house through its adoption in England, Germany and Holland and the British rave scene. Reynolds argues that music made for and around drug experience could be more adventurous because it did not aim at the status of art, and in the later editions he names the “hardcore continuum,” a line of London dance music from breakbeat rave through jungle and speed garage to grime. Soft Skull, which published its 2012 American edition, describes its evidence as social history and interviews joined to Reynolds’s reading of the records. Reviews were mixed to favorable. Kirkus called it an “encyclopedic overview” but found that Reynolds, “declaring a ‘rockist’ bias,” mostly put the music’s makers ahead of its clubs and parties, and Booklist called the updated edition authoritative. The continuum met skepticism in the late 2000s, and Mark Fisher defended it in 2009.

Picador published Energy Flash in London on August 21, 1998.¹ Little, Brown published the American edition, Generation Ecstasy, on September 10, 1998.² Updated editions followed from Picador in 2008, from Soft Skull in the United States in 2012 and from Faber and Faber in 2013.^{1, 3} Soft Skull’s description says the book combines social history and interviews with the scene’s participants with Reynolds’s reading of the records, and that it starts in the late 1980s with European producers’ first experiments with American techno and house.⁴

Reynolds asks whether the meaning of rave music “is reducible to drugs, or even a single drug, Ecstasy,” and whether it only makes sense to a listener under the influence. He answers the second question, “I don’t believe that for a second,” and writes that some of the most tripped-out dance music has been made by “straight-edge types who rarely if ever touch an illegal substance.” He also writes that “rave culture as a whole is barely conceivable without drugs, or at least without drug metaphors.”³ “What I’m proposing in this book,” he writes, “is that music shaped by and for drug experiences (even bad drug experiences) can go further out precisely because it’s not made with enduring ‘art’ status or avant-garde cachet as a goal.”³

In “Flashbacks,” the material added for the later editions, Reynolds writes that since the book first came out he has “tended to use the term ‘hardcore continuum’” for “a specifically London-centric tradition going from breakbeat rave through jungle to speed garage and grime,” one “based around an enduring infrastructure” of pirate radio stations, dubplate cutting houses, specialist record stores and “dingy clubs.”³ Introducing a series of seven essays on the continuum for The Wire’s three hundredth issue, in February 2009, he called it “a musical tradition/subcultural tribe that’s managed to hold it together for nearly 20 years now,” and wrote that “in a profound sense, underneath two decades of relentless sonic mutation, this is the same music, the same culture.”⁵

Kirkus, reviewing Generation Ecstasy, found the book mixed. It called the book an “encyclopedic overview” that “dispassionately charts the inevitable rise and fall of drug-based musical fashion,” and wrote that Reynolds, “declaring a ‘rockist’ bias, mostly prefers discussing recording artists, DJs, and subgenres” over the scene that grew up around the music. “For the uninitiated,” it found, his family tree of acid house’s offshoots “may seem obsessive,” and “some vivid passages of field research” fall short of the drug fiction of Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner.² Booklist, quoted on Soft Skull’s page, called the updated edition “Authoritative” and Reynolds “a terrific writer.”⁴ Fisher, writing as k-punk in FACT in February 2009, ahead of an appearance with Reynolds in Liverpool, wrote that doubts about the concept had surfaced over roughly the past year. He suggested that there was “perhaps an element of generational resentment” in the skepticism, from younger listeners whose own music the continuum’s framework could still contain.⁶

Key contributions

• A history of rave from Detroit techno and Chicago house through the European and British rave scenes.
• Drug experience as a spur to adventurous music, made without the aim of becoming art.
• The hardcore continuum, a line of London dance music from breakbeat rave to grime.

See also

• Ocean of Sound — David Toop’s 1995 history of ambient and listening music
• Love Saves the Day — Tim Lawrence’s 2003 history of American dance culture in the 1970s
• Retromania — Reynolds’s 2011 book on pop culture’s addiction to its own past
• The Underground Is Massive — Michaelangelo Matos’s 2015 history of American rave
• Assembling a Black Counter Culture — DeForrest Brown Jr.’s 2022 history of techno as Black music
• Electronic — the family of genres the book covers