Critical Review of McRobbie (10/6)

McRobbie's discussion of the "hyper-reality of pleasure" (291) brings up the relationship between the body, the music, and technology - or, as she says, the "new technologies of the mass media." In the technological '90s, 24-hour new broadcasts are possible, so it is also possible for a DJ to sustain a rave for days on end. From this image of rave, the music seems to function as a means to a state of (possibly drug-enhanced) bodily pleasure. The neverending sets of dance music are meant to be trance-inducing, to create a certain state of consciousness and a social state between the partiers. This social state functions as a space in which to perform the new sexual norms of youth culture, such as the "emancipation" of young people, especially girls, from romance, and the introduction of "friendship, equality, and difference" into the "vocabulary of relationships" (423). As McRobbie discusses, the way rave manifests, and the "signs, symbols, objects, styles and other signifying texts" are a result of social tensions, for example the combination of the excitement of the event, the hyper-sexualized feminine form, and the fears surrounding AIDS and other dangers present at raves. How does this complicated set of social pressures and attitudes translate into a subculture, and into a reimagining of "modes of femininity"?

McRobbie makes the point that raves, during which "a saturnalia of body and mind" sometimes went on for days, transmitted the club culture of black and gay 1980s culture in the UK to white, working-class groups in the '90s. I see strong parallels to Wilson Pickett's "In The Midnight Hour," which caused a similar transmission of subculture information into the white working-class public in an earlier time period. She also used this aspect of the rave scene to connect it with an earlier drug culture, the hippie subculture of the Sixties, since raves often verged on becoming days-long peace gatherings similar to hippie festivals. This, to me, seems more subversive to the superculture than any other aspect of the rave subculture, since this claiming of the "right to party" threatens the social norms that keep economies running. In this sense can rave culture be considered political, in its definition of a space where youth can exist outside the norms of the superculture?