Joaquín Barriendos

It is up to every one of us to continue this
stance against the oppression of dance.
THIS REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED

Anonymous flyer

The rock stage reproduces the classic structure of Western dialects: a well defined topology that organises the social tensions of the subjects through axes of power. The individual’s experience of space, pleasure as a collective experience, and the redemption of the social body against state-led coercion, all converge in this staging of music, through the collision and antithetical positions of a spokesman and his audience.
The charismatic leader -touched by genius and removed from the “everyday” world - guides the masses through a cathartic monologue, not delegating the right to speak but for the deaf repetition of the chorus. In many senses, the scenographic ritual of rock, works like a late modern update of the skena, the melos and the coro of Greek drama.
Any form of musical ‘topocracy’ surrounding rock music (from pop-rock to black-metal, and from glam-rock to grunge) has its own form of Messiah, its celebrant. This is the one who leads the collective delirium, turning all its elements antagonistic: the magical light of the scene contrasts with the chaotic twilight of the multitude, the poetic pleasure of the lyrical with the political articulation of youthful vindication, the accumulation of decibels in the lead’s voice with the deafness of the mass, the consonances of rock’s chords with the dissonances of the shouts and whistles of the public, the raising of social conscience with the loss of the emotional conscience through drug use, and so on.
Therefore, the rock concert as ritual is quite an accomplished form of counterculture, with all the negative weight that this antagonism carries for social practices and for the autonomy of the sub-cultural. This collective performance stages both the liberation of a body legitimized by the state and the state’s status as a legitimate form of social control and surveillance. The rock stage does not escape the power structure and control of the Foucauldian panopticon.
Alejandro Vidal’s installation A Thousand Lonely Suicides (2005) recovers the tensions generated by the combination of youth audiences, counter-cultural social conflicts and suicide as a form of release. In it, the amassed image of the rock concert is repoliticised from an anti-nostalgic perspective, by taking counter-cultural fanaticism towards the sphere of collective resistance and urban guerrilla.
The transferral of the atmosphere of the nightclub to an empty stage, to a spot designed to raise a leading character who is no longer there, the constant training of characters who could repress or be repressed, the macho exhibitionism of heavy-metal aesthetics, etc., herald the end of counter-cultural protests by an anonymous mass, simultaneously announcing new forms of counter-hegemonic street activity carried out by a new, diverse and neo-tribal youth.
In his series of photographs A Thousand Lonely Suicides -two of which are included in his Berlin show- a tired body, carved by time and scars through an urban hara-kiri rite, bears witness to the limitations of the modern individual subject as an agent of social change.
Like other modern revolutionary forms, the musical counter-culture that’s triggered by rock’s contentious power, is based on the utopian structure of social transformation; on the historical redemption exerted by the hero-singer who sacrifices him to shift the course of social events. The tragic deaths of idols like Jim Morrison, Ian Curtis or Sid Vicious creates a chain with this list of fallen angels. However, Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994 is perhaps the one that signals the most extreme way, delayed and extemporaneous, of trying to redeem an audience through a heroic life. His gesture was, without a doubt, a pyrrhic victory for counter-culture: the closing of the age of the redeeming hero.
By the mid-nineties, the idol-spokesman had been overcome, both by a market system capable of absorbing absolutely anything, even the performance of death, and by sub-cultural forms tired of the circular antagonism of rebellion. For the latter, grunge’s revisionism of North American fashion-metal (as Poison or Motley Crue) seemed too poor, excessively televisual with its saccharine media-friendly "unplugged"s for MTV afternoons. As it would become clear later, punk’s recycling was following a different route from that of mass assimilation.
The disenchantment with these forms of youthful rebellion served to fuel the popularity of electronic music fit for dancing in a club, a scene that saw itself as a depoliticized musical subculture, moving away from rock’s inertia of social redemption. The shift in the sonic paradigm was accompanied by a corresponding shift in the stimulants of choice: the use of ecstasy opened up new horizons for collective introspection.
The break with the characteristic duality of the traditional stage of the rock concert opened up the possibility of new forms of interaction between the subjects. As they no longer looked towards a fixed point centralized by the Dj, they could move more freely; as lyrics did not directly or indirectly determine an ideological or political position, they melted into a multitude aware of their individual abandonment; as no promise of salvation was offered, the subjects were no longer lost in anonymity but rather they re-encountered each other in a collective and emotional experience. This is perhaps the most important difference between the idolatry of the Rock Star and the techno-shamanism that characterizes the rave catharsis: the Dj does not have to die to redeem the audience nor does he need to stage his delirium to secure his followers. The neo-tribal times that Michel Maffesoli has talked about, in which the individualism of mass society has been eclipsed, have, in their turn, given way to new ways of understanding the collective.

Through electronic dance music, the tribal polyphony of urban cultures tried to find an anarchic space in which the meaning of class, race and other socio-cultural barriers could be erased. Some people have tried to see the “oceanic experience” –as the rave immersion has been called due to its unavoidable biorhythmical charge, and the loss of conscience through ecstasy– as an effective space of multiculturalism, through the obliteration of sexual, political, racial and other differences. However, the taste for the management of body pleasures and for alternative and dissident forms of leisure as counter-hegemonic strategies thrived alongside the banality of rave culture.
Academic studies of sub-cultural forms, tend to see the rave scene as having lost the political character that had characterized youth counter-cultural movements since the Sixties. However, the political force of the electronic scene was based on an indirect resistance that tried to be effective by not being explicit. It was a subculture that reflected upon its own mechanisms of politization. To survive as resistance, dance culture used the strategy of disappearance. The slogan "You can't arrest what you can't see" that guided ravers from the beginning of the Nineties sums up this political attitude.
The second half of the decade saw an increasing oppression of youth cultures. On July 7th, 1995, in a display of military intelligence, a group of police forces surrounded the rave party “Mother” in Corby (Northamptonshire). Like it was customary for this type of raves considered illegal, the site at which “Mother” was to take place was revealed via telephone just a few hours before the event. However, the police had been able to intercept the phone line that served as a hub to inform of the location of the party, and had used it to register names and addresses of prospective detainee youths. Arrests and harassment of both organizers and visitors was the balance of this raid against British youth.
This type of oppressive actions characteristic of the second half of the Nineties generated a deep malaise not just among the audiences of electronic dance music but also among other youth minorities and various activist groups, who made themselves prime targets of the Public Order Act of 1994. This law made a direct reference to rave music and parties, considering them as deviations from the state’s structure of leisure, grounding its argument on a negative conception of the repetitive beats of these forms of electronic music. The way the police acted, as well as the indiscriminate form in which they arrested both organizers and potential public, suggested that these new strategies of state surveillance were more ideological than legislative. The after effects of Thatcherist conservatism were again at play.
A new form of bio-power had emerged, a new panopticon of mind control, through the volitional restrictions of the body. The binomial mind /mood made sense again. The Public Order Act mentioned the word rave twice, and associated it with a "sound wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats" (Section 63, sub-section 1[b]). With it, the 1994 Public Order Act became a form of bio-control, trying to legislate on the morality of the bio-rhythmical impulses of youthful audiences and its bodily capacity for rebellion; far from being innocent, these laws knew that the energy that keeps a raver dancing for hours, under the effects of ecstasy, without food but well hydrated, is the same energy that is used in the army to train soldiers.
But bio-control is thwarted with bio-resistance, with the physical and mental training to stay non-alienated. Vidal’s installation A Thousand Lonely Suicides alludes to the current meaning of bodily and mental exercise through music, in relation to forms of counter-cultural resistance. Previous works, like his video The Nature of the Threat (2003) in which he portrays one of the members of legendary Chilean punk band Pinochet Boys already hinted at some of these themes. It’s no longer the word, but biorhythms, that provide the most effective form of social resistance for neo-tribal youths. These new forms of bodily terrorism are the forms that state crime takes on audiences that grew up with the fall of the Berlin wall.