“Are you taking anything tonight?”
Francis, who I just met, asks me. It’s a chilly evening, and we’re at a warehouse in some back alley located between Marikina and Pasig. All roads in Manila lead to EDSA highway, so if you squabble through its narrow side streets, through exhaust fumes, you’ll hear the distantly thumping bass to find tonight’s venue.
Francis, 25, is wearing sunglasses. Partying since he was 14, he turns to nightlife to escape his busy day life. He tells me about some “raves” he’s been to. “Neverland,” he shouts in my ear, “Sonic Garden,” parties I’ve never heard of, yet the names had the same mythical ring as Tomorrowland, considered today as one of the world’s largest dance music festivals in Boom, Belgium.
Tomorrowland, with its land area covering 78 hectares or 145 football fields, is designed to overload the senses. On its 20th anniversary in 2024, Tomorrowland’s intricately designed main stage equipped with a 230-speaker sound system, alluded to the “tree of life” with draping trees, floral embellishments, and bust sculptures carved onto rocky textures that transported tripping partygoers into a surreal fantasy.
Our Manila warehouse setup is far more modest: a few hundred sweaty dancers enveloped by a four-point sound system that, nevertheless, packs a punch. Industrial fans strategically encircle the crowd while Francis, with dilated eyes, scans the strobing dancefloor from behind his sunglasses.
“Is this a rave to you?” I ask him.
“This is more underground than that,” Francis says, pointing at the DJ. “You wouldn’t hear this music there.”
Rave means different things to different people. To some, it is a big party with big crowds and big sound system. To others, it is a subculture rooted in dance music. In 1958, Texan singer-songwriter Buddy Holly recorded a rockabilly track about the thrill of love, “Rave On,” which is to say that “to rave” is also to talk wildly over something. Its Middle English origin, “raven,” means to show signs of madness, while the Old French verb “resver” (like in “rêver”) is to dream.
In London between the ‘50s and ‘60s, young artist types threw hedonistic parties referred to as raves. The sharp-looking mods — like their bohemian predecessors, the beatniks — rejected postwar values of conformity by embracing a fashionable lifestyle that subverted polite society. Mods took speed and partied at raves that played rhythm and blues-inspired rock music.
The 1965 song “My Generation” by The Who, for example, drove anticipation with its pulsating bassline while vocalist Roger Daltrey frustratingly stutters his lyrics as if to tweak from the speed and mumble “fuck” under his breath (“Why don’t you f-fade away? / and d-don’t try dig [sic] what we all s-s- say”). The song climaxes into what was known then as a “rave-up,” a section near the end of a song when the band erupts into a faster, more intense pace.
“The only people for me are the mad ones,” wrote Jack Kerouac, an American writer and key figure of the beatnik movement, in his 1957 novel On The Road. “The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
But in every generation, what is considered “cool” always drifts from the familiar. Take rock music, which, along with rhythm and blues, branched into further obscurity throughout the 1970s. When English football fans from the North traveled down to London to follow their teams, many visited the vinyl store to dig for lesser-known records. A groovy, minimalist strand of punk rock populated the shelves, which many referred to at the time as the “new wave.” Stores also sold funk imports from Chicago and Detroit that, with its uptempo, four-on-the-floor beat from jazz and soul, conjured more athletic forms of dancing in the discotheques (French for a library of phonograph records).
Read the rest of the story in the first print issue of Rolling Stone Philippines. For more information, please visit Sari.Sari.Shopping.
