Authenticities from Record Hops to Raves

Disc Jockeys and Social Sounds

Discotheques have carved out distinctive times and places for recorded music. With their different senses of place and occasion, they have, as their name suggests, effectively accommodated discs. But records have also adapted to the social and cultural requirements of the evolving dance establishment, modifying their formats and formalizing the manner in which they are played. Disc jockeys have had a decisive role in conducting the energies and rearranging the authenticities of the dancefloor.

Essential to the altered space of discotheques is the enhanced acoustic atmosphere which results from high volume, continuous music. The initial popularity of juke-box-fitted coffee bars and purpose-built discotheques over the record sessions in dancehalls related not only to architectural style but also to improved soundsystems. According to one music weekly of the early sixties, La Discotheque in Streatham was 'more than a dance hall' because of the 'quality and the volume' of the records they played (New Record Mirror 19 January 1963). In the 1950s, record playback technology was not able to fill a large ballroom with high fidelity sound. Even in the early 1960s, few discotheques could provide all-around sound, highs or lows, or thumping bass.

In the mid-1960s, many juke-box manufacturers, including the three largest, Seeburg, Wurlitzer and Rowe, started to manufacture extended-play records for their dance-oriented juke-boxes - a decade before record companies extended the length of the single with the twelve-inch format. Seeburg argued that the discotheque would prevail as a form of entertainment only if it offered 'uninterrupted music'. As a result, they issued dance music in the format of the 'Little LP', a recording with three titles per side, with music in the lead-in and lead-out grooves, amounting to seven and a half minutes of continuous music (Billboard 6 February 1965 and I May 1965). So, the practice of dancing to discs began to affect the design of the record itself.

Record companies were slow to react. At around this time, Billboard introduced a discotheque chart because they said that the discotheque was having 'a major effect on the entire music and entertainment industry. A look at Billboard's Hot 100 shows discotheque industry material all over the chart (Billboard 27 February 1965). But it was not until a decade later, with disco music, that the industry really opened its eyes to the 'concept of transforming a routine nightclub into a catalyst for breaking records' (Wardlow in Joe 1980: 8-9). In his extensive analysis of the introduction of the twelve-inch single in America, Will Straw argues that record company interest in dance clubs coincided with shrinking radio play-lists; promotions departments were looking for alternative means of plugging their music (cf. Straw 1990).

In the 1970s, extended twelve-inch singles became a standard product amongst American, then British, record companies. The idea came from American DJs who had been mixing seven-inch copies of the same record for prolonged play. Some began recording their mixes, editing them on reel-to-reel tapes, then playing them in clubs. When these recordings were transferred to vinyl, the extended remix was born. Record labels became involved when they realized that discotheques were sufficiently widespread to make catering to them with special vinyl product a promotional necessity.*

*Although twelve-inches were originally made for public performance only, within a few years, they became retail products. In Britain, the first two retailed twelve-inch disco singles were Undisputed Truth's 'You Plus Me' (issued in a limited edition of three thousand) and Goodie Goodie's 'No I DJ' in 1978. The first twelve-inch-only release to make it into the top ten was Abba's 1981 single 'Lay Your Love on Me'. This honour is usually assumed to be held by New Order's 'Blue Monday', which was released on twelve-inch-only but, despite high sales and many weeks in the chart, it peaked at number nine. Although roughly forty-five per cent of singles sold in the early 1990s were twelve-inches, major record labels still see the format as primarily promotional. Profits on twelve-inches are such that they are usually only relevant to small companies with low overheads and low turnover.

The new record format was better suited for playing at high volume over club sound-systems and its extended versions had instrumental breaks where the song was stripped down to the drums and bass with very little vocal in order to facilitate seamless mixing of one track into another. (Interestingly, dance bands of the 1920s and 1930s constructed dance numbers in a way not unlike twelve-inches, with extended instrumental introductions and finales and short segments of lyrics in which the vocal acted as if it were merely another instrument. Simon Frith in conversation.) These extended dance 'tracks' (rather than 'songs') helped sustain the momentum of the dancefloor and contributed to the other-worldly atmosphere of the discotheque. The constant pulse of the bass blocks thoughts, affects emotions and enters the body. Like a drug, rhythms can lull one into another state. With rave culture, this potentiality was ritualized as the 'trance dance' by dancers actively seeking an altered state of consciousness through movement to the music.

Pre-eminently, twelve-inch records were made specifically for DJs. The recorded entertainment at the heart of disc cultures is not automated. DJs incorporate degrees of human touch, intervention and improvisation. They play a key role in the enculturation of records for dancing, sometimes as an artist but always as a representative and respondent to the crowd. By orchestrating the event and anchoring the music in a particular place, the DJ became a guarantor of subcultural authenticity. As Daniel Hadley writes, although DJs lack absolute control over the proceedings, they are 'still responsible for the creation of a musical space, a space which is formed according to the expectations of the crowd and the specific kinds of DJ practices in place' (Hadley 1993: 64).

The changes in the DJ's occupational status reflect the progressive enculturation of recorded entertainment. The DJ's job has changed dramatically since the Second World War, moving from unskilled worker through craftsman to artist, but also through a less linear process involving degrees of anonymity and celebrity, collection and connoisseurship, performance and recording (cf. Kealy 1979 / 1990; Langlois 1992). In the forties, the person who played records for public dancing was not seen to possess much technical skill, let alone artistry. Although the Musicians' Union referred to the ser-vices of the 'public address engineer', it also suggested that the job was simply a question of unskilled supply. In a passage quoted earlier, for example, it was reported that, 'In almost every town the man who runs the radio shop, or specializes in the provision of public address equipment, will undertake to supply recorded music for dances or other social events at a small proportion of the fee a good band would charge' (Musicians' Union Conference Report 1949). Even in the 1950s, playing records for dancing was considered so unskilled that most thought it best to do it oneself. One didn't hire mobile DJs but their records. The advertisements read: 'Party records for a record party. Hire an evening's recorded music' (New Musical Express December 1957). General opinion in the record industry was that the DJ was not endowed with any particularly special skills. As its main trade paper observed: 'The position of the disc jockey is not an easy one. He becomes a public figure by presenting someone else's talent' (Record Retailer and Music Industry News 10 March 1960). A decade later, however, DJs came to be acknowledged by the record industry as experts about dance music and its markets. DJs entered a number of new jobs, invading A&R, promotions and marketing departments, sometimes even becoming managing directors of their own labels. DJs were also brought into the studio as remixers, producers and even artists in their own right. In fact, by the mid-nineties, it was a rarity to find a dance musician who had not spent at least some time working as a DJ.

Supplying the records was certainly the first and most vital function of the DJ. Consistently through the years, DJs have been heavy record buyers, product hunters, zealous collectors. For example, Jocks (later relaunched as DJ magazine) ran a weekly column 'How to be a DJ' which included a section on 'Buying Records'. They argued that the most important investment of a mobile DJ, other than his/her turntables and amplifiers, is a constantly updated record collection. Shopping 'once a fortnight is the absolute minimum.. . records can become huge surprisingly quickly and nothing is worse than going to a gig where half your audience wants you to play something new and you've never heard of it' (Jocks October 1990).

Certain DJs have built a reputation upon having the most comprehensive collections of particular genres. An ad for a Northern Soul night at Blackpool Mecca in 1974 identifies the night's DJs, Ian Levine and Cohn Curtis, and proclaims their main selling point: 'We have records that no one else has' (Black Music January 1974). At this time, the status of DJs was partly the status of an exclusive owner with discerning taste. As one journalist commented, 'the disc jockeys are becoming more and more of a cultural elite in their efforts to outdo each other in finding exclusive records' (Black Music June 1974).

Beyond the supply of records, the uses, skills and talents of DJs have long been viewed with some suspicion. The origins of the curious term, 'disc jockey', are disputed. Nevertheless, whatever its etymology, the expression suggests that some sportsmanlike dexterity was required to perform the job. The new professional had to 'ride' a record much as a racing jockey might handle his horse at the track. But 'to jockey' also means to gain advantage by skilful maneuvering, trickery or artifice. The implication might have been that disc jockeys deceived their listeners into thinking that what they heard was a live performance. Well into the 1970s, the DJ had a dubious reputation. S/he was often considered to be 'a parasite, the less successful being a mere spinner of discs, while the ranking DJ is a synthetic rock star with no musical ability' (Melody Maker 15 November 1975).

For several decades, the expectations of the DJ's job varied greatly. For example, in the mid-1960s, the American Whisky-a-Gogo chain employed women who acted as both DJs and gogo dancers. Called 'dance-DJs', they changed records and did 'dance routines in glass cages above the crowd' (Billboard 1 May 1965). However, this arrangement was anomalous. The master of ceremonies, presenter or 'personality DJ' was a more common role. Most 'personality DJs' with a national profile came from radio. They filled the gaps between records with informative chatter and presided over disc hops, touring the country promoting the product of a sponsoring record company. They also might broadcast a regular weekly show from a particular club. Radios Caroline, London and Luxembourg broadcast disc shows from venues like the Marquee and the 100 Club throughout the 1960s.

Amongst youthful crowds, DJs were developing into leaders and local celebrities. In New Society in 1968, Angela Carter wrote about a disc jockey in an unnamed provincial city as the 'prince of cloud-cuckoo land'. She described how, wearing extravagant white suits, he presided over the controls of a monumental record-player and she paraphrased his philosophy: 'A disc jockey is in a position of power. He can mould taste. Maybe he could do more. You've got all these kids looking up to you and you're in a position of authority' (Carter 1968). In this way, DJs started to be perceived as taste-makers or 'moulders of musical opinion in a very similar - and far more direct - way to the music journalist' (Melody Maker 15 November 1975).

By the mid-seventies, it was generally understood that the best DJs built up a rapport with their crowd to the degree that the crowd would follow the DJ from one club to another. The 'Tom Cat' mobile discotheque, for example, claimed a 'fan club' of two thousand members. They would hire the venues, promote the show by printing then distributing a thousand handbills in the street, put up posters, advertise in the press and take the money on the door (as it was the only way to earn more than ten pounds a night). The lead DJ explained their strategy: 'We're just like a pop group. We have our own signature tune and a back up jock who plays slow records for ten minutes before I come on' (Melody Maker 30 August 1975).

However, it was as mixers, rather than personalities, that DJs entered the hallowed world of musicianship. As 'turntable musicians', they would perform elaborate mixes which required much rehearsal (with names like the running mix, the chop mix, transforming, etc.). DJs created new music in the process of mixing. Records became the raw material of DJ performance just as, with sampling, they had become the raw material of composition. As Tony Langlois argues in his study of British house music DJs, 'house records are not recordings of performances, but are actively per-formed by the DJ himself, allowing spontaneity, surprise and creativity' (Langlois 1992: 236). This is one reason why tapes of DJ mixes can be bought at raves, outdoor markets and under the table in dance record shops or downloaded from rave bulletin boards and internet sites. In other words, dance fans desire documents of DJ performance.

As the vinyl single had been the raw material of DJ performance since rock'n'roll, it is not surprising that there was moment in the late 1980s when disc jockeys reacted negatively to the rise of the CD in a manner not unlike the way musicians of the 1970s responded to the proliferation of mobile discos. Both involved threats to livelihood and creativity. Just as the dance musicians' repertoire became outmoded so the DJ's vast record collection threatened to become obsolete. And just as the years of practice in mastering an instrument by the musician no longer promised employment, so DJs who had spent hours perfecting their touch, feeling the groove, sighting the track, were faced with a technology whose operations they could not see or touch. As one journalist wrote: 'In the age of digital reproduction. . . the DJ may be the last musician. . . records represent the last technology you can grasp - now with CDs it's all digital' (Jocks September 1990). The analogy between musicianship and DJ-ing extended to the properties attributed to vinyl. According to mixing DJs the sound of vinyl was 'real', 'warm', 'imperfect' but full of integrity, while CDs were 'cold', 'clinical', 'inhuman' and 'unreal'. Their language resembled the way live music was polarized from recorded music only a few years before. By the early 1990s, however, many clubs were fitted with CD mixers, and DJs were adjusting to the new format, seeing the possibilities of its 'purer' sound.

Though DJs may be musicians, they are rarely performers in the pop sense of the word. In purpose-built clubs, mixing booths tend to be tucked away and DJs unseen. As cultural figures, DJs are known by name rather than face. Although in the mid-nineties in a minority of London clubs, the 'cult of the DJ' led to the practice of facing the DJ booth whilst dancing, this has not been a widespread activity. The enduring spectacle afforded by discotheques has been the dancing crowd. In the absence of visually commanding performers, the gaze of the audience has turned back on itself. Watching and being seen are key pleasures of discotheques. Angela McRobbie extends an analogy between the gazes involved in the cinema and those of the discotheque: both offer 'a darkened space where the [individuall can retain a degree of anonymity and absorption.., but where the cinema offers a one-way fantasy which is directed solely through the gaze of the spectator at the screen, the fantasy of dancing is more social, more reciprocated' (McRobbie 1984: 146).

What authenticates club cultures is not so much a unique DJ performance, as the 'buzz', 'vibe', 'mood' or 'atmosphere' created in the interaction of DJ and crowd in space. It is as orchestrators of this 'living' communal experience that DJs are most important to music culture. DJs respond to the crowd through their choice and sequence of records, seek to direct their energies and build up the tension until the event 'climaxes'. DJs are supposed to have their finger on the pulse of the event in order to give the dancing crowd 'what [they] need rather than what [they] want' (Graeme Park quoted in New Musical Express 27 February 1988). In this way, DJs are artists in the construction of musical experience. As Jon Pareles argues:

"Disc jockeys, improvising with records or electronic gadgets and usually backed by immense sound systems, produce variations on hit records by taking them apart, adding new drum tracks, superimposing tunes or bass-lines - all with a careful attention to the sensuality of sound and the efficacy of rhythm. Not only does the music have the freshness of improvisation - and a function, to keep people danc-ing - but it has a richness rarely heard in live pop music. In clubs, there's no tension between music, technology and audience." (New York Times 22 July 1990)

Records are the pivot around which dance cultures have come to revolve. Contrary to the old rock ideologies, the 'live' does not have an exclusive claim on collective music culture, nor is it the original to which disc culture is a dull and distant echo. Disc culture is a distinct high-tech folk culture and twelve-inch dance records in the hands of a mixing DJ are, quite literally, social sounds.

The Authenticities of Dance Genres

The perceived authenticity of particular records and music genres is a complex issue entangled in several factors which are the subject of this section. First and most obviously, given the discussions of the past two sections, authenticity is dependent on the degree to which records are assimilated and legitimized by a subculture. Authentication is the ultimate end of enculturation. Second, the distance between a record's production and its consumption is relevant to the cultural value bestowed upon it. When original performers are remote in time or place, as is the case with foreign imports and revived rarities, records can acquire prestige and authority. Third, the environment in which a record is produced contributes to its authenticity. Records are more likely to be perceived as the primary medium of musics whose main site of production is the studio. And, finally, the ideological vagaries of music genres like their communication of bodily 'soul' or their revelation of technology play a main role in whether records come across as genuine. In other words, authenticity is ultimately an effect of the discourses which surround popular music.

In the 1930s, the British jazz appreciation societies called 'rhythm clubs' held 'recitals.., given by records loaned by members' (Godbolt 1984:138). These gatherings mark a shift in cultural values whereby records became the pivot around which a collective cul-ture developed and revolved. One of the first jazz fans to analyse the rhythm club movement from an academic perspective described its mania for the recorded form:

To understand the function of this sort of organization in the life of the European jazz fan, his utter dependence on phonographic records will have to be remembered. Cut off from the living music by time as well as space he submits to a particular shift in values. The record becomes more important than the music; minor musicians who have left recorded examples of their own work behind them become more important than those major musicians who for one reason or another have never got around to a recording studio; and the man who has met the musicians and knows his way through a maze of records becomes more important than the musician himself. (Ernest Borneman 1947 quoted in Godbolt 1984: 142)

The resolute focus on records in jazz connoisseur circles was an anomaly in the thirties which would become the norm much later with the advent of teenage dance cultures. Despite the unlikely pedigree, the genealogy is preserved in the etymology of the word 'discotheque' which literally translated from the French means 'record library' and gained currency in relation to Parisian jazz clubs.

Although jazz fans collected and fetishized records, they valued discs as 'records' in the strict sense of the word, as transcriptions, accounts, replicas, reproductions of a unique jazz performance. Jazz records were enculturated, they had prestige and authority, but they were still a secondary medium for reasons that related both to their process of production (they were relatively straightforward documents of particular performances) and also to the discourses in which they were enveloped (as performance was considered unquestionably superior to recording, even though recording was superior to notation) (cf. Newton 1959).

It was not until rock'n'roll that records started to serve as the original. With rock'n'roll, spinning discs were no longer a poor imitation of performing musicians; they were music itself. As one 'jiver' remembers it: records brought 'the real sound and real tempo of the mainly American [music that was] taking the charts by storm, rather than the house band's well-meaning but tidied up cover versions' (Nourse with Hudson 1990: 43). In fact, rock'n'roll was so tightly identified with records in Britain that PPL, which was willing to regulate the use of records for any other kind of music during this period, thought it 'unreasonable that musicians should be employed at so called "rock'n'roll" dances' (Musicians' Union Conference Report 1961).

This was mainly due to changes in media environment and studio production. For example, in America as well as Britain, the development of rock'n'roll depended on records. The cross-fertilization of Hillbilly music and Rhythm & Blues that engendered rock'n'roll was primarily brought about by records on radio. As Kloosterman and Quispel write, the black and white music scenes had few 'live' contacts because the southern states were strictly segregated. When television took over from radio as a national mass medium in the 1950s, radio went local and its audience segmented. One of its new target markets was the black population whose recently increased affluence meant that they were now attractive to a handful of advertisers. Black music, therefore, made it on to airwaves which crossed neighbourhood boundaries and diffused black music among the white youngsters who chose to tune in (cf. Kloosterman and Quispel 1990).

Elvis Presley, who had little contact with the local black population, gained his knowledge of R&B music from Memphis's black radio station (cf. Quain 1992, Wark 1989). Moreover, his sound and image were fashioned from an array of recorded influences, including radio, records, comic books, movies and television. Elvis's early records abandoned the attempt to mimic a live performance in the studio; their novel use of echo created a specifically studio sound (Middleton 1990: 89). Elvis's professional live act followed his first hit on local radio; it was developed to promote his records. This series of inversions of the 'natural' route from performance to recording was an exception at the time (for example, Bill Haley and Little Richard were seasoned touring performers before they entered the studio). However, depending on the genre, the precedence of recording over performance would gradually become the rule.

It is worth considering the role played by distinct times and sites of production and consumption. Records were preferred to performance in circumstances where the qualities specific to records were exploited. So, the ability of records to travel in space and time led to disc cultures revolving around imports, new releases or lost and almost forgotten old records. By these means, records acquired credibilities independent of performance. And, the onus of authenticity was shifted from a regard for the unique to an interest in the degrees of exclusivity found in the new, rare and antique. However, a 'unique recording' or 'only copy' has occasionally figured in disc cultures. One key to the success of reggae sound-systems, argues Les Back, is having original music in the strict sense of the word:

'Dub plates, or recorded rhythms, are original acetates and they are usually the only copies... The records are made by artists especially for the sound-system' (Back 1988: 145-6).

Since the 1950s, one way in which disc sessions have attracted audiences is by playing the 'latest releases'. In a modern world of proliferating communications media where the speed by which information travels and fashions change seems to get progressively faster (just as the music seems to quicken, from the 120 beats per minute standard of disco to 200bpm with techno and jungle music), discotheques are able to deliver the freshest sounds. With dance music, performance has a difficult time keeping up: musicians must decide to expand their repertoire, rehearse the songs, by which time the sound may have lost its currency. As a result, cover or copy bands are now few and far between. Live acts either play their own material or versions which are truly 'their own'. Today, British dance sounds are distinguished by a quick turnover of records, styles and subgenres to the extent that vanguard audiences often dance to tracks on 'import' or limited edition 'white label' before their commercial release. (Pre-release to clubs is, in fact, a standard promotion strategy.) Amongst pop music cultures, novelty and rarity displace uniqueness. This may be an instance of what Benjamin called the 'phoney spell of a commodity' but, in this way, records nevertheless enjoy a kind of attenuated aura (Benjamin 1955/ 1970: 233).

The time-binding power of records fosters interest not only in the novel, but in the archival. Records expedite cultural revival; they allow for 'dancing to music recorded and forgotten in another world and another time' (Black Music June 1974). In London in the early 1990s, one could attend record hops where the boys jived and the girls did 'the Madison' or visit funk (also called 'rare groove') clubs where the crowd would 'get down' in 1970s style. Meanwhile 'Classic Disco' nights had become a feature of almost every British provincial town, particularly in gay clubs.

Perhaps the first fully-fledged archival dance culture to draw attention to the distinct potentials of discs over and above performed music was the 'Northern Soul' scene of the early 1970s. Populated by white working-class youth from Northern England who danced to obscure, in fact unpopular and long forgotten, Afro-American soul records from the 1960s, the scene was considered by many to be 'the strangest and most unlikely manifestation of the entire black music experience' (Black Music November 1975).

The logic of Northern Soul's appeal was not nostalgia but rarity. Taking the Mod taste in soul music (around 1966) off on a tangent, Northern Soul DJs played increasingly rare records from the period. Not only were these records unavailable to dancers but also few of them knew the names of the artists or record labels to which they danced. Nevertheless, the dancers avowed that they went to the Northern Soul discos to hear sounds they couldn't hear anywhere else (Black Music June 1974).

Northern Soul records effectively displayed many of the characteristics of the work of art before the age of mechanical reproduction. They functioned as the axis of an elaborate ritual and displayed 'cult value'. Certainly, their scene bordered on the religious. As one commentator wrote at the time, Northern Soul 'has evolved its own temples (Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca), high priests (the disc jockeys), false prophets (the bootleggers) and congregation (thousands of working class kids pulled from the heavy industry belt of the North and Midlands)' (Black Music January 1975).

The ease with which records travel in space and time has enabled the continual crossover and growing globalization that characterize post-war popular music. While not quite 'a music hall without walls', recording technology does trespass on the borders of neighbourhood and nation (McLuhan 1964: 248). Significantly, it also traverses time: records are more readily available and longer-lasting than live music; they efficiently distribute and preserve sound. It was in exploiting the time and space-binding characteristics of recording that disc cultures acquired distinction.

The ideologies of music genres also played a crucial role in the authentication of recorded music and discotheques. Contemporary pop music has seldom been anathema to discotheques and has rarely tried to deny its recorded form. Rock, however, has pivoted ideologically around the ideal of the live music event de-spite the fact that it is known by most listeners primarily in its recorded form and has often been played in discotheques. This idea took root with late-sixties rock. In the mid-sixties, Billboard's list of top discotheque records not only included the Beatles' 'Eight Days a Week' and the Beach Boys' 'Do You Wanna Dance?', but also Bob Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' (Billboard 1 April 1965). Only a few years later, Dylan would not be considered optimum discotheque music.

The meta-genre, 'dance music', does not have an exclusive claim on dancing. For instance, rock audiences do not sit in quiet, contemplative appreciation. Headbanging, fist-raising, air-guitar solos and other movements which mimic the performers are all 'dancing' in the broad sense of the word. Many live rock gigs involve degrees of toe-tapping, finger-snapping, rhythmic clapping, pogoing, slamming and moshing. Even though the audience tends to face forward, eyes fixed on the stage, these crowds are physically responsive; they do dance and their musics do inspire it.

The repertoire of body movements associated with rock music often fails to be categorized as 'dancing'. This may be because the gaze of the dancers is focused elsewhere, but it may also relate to issues of cultural hierarchy. In the late 1960s, when rock'n'roll became rock, the music abandoned its overt function for dancing. (This is not to say that people didn't dance to rock, but that dancing wasn't considered the optimal response.) If rock was to be taken seriously as an art form, then listening, not dancing, would be the requisite mode of appreciation. Dancing is still frequently stigmatized as being uncritical and mindless to the extent that it can debase the music with which it is associated. (That dance-influenced 'ambient' music distinguishes itself as a cerebral listening, or more accurately 'head', music would seem to reinforce this point. It is part and parcel of the genre's bid to be taken seriously by non-clubbers.)

What contemporary British youth call 'dance music' is more precisely designated as discotheque or club music. Rather than having an exclusive claim on dancing, the many genres and subgenres coined obsessively under the rubric share this institutional home. Genres often announce it in their names: disco music was so called because of discotheques, while 'house' and 'garage' were named after key clubs-the Warehouse in Chicago and Paradise Garage in New York. Discotheques have historically played a wide range of music. Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean genres have been particularly affiliated with the institution: R&B and soul in the 1960s; funk, disco and reggae in the 1970s; hiphop, house and garage in the 1980s; ragga, dancehall and jungle in the 1990s. Nevertheless, one should not reify the relationship and forget about white traditions in 'dance music'. Rock'n'roll, electro pop, varieties of gay and Euro-disco, new wave and the New Romantics, Hi-NRG, British acid house and techno, to name just a few, have had predominantly white performers, audiences and sounds.

The ideological categories of 'black' and 'white' define the main axes of authenticity within dance music. Categories of gender and sexuality are employed with reference to pop, but varieties of dance pop such as Madonna or the Pet Shop Boys actually fall outside the definitions of dance music which circulate in the predominantly straight and white club and rave cultures investigated here. Although issues of gender and sexuality can be read into the music and are clearly important discursive categories in gay club cultures (cf. Dyer 1992; Hughes 1994), they are not a conspicuous feature of the discourses of straight club cultures, for the main reason that the feminine tends to signal the inauthentic, and the authentic is rendered in genderless or generically masculine (rather than macho) terms (cf. chapter 3).

'Black' dance music is said to maintain a rhetoric of body and soul despite its use of sampling and other computer technologies. Whereas 'white' or 'European' dance music is about a futurist celebration and revelation of technology to the extent that it minimizes the human among its sonic signifiers. Of course, these categories often have little to do with the actual colour of the people making the records; rather they are two discourses about the value of dance music. Both have their authenticities. For white youth, 'black' musi-cal authenticity is rooted in the body, whereas Euro-dance authenticity, like white ethnicity, is disembodied, invisible and high-tech. In other words, to be organic to a discotheque, music must ring true to its recorded form.

Both 'black' and 'white' dance traditions have been at the forefront of studio experimentation since the sixties. Free from the constraints of imminent performance, makers of dance music have explored the aesthetics of new musical instruments such as synthesizers, drum and bass-line machines and samplers. Unlike rhetorically 'live' genres, the truth of dance music is often found in the revelation of technology. Genres like house, hiphop and techno have conspicuously featured technologies hidden by other genres. They sampled and blatantly manipulated vocals at a time when most pop producers were using samplers to mimic the high production values usually furnished by numerous studio musicians and to correct the lead singer's odd bad note. They used new equipment, not to imitate 'natural' sounds, but to explore and create new sounds.

The 'black' tradition, however, maintains a key interest in vocals and, in certain subgenres, 'funky' instrumentation. For white youth, black authenticity tends to be anchored in the body of the performer/artist/star - in the grain of the voice, the thumping and grinding bass, the perceived honesty of the performance. In other words, authenticity is rooted in the romance of body and soul and relates to essential, verifialble origins. Whether it be soulful house or rap, musical authenticity resides in a rich, full, emotive and embodied sound.

The 'white' dance tradition exchanges fidelity to the body for the romance of technology. Described as electronic, progressive, industrial and techno, these musics tend towards the instrumental and explore new computer sound possibilities. When they use vocals, they tend to be sampled and heavily manipulated into something which sounds futuristic or 'inhuman'. Moreover, their technophilia is demonstrated in their choice of name: for example, LFO, T99, or 808 State (named after the Roland 808 drum machine). Often, certain technologies will come to define a genre. For instance, the signature sound of acid house was a novel bleep produced by a Roland TB303 bass-line machine. Although the DJs in Chicago who first used this sound, like DJ Pierre (also known as Phuture, pr-ducer of 'Acid Tracks') were black (and gay, for that matter), the sound came to be associated with a predominantly white club culture in Britain. By 1989, few black clubbers seemed to perceive acid house as black music, although white clubbers seemed to hear the music as 'black' for almost another year. Interestingly, in America, house and acid house were perceived first and foremost as gay and could be heard only in gay clubs until they were re-exported back to the United States as 'English acid house'. Despite the continual cross-fertilization and hybridization of 'black' and 'white' dance musics, the two are kept remarkably separate in discourse. Genres which mix colours aesthetically are always emerging - hip-house, ethnotechno and jungle - but they often float to one pole or the other depending on their association with different audiences.

Both 'white' and 'black' dance music are primarily producers' rather than performers' media. But a producer is a hypothetical, remote origin. So, in the 'black' music tradition, individual singers or rappers will often stand in as authentic sources, whereas in the 'white' tradition dance groups embrace the 'facelessness' often seen as a problem with dance music. Sometimes this denial of image seems to allude to art discourses which celebrate the autonomy of music and the purity of engaging a single sense with sound. But when the act uses a corporate, logo-style name like DNA, 5L2 or the KLF, it becomes clear that they are playing with strategies of branding rather than the personas of the artiste. To some extent, their credibility is measured by their author's invisibility. Album covers and videos (when they have them) are likely to sport computer-generated animation or heavily manipulated and abstracted photographs. Their lack of figurative human image corresponds with their aural abstraction, for as Robert Christgau has written, techno reduces 'vocals to samples and melodies to ostinatos, the average techno hit doesn't leave the average listener.., much to grab onto' (Village Voice 16 February 1993). Moreover, not only do techno acts adopt brands, they also continually change them, eschewing the brand as soon as it is established. In so doing, they avoid 'selling out' and preserve their niche audience.

Another way in which 'black' and 'white' versions of authenticity differ is in their provenance. Although both bear witness to trans-Atlantic influences, 'black' dance musics are more likely to be rooted in local urban scenes and neighbour-'hoods'. Even gestures to the black diaspora point to local subcultures and city places -New York, Chicago, Detroit, Washington. These specific places anchor and authenticate music, render it tangible and real. 'White' dance musics, by contrast, are more likely to claim to be global, nationless or vaguely pan-European.

The trajectory of the genre 'techno' - which began as a 'black' music and ended as 'white' - is revealing of these cultural logics. 'Techno' was launched in the UK by the Virgin Records compilation, Techno: The Dance Sound of Detroit, in June 1988. In the months leading to the release, the company's A&R and marketing departments held discussions with DJs and other consultants to decide what to call the music of the three black Detroit-based DJs whose tracks were featured on the album. The term 'house' was then strongly identified with Chicago and was in dangerously ubiquitous use in the UK. They decided on the name 'techno' because it gave the music a distinct musical identity and made it appear as something substantively new (Stuart Cosgrove: interview, 25 August 1992). Crucially, the press release validated the music by emphasizing its roots in subcultural Detroit: 'Techno is the new music of the motor city, a highly synthesized form of modern dance music made in basement studios by Detroit's new underground producers.' In the subsequent articles in music and style magazines, the city was subject to as much copy as the DJ-artists. Despite the fact that the music was not on the playlist of a single Detroit radio station, nor a regular track in any but a few mostly gay black clubs, the British press hailed 'techno' as the sound of that city. Although the genre was not met with contestation* and a few singles from the album (notably Inner City's 'Big Fun') were hits, the genre as a category didn't quite take off. Because it was only a little faster and more melodic than 'Chicago' house, techno was not needed as an explanatory rubric or mark of club identity at this time.

Ironically, the term 'techno' was later appropriated to describe a slightly different descendant of Chicago house. When 'acid house' became unserviceable because of tabloid defamation and general overexposure (cf. chapter 4), the clubs, record companies and media went through a series of nominal shifts (about twenty different adjectives came to modify the word 'house', sometimes in pastiches like 'deep techno house') until they finally settled on 'techno'. The term had at least two advantages: it was free from the overt drug references of acid house and it sounded like what it described - a high-tech predominantly instrumental music. Record companies may coin a genre but they cannot control its circulation. By the time Virgin came to release Inner City's third album Praise in 1992, they had to shuffle the band's position, redefining their genre niche rather awkwardly as 'soulful techno' - reasserting the 'blackness' of the sound with reference to 'soul'.*

*Newly coined genres are often challenged. For example, in the same period, Balearic Beat was hotly debated and criticized for being 'conjured out of thin air' and 'merely a scam' (Soul Underground August 1988, Melody Maker 20 August 1988).

*There are advantages to having your genre hijacked. For example, when American Time magazine introduced techno music to their readers, they said it 'was born in Detroit during the mid-eighties' and by implication positioned Inner City as the founders of rave (Time 17 August 1994).

Importantly, the shift from the first to the second kind of techno, from a 'black' to a 'white' sound, is accompanied by a shift in the discourses about their places of origin. Later techno was said to be a musical Esperanto. It was not considered to be the sound of any particular city or any definite social group but rather as a celebration of rootlessness. As one producer said, 'Electronic music is a kind of world music. It may be a couple of generations yet, but I think that the global village is coming' (Ralf Hutter quoted in Savage 1993: 21).

The authenticities of dance music are complex and contradictory. They waver between an ancestral world of real bodies and city places and the new high-tech order of faceless machines and global dislocation. The categories 'black' and 'white' are often used as shorthand for these different sets of cultural values. In practice, however, it is very difficult to map this terrain in these terms because dance music is characterized by a constant borrowing and hybridization.

Since the 1950s, studios have been editing their wares into 'records of ideal, not real, events' (Frith 1987a: 65). Discotheques are an ideal environment for ideal musical events. They are an appropriate site of consumption of musics for which the studio is the main site of production, for the development of genres of music which are quintessentially recorded and the growth of the values which assert their cultural worth. Whether they draw from older live or newer disc-oriented value systems, discotheque musics have evolved their own auras and authenticities.