4 Raving, I’m Raving!

When I dance, I put you in a trance…
Nancy Dupree’s Ghetto Reality, “What Do I Have?”

Moral entrepreneurs were rather busy in Britain in the early 1990s. Among the usual spectres haunting the social fabric – single mothers, social housing, crime – emerged the folk-devil of a new, depraved youth culture. The common view of a mass, hedonistic drug frenzy, while perhaps not altogether inaccurate (it was by all accounts fun and there were a lot of drugs), saw in raves a British generation hollow-eyed, lost to a debauched recipe of pulsating dance music combined with the drug Ecstasy.

Around the same period that ravers were becoming subjected to tabloid hysteria and obliging police repression, the abduction and murder of two year-old James Bulger by a couple of ten year-old boys in Liverpool amplified the sense that “family values” were in serious trouble. Partly captured on a widely circulated video, the murder was fertile ground for familiar New Right fantasies: a loss of virtue, decency, order, discipline and respectability at the hands of broken families, violent movies, social housing, welfare, permissive teachers, and so on.

But another child accused of murder in this period concerns us here. The case in question was first made by the Boy’s Own fanzine and other rave-era tastemakers, but was most pertly set out in the August 1992 issue of dance music rag Mixmag. Flanked on either side by fellow members of his group the Prodigy, a sneering Liam Howlett is pictured posing on the magazine’s cover with a gun firmly pressed against his temple. The banner headline running below him asks: “Did Charly kill rave?” The provisional answer: it’s complicated.

Keepin’ the Clouds Away

The criminal in question is the Prodigy’s second ever single and its first top ten hit. Released in late 1991, “Charly”’s popularity was unexpected to say the least. Up to that point the Essex group, consisting of Howlett, two dancers and an MC, had built some local notoriety playing a live P.A. set to London clubs and parties. Their first EP, Where Evil Lurks had sold a solid 7,000 copies and put the group on the dance charts, but it gave no premonition of the enormity of “Charly”. Mainly on the basis of the group adding the song to their live show, the single sold out on pre-orders alone. Things went quickly from there.

The record label couldn’t keep up with demand, and had to run a series of further pressings of the vinyl. The track’s success lead to the video featuring on Top of the Pops, massive live show audiences, and an eventual #3 pop chart ranking.

The commercial success of “Charly” is curious. The track is mostly typical of “hardcore”, the native sub-genre of dance music that governed the UK rave scene’s tentative steps into the realm of the popular in the early 1990s. As it spread beyond the orbits of London – producing in the process a string of top 40 hits in 199 – hardcore was mostly ignored if not simply derided by the UK music press. A “barbarian horde waiting to overrun the pop citadel” was, by Simon Reynolds’ estimation, the music press’ view of hardcore. Nothing more than the province of boorish “acid teds”.⁴³

Eschewing the rhythmic finesse of Chicago House and Detroit Techno, British producers supplemented steady 4/4 beats with breakbeats, rumbling sub-bass, siren-like keyboards and stadium-ready piano riffs – as much the tropes of hard rock as those of the post-disco landscape from which rave emerged.

On “Charly” the Prodigy mostly follow the formula. The track has a massive bass line, stabbing keyboards and a hoover sound, along with a pounding 4/4 bass drum occasionally supplemented with a breakbeat.

But we know rules require exceptions. In this case peculiarity comes in the form of the song’s periodic interruptions by a sample – sourced from a 1970s ITV public service announcement – of a shrill howling cat followed by a young boy repeatedly imploring Prodigy’s audience: “Charly says: tell your mommy before you go off somewhere”. The aura is of a cartoon villain’s snicker.

It’s by all accounts a fairly sardonic invocation of the child’s exposed vulnerability to, one presumes, a rave culture then the object of tabloid fear-mongering. That said, “Charly”’s abandonment of musical and metaphorical subtlety makes him an unlikely, or at least rather second-rate killer. Sometimes though, the logics of pop work a lot like the rules of an Agatha Christie novel: suspect those arousing least suspicion.

Encore

Several months after “Charly” was released, then unknown group Smart E put out the single “Sesame’s Treat”. It not only charted one spot higher, hitting number 2 on the UK singles chart, it amped up the schmaltz factor too.

It’s sparse as far as songs go, amounting mostly to an up-tempo breakbeat and the jaunty calypso theme to the children’s TV programme from which the song draws its name – albeit repurposed as an oafish reference to Ecstasy.

In hindsight the joke falls flat. But the song’s appeal, derived mainly from the barely altered Sesame Street melody and the chorus of children who accompany it, is undeniable. The impulse is equal to that of “Charly”: the pastoral spaces of childhood encroached upon by the inebriate and the vulgar. It didn’t stop here either.

As its long history of by-passed masterworks attests, pop might not always know a good thing when it sees it. But when pop does know it has that thing, it bleeds it dry. In this regard “Charly” and “Sesame’s Treat” set the stage for a series of crossover hits engaged in a rearguard attack upon the 1970s childhoods of early ravers. If not always grounded in children’s voices, songs, or sampled cartoons, then double-time helium vocal samples ushered the child centre-stage in UK dance music between 1991 and 1992 in what became known, in an echo of the late 1960s, as “toytown techno”.

Urban Hype’s “A Trip to Trumpton” moored the gentle plucking acoustic guitar and occasional narration from the 1970s children’s stop-motion animated programme from which the song gets its title to a fast and hard breakbeat and stabbing keyboards. On “Roobarb and Custard” the group Shaft sampled the theme to the titular 1970s British cartoon dog and cat, themselves named after a favourite school dessert. The group Horsepower filched from the same decade when they used the rising horn slurs and pounding timpani of the theme music to the TV production of Black Beauty as the basis for their single “Bolt”. Altern-8’s single “Activ-8” has a recurring sample of a small child imitating the voice of what sounds like a doped up speed dealer: “top one, nice one, get sorted!”

The sophomoric mood was worn as much as it was sung. Baby soothers were a commonplace accessory, used to relieve the jaws of gurning dancers, while glo-sticks amplified the visual effects induced by Ecstasy. E’s were (and continue to be) often named after candy brands, lollipops were widely consumed, bright coloured clothing and jewellery were common. A drug-induced playfulness, along with the sorts of accessories one might expect to find at a three year-old’s birthday party, pervaded.

The question of whether the eschewal of subtlety and self-aware naughtiness in toytown techno really did “kill rave” as a subculture or merely accompanied the demise that often follows pop success is of lesser relevance here. In fact, Mixmag publicly apologised to the Prodigy for its hasty and in hindsight rather churlish verdict a decade later.

In any case, “Charly” and “Trumpton” were among the last major hits from the British interpretation of late-80s Chicago House and Detroit Techno. Not long after, the music began to split into so many tributaries of sub- and micro-genres.

Anyway, it’s less interesting to question toytown techno’s culpability in the waning frantic energy that emerged from the unique combination of drugs and dance known as the “Second Summer of Love”, running somewhere between 1988 to 1991 – accounts vary. It’s far more compelling to ask why the child might have embodied that moment’s inevitable exhaustion in the first place.

Infantilism might be an irreducible element of pop music, but still it seems prescient to ask why, in its second iteration, the Summer of Love only called upon the child at its dusk and not its dawn – as if the very meaning of childbirth wanted to be reversed.

Ecstasy Without Content

The story of that dawn is frequently trod ground. In 1987 a small group of entrepreneurial DJs and promoters returned from their Ibiza holidays with the souvenirs of newly discovered pleasures of Ecstasy consumption along with an expansive musical repertoire adopted from local DJ Alfredo Fiorillo. Theirs was the particular recipe that gave rave culture its identity: dance music drawn from de-industrialising US cities (Detroit Techno and Chicago House especially) along with rituals adopted from high society nightclubs, produced a peculiar Balearic ideology. This was, in Joshua Clover’s astute observation, a tribalist utopia co-mingled with the hedonism of the holiday.⁴⁴

As rave spread, first from Ibiza to a couple of London nightclubs, then to warehouses and fields orbiting London and ever further afield, gathering continually larger crowds as it went, Ecstasy came more and more to displace alcohol in British nightlife. Not unrelated, the sensuality of dance replaced the hetero theatre of pubs and nightclubs. Focused more on collective physical abandon than on sexual gratification, a romantic narrative was to be found at raves that was closer to the fleeting encounter of the gay disco than to tawdry drunken come-ons.

It’s typical to ascribe the intemperance of UK rave culture to a retort to a decade of the unremitting individualism of Thatcherism. But the precise terms of its rejoinder remain rather ambiguous. Sure, the raw, honest, guitar-toting singer so prevalent in the late 1960s was by the time of the 1980s – despite a fleeting revival in early 1990s Seattle – fraying. As likely to recruit for the military as espouse rebellion, he was bankrupt as a conduit of popular sentiment.

What Lawrence Grossberg called rock’s “corporeal romanticism”, its figures vessels for audience emotion, had become inseparable from an empowered neoliberalism.⁴⁵ This is a corruption most starkly manifest in Ronald Reagan’s infamous use of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” to soundtrack his electoral rallies. But this is just one example.

Is there anything that further embodies the logic of a welfare state in withdrawal than Axl Rose or David Lee Roth desperately screaming to be heard over the metronome discipline of a hard rock rhythm section? Indeed, as rock got harder, heavier, louder and more polished through the 1980s, it came more and more to embody the Darwinian logic of an ascendant finance capital.

What could more reflect the epoch’s proselytising faith in greed and the noisy urban hustle it implies, suggests musicologist Philip Tagg, than a progressively overbearing ground of bass, drums, and rhythm guitar that demanded increasingly frantic assertions of self, taking form as preposterous noodling guitar solos or full-time falsetto screaming vocals?⁴⁶ In response, late 1980s acid house and early 1990s hardcore shunned rock’s claims to individualised authenticity.

Not only were DJs conduits for the party rather than its stars, but the rejection of rock individualism was inherent to dance music’s form. The anonymous time of repeating rhythm, absent the heroic figure of the singer, incarnated rave’s collective pleasure. And this is the vantage point from which we can begin to grasp its political and aesthetic horizons.

Dance Dance Dance Revolution

There’s an argument to be made here that late 1980s dance culture heralded a utopian sensibility. This requires us to view rave’s rejection of bourgeois social mores as inherently revolutionary. On this view, rave doesn’t only reject hetero courtship rituals, it implies a new orientation to sensuality and pleasure, mainly absent from mainstream popular culture since the 1960s.

The diffuse sense of optimism which would underlie such a claim was nowhere more evident than on that barometer of popular sentiment known as the singles chart. One can trot out as evidence the bouncy, uptempo House hits that dominated the charts in 1988. S’Express’ “Theme from S’Express”, bubbling with brazen self-assurance, became in April of that year the first acid house single to chart at number 1. Black Box’s “Ride on Time”, the biggest hit of 1989, repurposed an old Loleatta Holloway disco song by supplementing it with a bounding bass that gave the piano and vocal a power absent in the original.

But it’s A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray”, the bestselling independent single of 1988, that stands as an anthem for the epoch. “I wanted to create something really tribal”, Gerald has said of the track. And surely, its exquisitely dizzying convergence of kicks and thumps and beguiling chant of a vocal best reflect the Peace-Love-Unity-Respect positivity of the period.

The mood extended beyond the confines of house music. In the summer of 1989 Soul II Soul displaced teen crooner and major label commodity Jason Donovan from the top of the pop charts with the shuffling hip-hop beats and Philly soul strings of the upbeat “Back to Life”. Like Gerald, Soul II Soul were upfront about their own tribal pretensions, but the mood infected rock too, especially in the form of the sprawling breakbeat-driven, often chaotic, psychedelia of “Madchester” bands the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays.

Not unlike the psych-rock revolution, the Second Summer of Love’s espousal of a romantic desire for pleasure might be read as a political demand in itself. Party for the right to party, one might say.

All Play and No Work

Whatever the limitations of the peculiar intersection of politics and pleasure of 1960s counterculture, framed by an antagonistic identity opposing itself to its parent culture, it set a generational conflict upon the terrain of cultural renewal. By contrast, it’s been noted that rave only discovered its antagonist after the fact – that is to say, in the form of a state seeking to suppress it in the early 1990s.⁴⁷

Rave’s intransigence, resounding more and more emphatically through the early 1990s, culminated in a 50,000-strong march on London in protest of the UK government’s Criminal Justice and Public Order bill in 1994. The bill was passed and, along with creating a more punitive youth justice system – partly in response to the Bulger murder – it increased the rights of property owners against squatters and effectively criminalised lifestyles anathema to a compliant consumerism (especially travelling and squatting). It also made raves – infamously described as one hundred people or more playing amplified music “characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” – illegal.

The political expression of rave’s desire was thus more rearguard action than inherent to its culture. Its gaze was always primarily restricted to an increasingly intense experience of the present, a ceaseless succession of nows, variously described as a “fugitive bliss”, an “isolationist hedonism”, or a “fantasy theatre”.⁴⁸ This is as evident in the epoch’s loved up sloganeering as it is in the form of the music itself; anonymous, repeating, shorn of harmony, dispersing individuality to the collectivity of meter, to return to Tagg’s appraisal.⁴⁹ This is one view at least. But it risks an unduly mechanical outlook.

Too formal an interpretative frame obscures as much as it enlightens. More than anything, it neglects that we’re talking about dance music. And in this regard, it should be noted that dance disabuses the passive consumption of singer on stage. Instead, it stakes its performance upon a collective act between DJ and crowd, wagering that bodies too can be expressive instruments integrated with a music which, in, turn, proposes movements to them.⁵⁰

This places dance beyond contemplative consumption sequestered to the music hall or theatre. Taking the body as the site of its pleasure, it proposes a more immersive experience than typical Friday night attempts to drink the memory of work into temporary oblivion. This is not unlike capital’s appending of bodies to machines, except rather than the compulsion to produce value, dance does so for no particular function and no specific aim, except perhaps pleasure.⁵¹

The ambiguity of what, if any, rave’s politics might be, converges with the same equivocations upon the surface of the dancefloor as a space of leisure. On one hand, there was an immediate but limited experience of liberation in the unregulated spaces that housed late-80s and early-90s raves, one that carried through the refinement of its Ibiza-influenced origins to its more frenzied transformation to “acid house” and hardcore. Raver memoirs and interviews often express this as an experience of class and racial harmony, of freedom from social mores, from makeup, from the dictates of fashion.

On the other hand, it did more than this. It lived, in uniquely intense fashion, the contradiction present in any society where survival is premised upon earning a wage, whereby work is opposed to play. This implies that if “leisure” or “fun” have any concise meaning here, it’s only insofar as work is usually experienced as stultifying and exhausting. These are exceedingly bounded definitions: play is play because it is not work.

But in not merely living for the weekend, and instead seeking to extend it absolutely, rave rubbed up against the limits of this quotidian experience of time. This is a feeling not completely unfamiliar to anyone who’s ever experienced the fleeting melancholy of a Sunday evening or the culmination of a holiday, let alone a really bad comedown. But to begin to understand the precise coordinates of this articulation demands a further confrontation with rave’s experience of time and its mobilisation of childhood.

Like a Long New Thread

Pop genres have trajectories similar to the stock biographical narratives of pop stars: success seized from humble origins is followed by moments of excess, downfall, and occasionally, a final subdued redemption. Posited thus as biography, it’s fitting that kids entered rave’s story. But that they did at the precipice of this cultural moment’s decline is significant.

By 1991 tabloids were a couple of years into the process of regularly reporting on raves in the unhinged manner upon which their business model banks. A more than obliging government was pushing for crackdowns, while in the background an increasingly intricate game of cat and mouse, performed by promoters and police seeking to send patrons back into the welcoming arms of licensed venues and the alcohol industry that supplies them, continued apace.

As crowds at raves grew so too did potential profits. Increasingly cynical promoters began to populate the scene, gangsters began running protection rackets and professionalising what had initially been a homespun MDMA industry. Even the drugs themselves were being drained of their euphoric power as amphetamines mingled with MDMA or displaced it altogether.

Whether we put it down to the availability of Speed over Ecstasy, as critics often do, or the complementary desire to maintain an impossible state of intensity, it’s frequently noted that the music too was becoming more frantic. UK hardcore, emergent in the early 1990s, intensified and exaggerated elements of house and techno. Beats were sped up, bass lines and kick drums accentuated, keyboards more and more reduced to stabs. At the very extreme, the micro-genre of gabber reduced the formula to an outrageously accelerated combination of 4/4 drums, arpeggios, and amphetamine consumption.

This is the context into which toytown techno emerged: ravers starved for intensity, beset by aggressive police repression, dodgy promoters, and even dodgier drugs, all while the music progressively migrated to suburban sitting rooms and provincial nightclubs. Offering intuitively known melodies, toytown techno tracks made palatable the discord of hardcore and breakbeat to those more accustomed to rock melody.

The Trumpton Riots

But childhood pastoralism was more than a gateway drug to hardcore’s disharmony. It implied a luxury of prolonged dependence and sanctioned irresponsibility (one, it goes without saying, rarely afforded to actual children) implicit in its rejection of discipline and order. For a subculture under threat from both crass(er) commercialism and state repression, the child could embody the wild experience of unselfconscious dancing just as those very spaces were coming under attack.

There are still further issues at stake here. Toytown techno doesn’t approximate the convivial Edwardian scene invoked by the penny-farthings and merry-go-rounds of psychedelia. Instead, it delights in spoiling the artefacts of the 1970s childhoods of early ravers. In the process, it renegotiates edenic representations of a golden age of innocence. Images are recontextualised, their surfaces fragmented, the meaning of childhood rejected.

The genteel, orderly life of the stop-motion animated village of Trumpton turns out rather differently if E’d up dancers looking for a party were to show up. If children don’t heed Charly’s advice, the cocoon of the home is undermined. The pedantry of Sesame Street is transformed from a site of cognitive development to one of regression by Smart E. Black Beauty is transformed from a sympathetic identification with animal suffering to a surging, amphetamine-fuelled experience of the beast’s raw energy. And so on.

Jacqueline Rose has written that at the core of children’s literature lies the pleasure of partial identification with a mythical viewer who trusts in the book’s fantasy.⁵² In the context of toytown techno however, the act of identification is interrupted by a contemptuous rejoinder to the realms adults construct for children. Chipping away at the sorts of bracketing devices which place their subjects in an inaccessible past, the songs frame the audience’s relationship to their childhood by cynicism and pessimism.

In any case, in order to understand these shifting symbolic economies of the child as it appears in rave culture, it’s useful to return here to the terms of rave’s own broader symbolic economy, anchored as it is in the intersecting symbolism of the holiday and the globetrotting tribalism spawned from its Ibiza veterans.

If we picture this as a series of limit points along the border between labour and leisure, then we can see its weekend rituals – an exaggerated intensity of the weekend and the comedown that would accompany the working week – as where the pleasures and the symbolic resistance offered by rave might be found.

It’s About Time

It is worth recalling at this juncture historian E.P. Thompson’s influential argument that in pre-industrial Europe time “passed”.⁵³ Oriented to daily, seasonal, annual, or generational tasks, time was organised according to a logic of need. Only by a centuries long introduction of bells, clocks, and money-incentives, along with the suppression of festivals and fairs, were pre-capitalist, agricultural habits broken along with the “lived” experience of time these implied.

We might say, echoing Thompson, time became currency. By this account, a new discipline anchored in the abstract time of the clock permitted the organisation of factory labour and so the capitalist’s direct control over the production process.

But to say that time is money is also to suggest it has to be earned before it can be spent. Work, shorn of autonomy and creativity, would come to be the pure means to an external goal we usually know it to be today. Conversely, by necessity, sprawling, often spontaneous festivities of feudal agricultural society anchored in seasonal rhythms of planting and harvesting gradually gave way to the quick fixes of cineplex screening times or the cruise ship. A standardisation of leisure equal to mechanical production, as Theodor Adorno might say.

By the same token, if music amounts, at root, to an enhanced sense of the present, then it too must be located within the terms of the binary of labour time and leisure time. This implies that the contemporary experience of music, an intensified temporal experience, only makes sense in terms of its opposition to the linear routine of clock time.

Rather than run like clockwork, music proposes that time can be organised according to different economies of pleasure and need than the compulsions to which capital submits social life. Music proposes, in other words, an intentional and intensive experience of time.

Not coincidentally, the institutional separation of work and play implied by industrialisation withdrew the song from labour. This isolation of music from places of work to the evening trip to the music hall had its de jure and its de facto moments. That is to say that the tradition of work song was silenced either by puritanical reformers who prohibited their labourers from singing, or by the effective muting of folk song traditions by noisy machinery.⁵⁴

These temporal coordinates go a long way to explaining the impulse that propelled rave: a desire for a different relationship between work and play, no longer grounded in the compulsion to seek a wage. This is apparent in condensed form in the manifold iterations of the longstanding invocation to “work it” in dance music, particularly prominent amongst late 1980s acid house tracks (LNR, “Work it to the Bone”; Jerome Hill, “Work that Shit”; Steve Poindexter, “Work that Muthafucka”; etc.). But a further argument is required to locate toytown techno’s summoning of the child. And this all has to do still, with time.

One Time for Your Mind

To say that an early industrial experience of time as abstract was displacing the circular rhythms of pre-industrial labour is to imply that it was coming to be conceived as linear. This is another way of describing the emergence of a historical consciousness, and the reasons are fairly straightforward. Quite literally.

To live time as abstract and linear is to experience it as a ceaseless division of points between what is “now” and “not now”. Such a plotting entails a new sense of contemporaneity; a present as distinct from the past.⁵⁵ And this further demands we return to the question of the emergence of nostalgia for childhood in modern Europe discussed in the previous chapter.

Become self-conscious of its coordinates upon a temporal axis, the society could understand itself as moving along that line. This is the logic at the core of ideas of progress, maturity and development then coming into view. But to stand in line here is not only to look towards an impending future, but equally to the past.

A European consciousness moving towards the future would not only view its present as an advance upon its past. It would also look back longingly upon its history. This is what we’ve been calling nostalgia or, put more plainly, the desire for a simpler time.

Biography begins to intersect with history here. This seems almost inevitable once concepts of development and progress are at issue. More importantly for our purposes, it opens a space for childhood to stand for absent spontaneity and freedom, for a paradise lost. The sacrifice is regrettable. But it is also viewed as necessity; a compromise in the pursuit of progress and enlightenment.

Needless to say, this is a distinctly colonial ordering of history.⁵⁶ Emblematic of Europe’s former barbarity but also invested with hope for the future, the colonised subject and the child with whom she is often equated both oblige either the colonial administrator’s or the parent’s authority and discipline which, they’ll insist, hurts them more than us.

Work It to the Bone

In other words, not everyone convenes at the same point on time’s line. In fact, by most bourgeois calculations, working-class children barely figured at all. Innocence was only attributed to them gradually and unevenly, and as we’ll see later, only temporarily in a process inextricable from their eventual exclusion from wage labour.

This is, it should be pointed out, a view at odds with the postcard narrative whereby, in response to Dickensian traumas of industrialisation, a morally progressive sentiment gradually removes children from factory work. Such a picture is wrong from the start.

Initially, technological change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made children relatively productive, and so drew them in large numbers into labour markets. But in Britain at least, putting children to waged work was not only a consequence of market demands, it was a concerted national project.

Indeed, a lot of work went into putting children to labour. Hugh Cunningham has written of the opening of children’s workhouses managed by churches and charities, the placing of children as young as five in so-called “Schools of Industry” to learn weaving and straw-pleating, as well as the binding out of large numbers as apprentices in the eighteenth century.⁵⁷

Not merely the province of villainous moneygrubbers, the trade in children was a national effort to employ the masses of young children made idle by the factory’s transfer of work out of the home and family plot. Part puritanism, part mercantile romanticism, in the prevailing view children idle in city streets were to be saved through work; both from sin and from criminality.

This turned out to be a fairly malleable set of moral arguments. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries men revolted against the downward pressure child labour put on their wages. But the unique combination of sentimentalism and utility underlying moral claims putting children to work weren’t abandoned.⁵⁸ Instead, they were merely repurposed. From the perspective of emerging arguments against child labour, wages were no longer a source of uprightness but of moral degradation.

The coordinates were reversed but the logic remained intact: work had become an offence rather than a support to innocence. But the commitment to innocence remained mostly unchanged. In any case, by virtue of the introduction of compulsory schooling, by the late 1920s working-class children had almost universally joined their bourgeois peers in an unproductive, segregated world.

To cut a long story short then, the humanitarian narrative usually made to account for the abolition of child labour is mistaken. But it’s also myopic. How else to explain the failure to view daily schooling as onerous or the pervasive puritan logic which views children’s chores as “character building”?

Make Money Money Money

No matter such contradictions, once freed from the burdens of wage labour, positioned unambiguously on the side of “free” time rather than work, the child is securely placed in the arms of the family. Here they become something of an anchor for a cult of domesticity: the object of desire for a life beyond waged work, a fantasy of pure leisure and enjoyment.

Shulamith Firestone captured this function with equanimity that deserves quotation in full:

[I]t is clear that the myth of childhood happiness flourishes so widely not because it satisfies the needs of children but because it satisfies the needs of adults. In a culture of alienated people, the belief that everyone has at least one good period in their life, free of care and drudgery dies hard.⁵⁹

What Firestone calls the “myth of childhood happiness” is ultimately the context for toytown techno’s fundamental idea: a perversion of idealised spaces of childhood.

Of course, these spaces are always vulnerable to trespass. But it’s here we find the less latent gesture upon which we have already touched, and from which one may take a view of toytown techno as representing a fraying belief in the child. It’s likely not merely coincidental that this sentiment emerges at the moment that rave’s genuinely rebellious gesture – no matter how limited we might see it – arrives at its crisis.

But let’s equivocate. Toytown techno’s recalcitrance is as facile as the pick-and-mix of breakbeats, keyboard riffs, and TV show samples upon which the songs rely. Mixmag, despite its own pretences, was not totally misguided in its sneering dismissal. Yet it’s the hackneyed nature of the toytown phenomenon that ultimately makes it so interesting. It’s too easy to see it as merely cheap kicks against the sanctity of childhood; it’s the very unravelling of that symbolic imagery itself that’s at stake.

As we have seen, things began to unravel in the 1980s. Capital responded to declining profits, in part, by making itself more globally mobile; a mobility labour could never match. Declining employment, combined with a welfare state in withdrawal, meant that what Angela Mitropoulos and Melinda Cooper call the “frontiers” of the household – the site to which the priceless child is segregated – were increasingly crumbling.⁶⁰

The home progressively internalised the boundaries – men at work, women and children at home, weekends for leisure – the industrial social contract had placed between the public and the private. Finance capital in search of profits progressively coursed through the household as credit was offered not only on the home itself, but on education, health, and domestic labour.

Every element of life came to be viewed as a potentially tradable security, every service or task a possible commodity. But if the spaces of childhood are dissolving in recent decades, so too are its temporal coordinates; the child’s identification with a time of pure enjoyment grows increasingly unstable.

Enter Sandman

The leisure on offer for the post-war Fordist factory worker, a pre-packaged assembly-line of weekend distractions, wasn’t all that dissimilar to the factory work from which he sought escape. Yet it nevertheless marked a definitive boundary between work time and play time. From the perspective of the present however, such a dividing line appears increasingly vulnerable. This is an epoch, after all, wherein almost every instant involves producing content and user-data for Facebook or Google, where one is never very far away from work email. The old distinctions barely hold, if they do whatsoever.

There’s a more immediate context too. By the early 1990s the UK was undergoing rapidly rising youth unemployment and a Conservative government enjoying its second decade of rule had just scrapped benefits for sixteen and seventeen year-olds and introduced increasingly punitive social assistance and “availability for work schemes”. The horizon upon which British youth gazed was rapidly contracting.

Such claims to the child’s dissociation from an isolated leisure time can be posed in still other ways. On the one hand, “play time” today often entails a “digital labour” shackled to one web platform or another. On the other hand, a spectacle of youth implies the entrepreneurial spirit behind those very pieces of software.

In the latter case, the archetype of a young Bill Gates or Steve Jobs tinkering in a garage over some piece of code or the image of an entrepreneurial “app” developer further scramble a previously steadfast opposition of youth and labour. To be sure, it’s no exaggeration to say the normal developmental transitions established by the trajectory of capital indexed by infant, child, adolescent, and adult have been twisted into new configurations. The status of “responsible adult”, characterised by permanent employment and home ownership, grows increasingly unattainable. Time’s line has little purchase on reality.

Childhood’s End

The coordinates are all shuffled here. If in the Summer of Love the child offered a past to which a corrupted society might return to begin anew, the Second Summer of Love inhabited an epoch of declining social mobility, living standards, and welfare, along with rising youth unemployment. Belief in the future itself grew increasingly tenuous or, to paraphrase a recently popular formulation: it became less problematic not to believe in the future.

This then brings us to a crucial question. If the ideology of childhood functioned to resign modernity to the misery of its present in exchange for a promissory future for its children; what form then does the ideology of childhood take in an epoch of crisis and collective disenchantment?

Of course, this was always a retrograde vision that only preserved an operative form of childhood by detaching it from actual experience. But presuming we take Fredric Jameson’s widely repeated claim that we inhabit what he calls a “nostalgia mode” as correct, this implies the loss of investment in the future has led to a rupture – evident in the changing symbolic economies of the first and second Summers of Love – of the child’s association with the future.⁶¹

It’s upon this generalised restriction of the future that we can plot the sneering cynicism of toytown techno. The music’s paltry gesture towards rebellion betrays a hegemony of disillusionment and the collapse of the trajectory of a life hinged to capital. But it also entails something more specific; a decline in the conditions of childhood itself.

If, as we saw, the 1980s were characterised by generational abandonment of earlier ideals now viewed as quixotic, the 1990s took the tone of a revanchist puritanism. The initial rolling back of the welfare state and civil rights in the 1980s were done in the name of the child. State schools were said to fail children, permissive attitudes to drugs were said to be dangerous, “generous” social security provisions would bankrupt future generations.

But Lawrence Grossberg and Henry Giroux have both argued that, as the 1980s came to a close, the terms of the reactionary attack shifted to an attack on children themselves.⁶² No longer conceived as innocent victims failed by a decadent society, they were increasingly viewed as the source of corruption. As child poverty and suicide rates rose, along with youth unemployment and debt in the early 1990s, so too did a puritanical discourse viewing the child as damned and salvageable only through discipline gain traction.

But all this still offers too homogeneous a picture, one which omits that childhood is lived differently, that some children are more disposable than others.