Rave Culture

The Alteration and Decline of a Philadelphia Music Scene

Tammy Anderson

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781592139347, 9781592139330
• eBook ISBN: 9781592139354
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

It used to be that raves were grassroots 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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Corporate Raves, Weeklies, Underground Parties, and More
• 3 Loyalists, Spillovers, and Other Party People
• 4 From 1990s Massives to Raves’ Death?
• 5 “Players and Their Tracks”
• 6 EDM as a Vibrant Global Scene
• 7 Twenty- First- Century Scenes, Sounds, and Selves
• Appendix: Methods
• Notes
• References
• Index