Solidarity and drug use in the electronic dance music scene
Date
2006
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between drug use and solidarity in the electronic dance music (EDM) scene. The U.S. literature on raves and the current EDM scene has levied a serious blow to cultural studies and social movement scholars' claims that raves were a significant youth cultural movement of the 1980s and 1990s. The primary challenge in reconciling this debate centers on the concept of solidarity and whether raves and its participants created and experienced a naturally occurring form, or simply one induced by illegal drugs. In this study, raves and the current EDM scene are used as a microcosm to understand classic and contemporary ideas about solidarity and the cultural significance of drugs in youth culture. I also consider complications to the seemingly straightforward connection between drugs and solidarity, including how that connection may have been altered by rave's cultural fragmentation. The data for this study were drawn from a multi-method ethnography examining forces of cultural change in the rave scene (Anderson 2005). A secondary analysis of this ethnography was conducted to examine the relationship between solidarity and drug use. Findings indicate that the relationship between drug use and solidarity is substantially more complicated than previous theoretical and empirical work on the rave scene has conceptualized.