Dancefloor-Driven Literature: The Rave Scene in Fiction

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Almost as soon as 'club culture' took hold - during the UKs Second Summer of Love in 1988 - its sociopolitical impact became clear, with journalists, filmmakers and authors all keen to use this cultural context as source material for their texts. This book uses that electronic music subculture as a route into an analysis of these principally literary representations of a music culture: why such secondary artefacts appear and what function they serve. The book conceives of a new literary genre to accommodate these stories born of the dancefloor - 'dancefloor-driven literature'. Using interviews with Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting (1994), alongside other dancefloor-driven authors Nicholas Blincoe and Jeff Noon as case studies, the book analyzes three separate ways writers draw on electronic dance music in their fictions, interrogating that very particular intermedial intersection between the sonic and the linguistic. It explores how such authors write about something so subterranean as the nightclub scene, and analyses what specific literary techniques they deploy to write lucidly and fluidly about the metronomic beat of electronic music and the chemical accelerant that further alters that relationship.

Reviews

[An] excellent book ... A particular strength of this book is Morrisons ability to dance between literary theory, thick description, journalistic interviews and unabashed connoisseurship with elegance and ease. ... Highly recommended. * Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture *
Simon A. Morrison appears from his discombobulating adventures to take the reader on a unique tour of the rave scene through a study of dance-driven literature. Following on from Sarah Champions edited collections of rave inspired short stories and Steve Redheads introduction to 'repetitive beat generation' authors, he shows how fiction conveys the subjective experiences of electronic dance music culture through a range of approaches that can be beneficial to the further development of subcultural studies. * Hillegonda C Rietveld, Professor of Sonic Culture, School of Arts and Creative Industries, London South Bank University, UK *
Morrison analyses hallucinatory stories of the 1990s dance floor, documenting the emergence of a new literary genre. He shows how the intermediation of music and language created an experimental form of writing with the DJ as modern minstrel and the author as subcultural mischief-maker. A witty, fascinating, immersive study. * Lucy O'Brien, Senior Lecturer, London College of Music, University of West London, UK, and author of She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Popular Music (2012) *

Author Bio

Simon A. Morrison is Programme Leader for Music Journalism at the University of Chester, UK. He is author of the book Discombobulated (2010) and has reported on the music scene everywhere from Beijing to Brazil; Moscow to Marrakech. He edited Ministry of Sounds Ibiza magazine and has also produced and presented TV and radio. A screenplay he penned, based on a story he wrote for The Guardian, is about to be produced by the BBC, for broadcast in 2019.