Many writers have tried, and few have succeeded, in capturing the experience of an all-night rave. Attempts to evoke techno’s oceanic feeling—this vortex of bodily sensations that seems to outpace description—tend toward the histrionic. Returning from such a dimension, it’s natural to want to shout it from the rooftops, but writers get a little overexcited, reaching for stylistic flourishes that rise to its intensity and the sense of having, ever so briefly, escaped the strictures of the normative world. It’s true that rave culture, with its insubordinate ethos and hedonistic drive, can provide a vantage point from which to question the existing social, sexual, and moral order—and a bubble in which to test out new ones. But this has culminated in a writing style plagued by purple excess and a tendency to overstate the politics of the personal, all in the service of justifying the culture’s existence as radical. “Raving is resistance” goes the fashionable platitude.
Read more A Rave Novel Rediscovered
This utopian bent is wired into rave culture’s DNA, although it was often tempered by a healthy cynicism, as we see in Superstars, the 2000 cult novel by the French author Ann Scott, which follows a lesbian DJ’s misadventures, as told in the first person, in the toxic milieu of Paris’s fin de siècle techno scene. The many clubs and warehouse parties that the book’s protagonist, Louise, guides us through on her road to rock bottom are distinctly unsafe spaces full of broken people. Scott, a former musician raised between London and Paris, began the book as a memoir of her friend group, an entourage that formed around the ’90s queer club icon DJ Sextoy. A rare example of an author writing with a true insider perspective, it’s an unvarnished snapshot of rave culture’s second wave, when the major-label takeover was in full swing and techno was, as ever, being declared dead.
Following the romantic entanglements of a group of lesbian and bisexual club rats, Superstars is about the drama, the addiction, and the identity crises that come with staying up for three days straight. And crucially, it’s about being young in the city, and the relief of finding a family—dysfunctional as it may be—in a world of misfits unbothered by the circadian dictates of punching the time clock. We used to call that feeling nonconformity, and it was considered a virtue without having to think of it as praxis.
Like many spirals, this one starts with a manic high, when Louise opens her mailbox to find a record deal from Virgin Records to the tune of 100,000 francs. That’s a lot of money for a recovering heroin user living off her murkily defined roommate/best friend/lover, Pallas, and whose earthly possessions consist of a room full of music hardware—samplers, synths, compressors, floppy drives—that will soon be considered obsolete. The first thing Louise does is hoof it to the home of another kind-of-ex and perennial frenemy, a big-time DJ named Alex, wave the contract in her face, and ask to borrow 500 francs before a visit to the coke guy.
“Literally flying, shearing through the warm late-May air,” Louise runs home from Notre-Dame to the Rue du Chemin Vert and snorts prodigiously until it’s one in the morning and she’s lying on the couch listening to her own erratic heartbeat, when Pallas finally returns her call from the sidewalk outside the club. How much, she asks. How much? “Ten times what I owe you,” Louise whispers into the phone.
The bank transfer won’t hit for a few weeks, but that doesn’t stop them from celebrating. And the natural celebration: a rave—a big one, “all anyone could talk about for two months,” where Alex and another DJ friend named Jessie are booked to spin records and, they hope, get their big break. The flyer reads: SUPER-MEGA RAGER. Detroit. London. Berlin. Brussels. Paris. The best the underground has to offer. “No address, obviously, otherwise the cops would have camped out for two straight months, but also no named affiliations or any indication of sound quality, which was truly unusual. And more mysterious still, no DJ list,” Louise observes. “That kind of secrecy suggested either a wild first-class rave, like in the early days, or a hyper-commercial crapfest with smiley-face T-shirt stands and other baloney.”
Anyone who’s done time in the trenches will feel the pre-party butterflies as Louise and her crew split up into two overcapacity cars and blast off onto the dark suburban highway, kick drums rattling the panes of their half-lowered windows. Wearing big pants and tight designer tees, they roll up to a circus tent an hour outside Paris and are greeted at the entrance by an airport-sized display panel listing a lineup that would still sell out the biggest rooms in Brooklyn, including The Hacker, DJ Hell, Kevin Saunderson, and Laurent Garnier. “Holy shit,” Louise says to her friends, “you two and Alex are the only two girls.”
Read more The Rise of Avigdor Lieberman
Cue the first of many blurry rave scenes, written in short, fractured sentences that mirror the strange dissonance of rushing on E, of feeling supernaturally attentive and yet constantly distracted by just about anything. The best lines are cinematic flashes (“I looked at my undulating hands as they opened and closed”) or quietly incisive musings (“anyone who says this music is cold and inhuman should have their head checked”). But the author isn’t immune to the kinds of high-flown metaphors so common in electronic-music criticism, a by-product of trying to convey something so visceral, so rapturous, and yet so alien to anything we experience in daily life as the feeling of being ravaged by a military-grade subwoofer, as in: “The bass kept plowing, a deaf, blind locomotive climbing upward with that voice tirelessly repeating its urge to fuck you all night.” Read that again.
A lot of the prose in Superstars can tend toward the amateurish. But the unedited fanzine style also feels punk, so you can take it for what it is, or not, depending on your tolerance. The translation is occasionally marred by hilariously uncool dadspeak, like when an after-hours party gets raided and Louise’s friend cries: “It’s so pissy—Jessie was on a heater when these gasbags came and told her to shut it all down!” But the rawness is mostly endearing, and authentic as a record of a time when underground music wasn’t so depressingly professionalized. It’s also tonally consistent for a book about a woman consumed by music, in an era when you couldn’t just sleepwalk into the nearest Spotify playlist in search of a personality.
The mind of today’s music fan could hardly comprehend holding a tape recorder to the TV during a Patti Smith rerun concert to capture her cover of “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star” by the Byrds because it wasn’t available on CD, as Louise does at one point in the book. That’s not to say today’s fans are any less fervent or that they’re in it more for the lifestyle than the music. But there’s a reason these older fans went to such lengths for the music, and it’s not because it bolstered their politics—though it often did—but because it stirred their souls.
Superstars is also a rich psychological profile, a glimpse into the mind of the young, middle-class nonconformist at the tail end of the pre-Internet age. And that person—every character in the novel, in fact—is a real piece of work: starved for sex and affection, disloyal and disorganized, materialistic in a way that would have seemed tacky to their Berlin counterparts, pathological liars who start drama because there’s nothing good on MTV. Worst of all is Louise, who—as a way of procrastinating on her album—steals her ex’s new young girlfriend, Inès, to have as an impressionable pet on the couch, going “ooh” and “aah” as she makes beats on her drum machine. But even in the midst of all the back-stabbing, when they do get that strung-out, early-morning call from a friend who overdid it, they know to open their door with a warm bath and a pull-out couch ready. That’s what a scene usually is, isn’t it? Neither irreproachable nor totally depraved.
These days, raving is held to great expectations. If you believe the recent spate of highbrow writing on the subject, it can do just about anything. It can prime you for direct action—as in the case of one writer who describes emerging from a club in Berlin “drenched in sweat, ready to riot,” only to join the “tumultuous, violent May Day protests” the next day. It can, when paired with the right mind-altering substances, open a space for healing: a way to “psychically rearrange a world…corrupted by moral hypocrisy and the profit motive,” writes another. Meanwhile, its hypnotic, long-haul mindset can even deprogram such deep-seated constructs as our very perception of time, says a third, defying the “chrononormativity” of “straight time” to create new emancipatory epistemes: “a dissociative time, a transsexual time, a ketamine time.”
It’s not that these writers are over-theorizing the rave so much as that they all seem to suggest that it can somehow make you a better person. Today’s discourse, with its insistence on raving as more than mere frivolous diversion, carries a distinct whiff of the Protestant work ethic, that secularized inheritance that none of us can seem to escape. But Superstars belongs to a different time, when most people’s concerns were, in the author’s words, that “the drugs were good, the music was good, the sex was good.” If anything, today’s priorities seem like a pendulum swing away from the Gen X attitude on display here, which excused toxic behavior as a sign of being tortured and deep. None of these characters would describe their lifestyle as uplifting or edifying or even use a term as rosy as community (which doesn’t appear in the text once). What’s more, they probably wouldn’t use a word like lifestyle, which would have been considered a fraudulent concern, a distraction from the music. Yes, music… remember that old thing? Of course, music is political, always has been—and the scene’s recent awakening to that fact has made it safer and more equitable. But given all the ink spilled in these discussions about lifestyle, Superstars is a welcome reminder of the power of sound itself—why someone might go so far as to hold a recording device to a TV so they can savor it over and over and over again.
Read more Trump Humiliated a Submissive Mainstream Media at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
