Happy hardcore takes all the elements that jungle purged as too ‘cheesy quaver’ – synth stab-patterns, Italo-house piano vamps, shrieking divas, anthemic choruses – and cubes their epileptic intensity. The euphoria of the original 1992 ’ardkore was tinged with bittersweet poignancy; happy hardcore, by comparison, is relentlessly and ruthlessly upful, with every last hint of ‘darkness’ or ambivalence banished from the music. The atmosphere at predominantly happy-core oriented events like Dreamscape, Hysteria, Helter Skelter and Pandemonium, is akin to a Butlin’s holiday camp: a pleasure prison of enforced jollity.
Ignored by the dance press until 1997, happy hardcore developed its own media. Like their Scottish counterpart
M8
, these glossy mags
– Eternity
,
Dream
and
To The Core
– have distilled rave ideology down to its populist and democratic essence. Although they contain record reviews and interviews with artists, the bulk of the mags consists of lengthy, relentlessly positive reports on raves and clubs. As well as praising the DJs’ performances, the reviewers compliment the MCs, the scantily clad girl-dancers, the lights ’n’ lasers, the security staff, the toilet facilities, and above all, the crowd for being so up for it. Occasionally, the reviewer might criticize the poor parking facilities or the long queue for admission or the cloakrooms, but only in a goodnatured, apologetic way. More important than the text, though, are the photo spreads. Again, rather than the DJs, these depict the ravers: glassy-eyed and gurning boys, shirts off to expose their skinny-ribbed torsos; girls, dazed and sweaty in their unflatteringly clingy lycra leotards; huddles of friends, red-faced and grinning like maniacs, throwing mad-raver shapes for the camera and tooting their air-horns. Where ‘serious’ dance mags like
Mixmag
and
Muzik
frame the DJs as auteurs and cult figures, and barely mention the crowd in their live reviews, the rave-mags treat the audience as the star.
Happy hardcore is huge pretty much anywhere the white rave audience predominates, i.e., not London, where the heavy concentration of hip hop, soul and reggae fans means jungle has more appeal. In large part, happy-core was the result of an exodus of white ravers from the jungle scene, in reaction to the influx of black youth and the attendant mood-change from bonhomie to surly attitude. Grant of Slammin’ Vinyl argued that ‘hardcore used to be a multiracial scene. But now jungle is mostly seen as black. A lot of people who used to be into swingbeat and ragga got into jungle in 1994, and they claim “It’s our music.” So the white kids are saying, “Well you can keep it then, we’ll make our own music.” ’ As well as the racial factor, the other crucial difference between jungle and happy hardcore is purely pharmacological. Junglists have mostly given up pills for ganja; happy hardcore, geared towards the perpetual crescendo of the E-rush, is for the younger kids still going through the MDMA honeymoon.
Because of its defiant cheesiness, most junglists dismiss happy hardcore as mere juvenilia for timewarp kids who haven’t realized that rave’s ‘living dream’ is over. With its rictus-like tone of relentless affirmation, its
déjà vu
piano chords and synth-stabs that all appear to be anagrams of some primordial, rush-inducing riff, happy hardcore is indeed a bit like dance music’s equivalent to a rockabilly revival: nostalgia for something you never actually lived through.
In other respects, happy hardcore is closer to heavy metal. Both are scenes that just won’t die, because they fulfil very basic and enduring needs for provincial youth. Like metal, happy hardcore is all about keeping the faith and unity-as-uniformity: The happy-core raver’s favourite garment – the identikit black flight-jacket – is like the metalkid’s denim jacket, except that logos for labels like Kniteforce and Slammin’ have replaced Iron Maiden and Motorhead patches. Indeed, events like Rezerection, Dreamscape and Desire are highly reminiscent of heavy metal festivals like Castle Donnington. There’s the fetish for video-nasty grotesquerie (the huge inflatable monsters hanging from the hall’s ceiling at Rez), and the overpriced merchandising (T-shirts and hats kids gladly buy to testify to their tribal allegiance). There’s the way hardcore’s obsession with ‘nosebleed’ sub-bass frequencies parallels metal’s love of ‘earbleeding’ decibellage. And the rise of the sleeping pill Temazepam recalls the mandrax and Quaaludes popular with Black Sabbath fans; combined with alcohol, these tranquillizers all induce comatose stupor or mindless violence.
Wargasm
With the English producers restoring the pounding four-beat kick-drum and playing down the breakbeat, by 1996 the stage was set for happy-core’s merger with Scottish ‘bouncy techno’ and Dutch fun-core, to form a single rave-will-never-die sound: in effect, the reintegration of the original pan-European hardcore of 1991, only much faster. But this prospect dismayed a faction of diehard gabba fans for whom hardcore is
anti-rave
in spirit. This pan-global network of dissidents includes Nasenbluten (German for nosebleed), a terrorcore trio from Newcastle, Northern Australia, who are on a crusade to bring back ‘quality gabba’.
‘It serves Leah Betts right, and Anna Woods too,’ sneers the band’s Mark Newlands, referring to England’s and Australia’s famous Ecstasy fatalities. ‘I never, ever saw hardcore as happy E music. I’m not a happy man, y’know. I’m always grumbling. I’m an absolute turd . . . The original Rotterdam gabba, stuff by Euromasters and Sperminator, was cold and unpleasant, and it was great. We called our double-EP “100% No Soul Guaranteed” as a riposte to all those people who say gabba is monotonous, inhuman, soul-less. Of course it is! It’s supposed to sound like blast furnaces! In Newcastle, all our relatives work in steel foundries. We’re just trying to reflect our environment.’
Such was Nasenbluten’s sense of betrayal by Paul Elstak’s move towards happy-gabba that the band recorded the infamous ‘Rotterdam Takes It Up The Ass’. The title phrase is sung to the ‘doo-dah, doo-dah’ melody of ‘Camptown Races’, but because the track sampled copyright material by Elstak and turns it against him, Nasenbluten decided not to release it for fear of being sued. ‘We don’t want our label Bloody Fist to go under,’ Mark told me, ‘’cos other Australian hardcore bands depend on us.’ Artists like Embolism, a fourteen-year-old kid with a ‘real chip on his shoulder, you can tell he’s probably gonna grow up to be a serial killer,’ whose ‘This Means f*cking War’ EP was released by Bloody Fist in 1995.
Nasenbluten record their own music in mono on a crap Amiga computer with a puny 8 bit memory. ‘With the Amiga, it’s impossible to get a clean, distortion-free sound,’ Mark enthuses. Typical song titles include ‘Feeling sh*t’, ‘c*ntface’, ‘Kill More People’ and ‘co*cksucker’ (which clocks in at a lethal 300 b.p.m.). So what exactly motivated Nasenbluten’s monstrous barrage of puerile vileness, sampled belches, expletives-undeleted abuse and virulent lo-fi noise? Why have they dedicated their lives to this aural atrocity?
‘I just don’t like other people. I think I’m a sociopath. You get so much sh*t from people, but instead of burning their houses down, we let all our aggression out on the computer. Instead of killing people, we do it with sound.’
Nasenbluten’s anti-rave sentiments are shared by England’s DJ Loftgroover. A man on a mission, Lofty believes there’s ‘too much niceness in the rave scene’. Although he started out during the late eighties acid-house explosion, Loftgroover never tried E and never bought into the rave dream of love, peace and unity. ‘Gabba is how I really feel – hard, angry,’ he says. ‘I’ve always had a bleak view of the world.’
Loftgroover coined a bunch of evocative terms for Nasenbluten-style extreme noise terror: ‘punkcore’, ‘scarecore’ and ‘doomtrooper’. There are pockets of doomtroopers all over the UK, and when he plays at clubs like The Shire Horse in St Ives, Judgement Day in Newcastle, Steam in Rhyl, North Wales, and Death Row Techno in Bristol, Loftgroover is treated like a god. ‘At The Shire Horse, the birds throw their stockings at me and I pull them right over my face like a bank robber. The kids in Cornwall go mad, giving me the finger, shouting “f*ck you”, and you have to do it back to them. Kids run up to me and say “Lofty, I fainted the last time you played”.’
When he DJs, Loftgroover mixes in tracks by death-metal bands like Morbid Angel, Stormtroopers of Death and Slayer, and when asked about gabba’s origins, he claims it’s not even techno but ‘probably something by Anthrax or Sepultura back in 1983 . . . The line between gabba and metal is only that thin, y’know.’
Bizarrely, given his obsession with the two most Teutonic forms of music on the planet, Loftgroover is black; if you saw a photo of him at the decks, you’d assume he was playing jungle. Clearly ambivalent about the fact that ‘Seventy per cent of the people following this music are skinheads,’ he stresses that he’s never had any trouble even though ‘some of them are giving it all that’ – he mimes a frenzied Nazi salute. ‘Most of the time, the look is just a fashion,’ he insists, adding, ‘gabba’s about controlled violence. You never see people having fisticuffs at a gabba party.’
In addition to the sonic affinities between thrash and gabba, both musics share a similar audience: white working-class youth whose hopes have been crushed by the decline of heavy industry and who face unemployment or ignominious, no-security/no-future jobs in the service sector. From Rotterdam to Brooklyn, from Glasgow to Milwaukee, gabba expresses the rage and frustration of White nigg*z With Bad Attitude and No Prospects. And like metal, gabba is despised by middle-class critics who simply don’t understand the mentality of those who crave music to
go mental
to.
‘It’s a working-class scene, there’s no pseudo-intellectual element,’ says Technohead’s Michael Wells. ‘People respond on a gut level. The apocalyptic, sci-fi and horror-movie imagery in gabba, it’s all part of the trash culture these kids are into. And it’s very similar to the way heavy metal uses imagery of death, destruction and anti-religion. It’s a reaction against the pressure of modern life.’
It was almost inevitable that metal and gabba would join forces. Operating as Signs Ov Chaos, Wells recorded the experimental gabba album
Frankenscience
for English metal label Earache, who also put out a compilation of hardest-core gabba from Lenny Dee’s Industrial Strength label. At the album’s launch party at the Gardening Club in London, the T-shirts are less cuddly than at Rez – ‘I’m Afraid I’m Going To Have To Kill You’, ‘Nightmares Are Reality’, ‘Where’s My Money, Motherf*cker?’ – and the music is even harder than Arnhem: Wells and Dee unleash a remorseless onslaught of electro-convulsive riffs, sphincter-bruising bass that scores ten on my Rectal Richter Scale, and satanic synth-tones that get your goosepimples doing the goosestep.
The audience is a strange mix of shirtless skinheads and crustie types with matted dreadlocks and camouflage trousers. The anarcho-crusties belong to an underground London scene in which gabbas serves as the militant sound of post-Criminal Justice Act anger. A key player in this London scene is an organization called Praxis, who put out records, throw monthly Dead By Dawn parties and publish the magazine
Alien Underground
. Praxis are part of an international network of ultra severe ‘stormcore’: labels like Napalm, Gangstar Toons Industry, Kotzaak, Juncalor and Fischkopf; artists like DOA, Rage Reset, Temper Tantrum, The Speedfreak, DJ Scud, Lory D and DJ Producer.
On this circuit, gabba’s perverse identification of libido with the military-industrial complex is taken even further; just check song titles like ‘At War’ by Leathernecks (a band named after the US Marines), Disintegrator’s ‘Locked On Target’, and ‘Wehrmacht’ by Delta 9 (itself the name of a nerve gas!) Fantasies of man-machine interface and cyborg
ubermensch
abound. The ideology ranges from Underground Resistance style ‘guerrilla warfare on vinyl’ to full-blown techno-mysticism. In one issue of
Alien Underground
, the record reviews featured ‘samples’ from philosopher Paul Virilio’s writings on speed and the war-machine. One review, wittily attributed to Virilio, raves about ‘instantaneous explosions, the sudden flare of assassinations, the paroxysm of speed . . . an internal war-machine’. Gangstar Toons Industry’s 250 b.p.m. ‘pure Uzi poetry’ is hailed as ‘exercises in the art of disappearing in pure speed to the point of vertigo and standstill’. Everything that for Virilio represents an anti-humanist cultural exter-minism that must be resisted and reviled, is perversely celebrated by these speedfreak techno-junkies.
Such imagery recalls the aestheticization of war and carnage in the manifestos of the Italian Futurists and the writings of the
Freikorps
(German veterans who formed right-wing militia to beat down the Communists during the strife that followed the First World War). It also demonstrates the extent to which hardcore techno is the culmination of a feverish strain within the rock imagination. Examples include road-warriors Steppenwolf and their exhortation ‘fire all of your guns at once / explode into space’; Black Sabbath’s cyborg fantasy ‘Iron Man’, a case study in protofascist
rigor mortis
; Motorhead’s iron-fisted, Hell’s Angels influenced Reich ’n’ roll. Greatest of all these ‘rock ’n’ roll soldiers’ was Iggy Pop and his ‘heart full of napalm’, ballistic death-trip. Reflecting on this era of Stooges, when he fuelled himself with drugs like speed and LSD, Iggy declared: ‘Rather than become a person singing about subjects, I sort of sublimated the person and I became, if you will, a human electronic tool creating this sort of buzzing, throbbing music. . .’ Similarly, PCP’s The Mover told
Alien Underground
: ‘Well you know I’m a machine, I’m wired up . . . I’m roaming the earth and it’s nice and doomy here.’
