Rave Culture: The Alteration and Decline of a Philadelphia Music Scene (review)

Tammy Anderson's Rave Culture is based on several years of intensive, multisite ethnographic research on the twilight era of raves in Philadelphia. This insightful and ambitious book gives one of the fullest pictures to date of the American rave scene, which centers on all-night dance parties featuring electronic dance music. A new fan of the music, Anderson was disappointed to find the culture was losing popularity and its grassroots, antiestablishment ethos. Using informants at an EDM record store, ethnographic observation of parties and interviews, she sets out to understand the forces behind this decline. Anderson argues that the intersection of five forces, generational schisms, musical fragmentation, formal social control, excessive deviance and commercialization worked to strip raves of loyal participants and shift party promoters and DJs to more mainstream cultural practices.

Anderson's investigation of the sources of cultural change provides a welcome break from much of the prior work on youth subcultures, which defines scenes in terms of either drug abuse or working class resistance. The book's great strength is its subtle and complex empirical account of the rave scene, including the overlapping social groups, parties and the scene's vague, contested borders with other forms of nightlife. Conflicts over scene borders and their symbolic markers are a common but under-researched feature of many youth music cultures. Chapter 2 lays out the fragmentation and decline of raves by explaining the range of different parties, tastes and practices that produce social distinctions within the scene. Placed on a continuum of commercialization, she charts the vast gray area between illegal, "underground," raves and the glitzy, highly sexualized club scene. Chapter 3 describes six ideal type rave-goers, ranging from "loyalists" to outsiders who "spillover" from mainstream bars. While each category of people and parties is not equally fleshed out, Anderson's complication of the dichotomy between underground and commercialized is an important contribution.

Chapter 4 is lays out Anderson's argument about the forces of "alteration and decline" and is the heart of the book's analysis. She raises several important questions about the standard analysis that grassroots cultural production eventually loses out to homogenized commercialized success. Anderson shows how other forces shape commercialization. The intensive policing and numerous federal laws that targeted raves in the early 2000s led party promoters and musicians to renounce rave culture, move EDM into mainstream nightclubs and restrict admission to those over 21. While many ravers aged out of the culture and their own drug use, the shift to nightclub venues failed to recruit new, young fans into raves. Furthermore Anderson argues that as the scene declined for reasons unrelated to commercialization because the music fragmented by genre. While it is not clear why this is unrelated to commercialization, Anderson makes a convincing case that commercialization does not guarantee scene expansion, but in this case actually undermined the scene and the market for EDM.

Chapter 5 looks at the cultural work done by people, especially cultural producers, to adapt to these changes, restore elements of the rave culture, or preserve what they have. Anderson is able to further complicate the overly-simplistic story of commercialization by showing how these strategies reveal multiple different relationships between music and the other cultural elements of rave. In Chapter 6 she applies her theory of scene alteration and decline to two places where EDM has thrived, London and the Spanish island of Ibiza. Using a few short stints of fieldwork, Anderson finds that rave commercialized but this resulted in expansion. The model does not account for EDM's continued popularity, but it illuminates how greater tolerance for hedonism and lesser social control allowed commercialization to sustain a diverse, class and age stratified scene.

Despite the complexity with which Anderson describes the current rave scene, her characterization of the scene during its height is thin — the product of relying on her informants' idealizations of "back in the day." Without a clear...