Should raves be illegal?

No

1 of 3

by Justin Mccauley

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Responsinility Lies With Whom?

So big brother is watching. The government wants all parties legalised. Don't worry, when your two year-old niece is having her birthday party, the SWAT team will scale down your garden trellasses and confiscate all the candy floss and barbie dolls. Watch out for the red cordial too. And coco the clown? He'll be hauled away for supplying the kids with candy and that most addictive of drugs, laughter.

Okay you're not likely to find hardcore narcotics and dancefloor beats at a two year-old's birthday but are we not being a bit too precious about banning fun? When did we take social responsibilty away from the individual and give it to the government? I am not a radical social warrior but I do believe in the freedom of choice for each and every one of us. Were people in government never young or were they born into office at the age of sixty and never had the opportunity to let their hair down?

As with everything illegal which affects social interaction, it exists because there is a need within the community. That is exactly the case with illegal raves. I can't comment on their emergence in America but in the United Kingdom they evolved out of a dire need to listen to and interact with a generation that had been neglected by the wider community. There was nothing sinister going on. It was just that if you wanted to dance away 'til the wee hours of the morning to Acid House or a similar kind of music, then you had no option but to go to an illegal rave. The clubs were stagnated. You would be left at the velvet rope, kicking your heels for any number of transgressions. None of which made sense to the people waiting outside. The music was pathetic. You had to dress up like you were going to a family wedding to get in. You became a beige figure in a grey world of non descript faces.

Then suddenly the M25 motorway arrived around London and all parts of the city and suburban landscape became accesible. Instead of just a couple of hundred people in your area being connected to the same social scene, it became tens of thousands and the kids salivated at the need. Saturday night would be an endless procession of calling vague phone numbers from telephone boxes in different parts of London trying to find directions to the latest offerings. Sometime it would be in a disused warehouse of which there were many on offer. Sometimes it would be in a circus tent in the middle of a farmers fileld. Wherever it was, it was the vibe that drove us on. The fear of the unknown. The fact that we had thumbed our nose at the establishment and won. This was what it felt like to be a rebel. This was what it was like to be on the cutting edge and we loved it.

These events spawned a tribal underground that loved the clandestine nature of the event. No one knew where they would be held. No one knew who really was playing. It was everything to us and meant little to our parents. It was ours. We owned it. It was like rock n roll was to the fifties. The Beatles to the sixties. Punk in the late seventies and early eighties. No one but those who loved the scene understood it and people felt they belonged to something greater than they themselves were.

Much of what exists in the dance community today owes itself to the memories of those heady days of illegal raves and it is their absence which has caused a gaping hole in the scene. When the government brought in new legislation to ban them, the dance music community suffered immensely. The lions at the gate brought it back into the main stream and made it acceptable and took away the very thing from us that made it ours.

Now who are we to say that the current generation should miss out on something like that? Yes there is the palpable danger that something could go wrong but it is the individual's choice if they want to go. It's like going in a lucky dip and getting a prize that nobody wants. You took that chance. You spun that wheel. No one feels sorry for you if you got a key ring when you really wanted the lifesize Garfield. People carry on about the possibilty of bad drugs. Well yes, there is that very real possibilty but it is your decision whether to take something that has been made in some unregulated laboratory with indeterminate side effects. No one forces you to take it and if the outcome is unfortunate then you have only yourself to blame.

Much of what drives people to attend illegal raves is the danger. Why else would you try and out-fox the police and the local authorities? Why else would you shirk the airconditioned comfort of a local club? Why? Why not? When you have to pay upwards of fifty bucks to get into a place, allow them to fuel you with overpriced alcohol and then get uncermoniously bundled out of the establishment because you have the temerity to have gotten intoxicarted, why wouldn't you seek the warm embrace of something alternative?

Sometime s I think that we forget that we were young once too. There have been casualties along the way and that is sadly deplorable but how many people have ended up dead in licensed premises from bar room brawls? Many years ago I was talking with the commander of a city police region in Sydney. I commented about how low the arrests were that New Year's Eve. He shot right back at me that 'the pills were really good that year'. We went on to discuss that from the police's point of view, how much easier it was to control a party of ravers than a pub at throwing out time.

And maybe this is what it all boils down to. Control and fear. The establishment fears what it doesn't understand and thereby tries to control it. But how the establishment forgets that without rebellion, without subverviseness, without the desire to change and try different things, the world would be a very boring place. Illegal raves exist because there is a very real need for people to share their ideoligies and their music. From that scene has come ideas that have moved the musical landscape and this has changed modern culture. Who are we to deny the current generation that same possibility? Should raves be illegal? Why not? If you make them legal, they are no longer raves but become banal church discos with nothing more challenging than the latest Madonna offering which let's face it, has been heavily borrowed from the rave scene anyway.

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