Rave was America’s last great outlaw musical subculture: created by kids, for kids, designed to be impenetrable to adults. American rave formed its own mutant funhouse approach to existing looks, sounds and ideologies. In the early-to-mid-1990s, it was driven not by stars but a sudden collective sense that, as the Milwaukee rave zine Massive put it in every issue above the masthead, “The underground is massive.”
What better place for such a subculture to flourish than on the Internet?
Rave’s rise mirrors the Web’s in many ways. Both mixed rhetorical utopianism with insider snobbery. Both were future-forward “free spaces” with special appeal to geeks and wonks. (It can’t be a coincidence that dance music’s instruments of choice are referred to by their model numbers: 303, 606, 808, 909.) Both took root through the ’80s and emerged in fits and starts through the mid-’90s, at which point both became part of the social fabric. Indeed, one of electronic dance music’s key genres, IDM, was named after an emaillist devoted to “intelligent dance music.”
“Part of the explosion of the whole electronic music scene has been totally tied to the Internet, and the way we can communicate over vast distances,” says Richie Hawtin, who as Plastikman was an early rave icon.
“The Midwest — and maybe national — scene wouldn’t have become so interconnected without the rise of the Web circa 1994-95,” agrees Matt Massive (born Matt Bonde, though we’ll identify him here by his pen name), the publisher of Massive.
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