Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture (Popular Culture Studies : 1) by Steve Redhead

Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture (Popular Culture Studies : 1) Reviews

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  Tara Brabazon

  Rave Off changed Cultural Studies. I was 23 when this book was released, in the first year of my PhD, and about to start my first full time academic job in Wellington in Aotearoa / New Zealand. I read this book and it provide the framework, the foundation, the propulsion, the fuel for my PhD, which was titled From Revolution to Revelation: Post-Youth Culture in Thatcher's Britain. That thesis could not have been written without Rave Off.
  
  As a young scholar, it motivated and inspired me. Reading it again - a quarter of a century later - I still see the attraction. It is as fresh and bold as a new Summer day. It laughs at nostalgic renderings of youth, music and politics. It mocks the scholars and the journalists trying to make new music and new culture fit into tired and redundant theories and paradigms.
  
  This book stands for something. The empirical must tempered and trained by theory. The present must be allowed to live and breathe in its time, rather than pulled back to sepia-tinged nostalgia. It is necessary to summon a proper understanding of drugs and drug culture, beyond the 'folk devils' and 'moral panics' of the 1960s.
  
  It also captures the passion of a PhD supervisor and his students. One man - in the right time and place (1980s-1990s Manchester) - with stunningly brilliant and courageous PhD students - took on establishment research and researchers. Took on Cultural Studies. Took on lettuce-leaf weak ethnography. Took on all those damn, pointless pathetic textbooks with their boiled to mush textual analysis.
  
  And Bez was dancing on the cover.
  
  Rave Off is the moment when Old Cultural Studies lost. The Birmingham Centre lost. Yes - these sad old ideas would continue through textbooks for decades. They still do. Celebrating mediocre theory and banal politics. But those of us who were in the right time and the right place - and the right age - to read Rave Off know that this book called us to a future that was ours to take, ours to grasp.
  
  I know we failed in this project. The sad state of our universities in the subsequent 25 years meant that nostalgia won. The empiricists won. Banal prose and dull arguments won. But for one moment, we experienced that thrill of knowing that courage could be sieved through academic life.
  
  Rave Off remains a testament to the gift of intelligence and the gift of PhD students changing the world through their research. It remains a testament to a courageous independent publisher - Ashgate - who believed in this new voice.
  
  We are a long way from the right time and the right place now. But Rave Off is a reminder that we can grab this present - and shake the hell out of it.