Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect. Cultural liberation and musical innovation. Pyrotechnics, bottle service, bass drops, and molly. Electronic dance music has been a vital force for more than three decades now, and has undergone transformation upon transformation as it has taken over the world. In this searching, lyrical account of dance music culture worldwide, Matthew Collin takes stock of its highest highs and lowest lows across its global trajectory. Through firsthand reportage and interviews with clubbers and DJs, Collin documents the itinerant musical form from its underground beginnings in New York, Chicago, and Detroit in the 1980s, to its explosions in Ibiza and Berlin, to today’s mainstream music scenes in new frontiers like Las Vegas, Shanghai, and Dubai. Collin shows how its dizzying array of genres—from house, techno, and garage to drum and bass, dubstep, and psytrance—have given voice to locally specific struggles. For so many people in so many different places, electronic dance music has been caught up in the search for free cultural space: forming the soundtrack to liberation for South African youth after Apartheid; inspiring a psychedelic party culture in Israel; offering fleeting escape from—and at times into—corporatization in China; and even undergirding a veritable “independent republic” in a politically contested slice of the former Soviet Union. Full of admiration for the possibilities the music has opened up all over the world, Collin also unflinchingly probes where this utopianism has fallen short, whether the culture maintains its liberating possibilities today, and where it might go in the future.

Rave On: Global Adventures in Electronic Dance Music

Arts & Photography

Collin, Matthew

Music

University of Chicago Press

This is a book about a group of Belgrade’s young idealists and their pirate radio station B92, who began with the naive desire to simply play music, but ended up facing two wars, economic sanctions, violent police and government crackdowns, the attentions of armed gangsters and neo-Nazi politicians, and ultimately became the leaders of an opposition movement forced into exile. Before Milosevic was finally ousted in October 2000, B92 would be shut down and resume broadcasting four times as, through an inspired combination of courage, imagination, and black humor—and a playlist, from The Clash’s “White Riot” to Public Enemy’s rap manifesto, “Fight the Power,” which in sound and spirit, echoed the street fighting in which they sometimes took part—it somehow persisted in disseminating the truth. Matthew Collin knows the founders of the station well and has had extraordinary access to the key personalities and their archives. He first reported on the station as part of a feature on Belgrade’s mass street protest in 1996. The book is based on in-depth, first person interviews and exhaustive background research. “Matthew Collin captures the conviction of a generation whose culture and identity were under siege....”—Independent on Sunday

Guerrilla Radio: Rock 'N' Roll Radio and Serbia's Underground Resistance (Nation Books)

Nation Books

Rave on: Global Adventures in Electronic Dance Music

Univ of Chicago Pr

Serpent's Tail

An adrenalin-charged trip through some of the cultural flashpoints of the past few decades, Pop Grenade celebrates the power of music as a force for change. Based on first-hand, personal reportage from raves, riots and rebellions, it explores how music has been used as a weapon in struggles for liberation and attempts to create temporary paradises. From Berlin’s anarchic techno scene after the fall of the Wall to outlaw sound systems in wartime Bosnia, from Moscow during the crackdown on Pussy Riot to New York in the militant early years of hip-hop, it tells the extraordinary stories of some of the world’s most audacious musical freedom fighters, disco visionaries and rock’n’roll rebels with a cause.

Pop Grenade: From Public Enemy to Pussy Riot - Dispatches from Musical Frontlines

Zero Books

“I can’t recommend this marvellous piece of work enough.” —Irvine Welsh
Altered State—now updated—is the definitive text on ecstasy culture, using a cast of characters to track the origins of the scene through psychedelic subcults, underground gay discos, and the Balearic paradise of Ibiza. It examines the ideologies and myths, documenting the criminal underside to the blissed-out image, and shedding light on the social history of the most spectacular youth movement of the twentieth century.
Matthew Collin is the author of Guerrilla Radio and The Time of the Rebels. He now reports for Al Jazeera from Tbilisi in Georgia.

Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House

When Ecstasy was first mixed with house music sometime during the 1980s, the reaction triggered a diverse youth movement. It affected music, fashion, the law, government policy and other areas of public and private life. This work trails the drug from California, through New York and onwards in the history of Ecstasy and the culture and politics that surround it.

Altered State: The Story of Ecstacy Culture and Acid House

Godfrey, John

Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House (A Five Star Title)

"An important addition to youth literature."—Guardian
"Fascinating . . . great journalism, using eye-level experience and dispassionate research to give the reader a rare insight."—Time Out
This is the inspiring story of the youth movements and revolutions of the former Communist Eastern Europe. Participants tell how they created popular resistance movements, defying threats, violence, and mass arrests in an attempt to change their countries and the world.
Matthew Collin's previous books include Altered State and Guerrilla Radio. He lives in Tbilisi, Georgia.

The Time of the Rebels: Youth Resistance Movements and 21st Century Revolutions

History

Europe

Dream Machines: Electronic Music in Britain From Doctor Who to Acid House

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Omnibus Press

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