British Rave Music & Culture & the Media
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This study will examine the relationship between the media and British rave music and culture, using as source material Sarah Thornton's essay "Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave Culture," from Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture, edited by Andrew Ross and Tricia Ross. The essence of the Thornton essay is that the gap between the alternative scene as described both by the media and the members of this particular alternative scene themselves is not as great as both "sides" might imagine or want to imagine. The conclusion can fairly be drawn that the mainstream culture in modern society is so vast that any subculture or counterculture springing up in its midst is inevitably intimately connected to that larger mainstream entity. In other words,the alternative culture of the rave dance scene is not as radical a subculture as is depicted by both the ravers and the media. Both benefit from this deception. Thornton demonstrates a number of features of rave culture which fit into the stereotypes of status quo social life. The study will also consider some of the ideals of the rave culture, ideals which reflect some of the ideals of the larger culture, and will consider as well the future of the music of the British rave scene. The notion that somehow the rave culture emerged and exists separate and distinct from the "media" is critiqued thoroughly by Thornton, who concludes that "Diverse media are inextricably involved in the meaning and organization of subcultures
. . .
the ravers themselves, gains its value in large part because of that scene's perceived distance from and defiance of the mainstream culture and its great representative the "media," which its members mock and abhor:
The reason for the oft-repeated notion of an absolute and essentialist ideological opposition between subcultures and media is . . . easy to understand. The stories that subcultural youth tell about media and commerce are not meant to give accurate accounts of media production processes, but are part of the way youth articulate their negotiation of issues of cultural capital and social structure. In this case, the "the media" stand in for the masses--the greater discursive distance from which is a measure of their cultural worth (188).
In other words, the ravers see themselves and their scene as more valuable the more unlike they are from the mainstream culture, people, and media. What Thornton argues, on the other hand, is that in reality the ravers demonstrate many of the same organizing features which mark the mainstream.
Thornton, for example, portrays the ravers as a class of children, in effect, who are far less threatening than they portray themselves as being or as the media portrays them as being:
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1659
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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