The Rave Subculture

The dizzying laser lights flashed in synchronicity with the pulsating bass of the music that bounced off the psychedelic warehouse walls. As my boyfriend and I mentally attempted to organize the chaos surrounding us, we pushed our way through the crowd of spasmodic lunatics who contorted their bodies in time with the music and lights. We located a couch in a room covered with cartoonesque, hyper-graphic graffiti. An androgynous man sat himself at my feet and began massaging my thighs, while a girl with her eyes rolled back into her head demanded that my boyfriend give her a massage. Just then the deejay laid his head in my lap, told me he was in love with me, and placed a bitter pill on my tongue. This certainly was the most bizarre method of earning three graduate credit hours I could imagine.

So began my two-year ethnography on the American rave subculture. The scene described above was my initiation into the underground subculture where rave kids, typically under twenty-one years old, are given secret invitations to attend private warehouse parties with dancing, drugs, and thousands of their closest friends. Because of my youthful and unorthodox appearance, I was invited to join the then-highly-exclusive underground scene and attended numerous raves in several major cities in North Carolina. Although my chosen subculture was not typically examined by academia, I conducted an academic ethnography of what Maton (1993) describes as a "group whose world views, values and practices diverge from mainstream North American and social science cultures" (747). As a result, I received three graduate credit hours for "supervised research in ethnography" and conducted what may be the only academic ethnography on raves.

The American rave...

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...ck." This blessing is typically given to the "virgin" by seasoned rollers. All of the body and hand rituals can occur in the "ambiance room." The ambiance room is away from the music, so people can talk to each other and be in private. The room has fantastical art, typically painted on the walls to look like psychedelic graffiti. Ravers report seeing hallucinations such as faces on the walls speaking to them, or watching the walls as if they were cartoons. The drugs and the rituals work in conjunction with the music to create the total rave experience.

Being on the cutting edge of bizarre, alternative music is an elite privilege, complete with buzz words to exclude the mainstream. The music makes or breaks the scene. One rave deejay explains to Rosen and Flick (1992), "A great rave or techno record is like a religious experience. A bad one will give you a headache