Dance Drugs And Escape

In the late 1980s the rave phenomenon swept the youth culture of the United Kingdom, incorporating the generations' two newest social stimulants: modern electronic dance music and a notorious designer drug known as Ecstasy. Although the movement began in rebellion against mainstream culture, its underground dynamism soon attracted the interest of novelists, screenwriters, and filmmakers who attempted to reflect the phenomenon in their works. Through artistic and commercial popularization, the once obscure subculture was transformed into a pop-culture behemoth with powerful links to the entertainment industry. This study deals with the transformative effects of film, television and literature on club culture. Chapters furthermore reflect club culture's own effect on crime, ethnicity, sexuality and drug use. As the study traces artistic depictions of club culture's development, each chapter focuses on individual books, films and television shows that reflect the transformation of the club culture into what it is today.

The DJ stands at a juncture of technology, performance and culture in the increasingly uncertain climate of the popular music industry, functioning both as pioneer of musical taste and gatekeeper of the music industry. Together with promoters, producers, video jockeys (VJs) and other professionals in dance music scenes, DJs have pushed forward music techniques and technological developments in last few decades, from mashups and remixes to digital systems for emulating vinyl performance modes. This book is the outcome of international collaboration among academics in the study of electronic dance music. Mixing established and upcoming researchers from the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Australia and Brazil, the collection offers critical insights into DJ activities in a range of global dance music contexts. In particular, chapters address digitization and performativity, as well as issues surrounding the gender dynamics and political economies of DJ cultures and practices.

From the ragtime one-step of the early twentieth century to the contemporary practices of youth club cultures, popular dance and music are inextricably linked. This collection reveals the intimate connections between the corporeal and the sonic in the creation, transmission and reception of popular dance and music, which is imagined here as ’bodies of sound’. The volume provokes a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conversation that includes scholarship from Asia, Europe and the United States, which explores topics from the nineteenth century through to the present day and engages with practices at local, national and transnational levels. In Part I: Constructing the Popular, the authors explore how categories of popular music and dance are constructed and de-stabilized, and their proclivity to appropriate and re-imagine cultural forms and meanings. In Part II: Authenticity, Revival and Reinvention, the authors examine how popular forms produce and manipulate identities and meanings through their attraction to and departure from cultural traditions. In Part III: (Re)Framing Value, the authors interrogate how values are inscribed, silenced, rearticulated and capitalized through popular music and dance. And in Part IV: Politics of the Popular, the authors read the popular as a site of political negotiation and transformation.

Almost as soon as 'club culture' took hold - during the UK's Second Summer of Love in 1988 - its sociopolitical impact became clear, with journalists, filmmakers and authors all keen to use this cultural context as source material for their texts. This book uses that electronic music subculture as a route into an analysis of these principally literary representations of a music culture: why such secondary artefacts appear and what function they serve. The book conceives of a new literary genre to accommodate these stories born of the dancefloor - 'dancefloor-driven literature'. Using interviews with Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting (1994), alongside other dancefloor-driven authors Nicholas Blincoe and Jeff Noon as case studies, the book analyzes three separate ways writers draw on electronic dance music in their fictions, interrogating that very particular intermedial intersection between the sonic and the linguistic. It explores how such authors write about something so subterranean as the nightclub scene, and analyses what specific literary techniques they deploy to write lucidly and fluidly about the metronomic beat of electronic music and the chemical accelerant that further alters that relationship.

This collection explores the representation, articulation and construction of youth subcultures in a range of texts and contexts. It brings together scholars working in literary studies, screen studies, sociology and cultural studies whose research interests lie in the aesthetics and cultural politics of youth. It contributes to, and extends, contemporary theoretical perspectives around youth and youth cultures. Contributors examine a range of topics, including ‘bad girl’ fiction of the 1950s, novels by subcultural writers such as Colin MacInnes, Alex Wheatle and Courttia Newland, as well as screen representations of Mods, the 1990s Rave culture, heavy metal, and the Manchester scene. Others explore interventions into subcultural theory with respect to metal, subcultural locations, abjection, graffiti cultures, and the potential of subcultures to resist dominant power frameworks in both historical and contemporary contexts.

For some people, at some times, in some places, on some drugs, dance music can be a gateway to transformative, even transcendent experiences. With the help of skilled DJs, dancers can reach euphoric states, discard their egos, and feel social barriers dissolve. Dance floors can be sites of openness, subversion, and even small-scale acts of political resistance. At a minimum, dance music lightens the burdens of contemporary life. At its best, dance music offers glimpses of better worlds. Yet even where dance music communities are built on principles of resistance and liberation, they nevertheless share the grittier realities of the rest of the world. Dance Music makes the case that dance music is ordinary and that something exceeding the social and spatiotemporal bounds of the dance floor is required for the transformative promise of dance music to be realized.

Amanda Howell offers a new perspective on the contemporary pop score as the means by which masculinities not seen—or heard—before become a part of post-World War II American cinema. Popular Film Music and Masculinity in Action addresses itself to an eclectic mix of film, from Elvis and Travolta star vehicles to Bruckheimer-produced blockbuster action, including the work of musically-innovative directors, Melvin Van Peebles, Martin Scorsese, Gregg Araki, and Quentin Tarantino. Of particular interest is the way these films and their representations of masculinity are shaped by generic exchanges among contemporary music, music cultures, and film, combining American cinema's long-standing investment in violence-as-spectacle with similarly body-focused pleasures of contemporary youth music. Drawing on scholarship of popular music and the pop score as well as feminist film and media studies, Howell addresses an often neglected area of gender representation by considering cinematic masculinity as an audio-visual construction. Through her analyses of music’s role in action and other film genres that share its investment in violence, she reveals the mechanisms by which the pop score has helped to reinvent gender—and gendered fictions of male empowerment—in contemporary screen entertainment.

***An Instant New York Times Bestseller*** From the woman who is credited for launching what we know as the celebrity focused, “brand” driven, social media obsessed popular culture of today, comes an honest and surprising memoir that reckons with that truth, and shows that there is so much more to Paris Hilton than you might believe. I was born in New York City on February 17, 1981, three days after Valentine’s Day. From the time I was a toddler, my brain skipped and flickered with the chemical imbalance of ADHD. Sometimes it was too much. I’m not bragging or complaining about it, just telling you: This is my brain. It has a lot to do with how this whole book thing is going to play out, because I love run-on sentences—and dashes. And sentence fragments. I’m probably going to jump around a lot while I tell the story. I came of age during the most turbulent pop culture period ever. The character I played—part Lucy, part Marilyn—was my steel-plated armor. People loved her. Or they loved to hate her, which was just as marketable. I leaned into that character, my ticket to financial freedom and a safe place to hide. I made sure I never had a quiet moment to figure out who I was without her. I was afraid of that moment because I didn’t know what I’d find. I wrote this book in an effort to understand my place in a watershed moment: the technology renaissance, the age of influencers. I also wrote this book so that the world could know who I am today. I focused on key aspects of my life that led to what I am most proud of--how my power was taken away from me and how I took it back, how I built a thriving business, a marriage and a family. There are so many young women who need to hear this story. I don’t want them to learn from my mistakes; I want them to stop hating themselves for their own mistakes. I want them to laugh and cry and embrace every aspect of who they are with fearlessness and pride. We all have our own brand of intelligence, and, girl, fuck fitting in.