So the house movement is determined to have no stars. It is ''in the face'' of a recording industry that needs egos and idolatry in order to survive. It depends, instead, on a community in resonance. The fractal equation must be kept in balance. If one star were to rise above the crowd, the spontaneous feedback creating the fractal would be obliterated. The kids don't want to dance even facing their partners, much less a stage. Everyone in the room must become "one.'' This means no performers, no audience, no leaders, no egos. For the fractal rule of self-similarity to hold, this also means that every house club must share in the cooperative spirit of all clubs. Even a club must resist the temptation to become a ''star.'' Every club and every rave must establish itself as part of one community, or what Fraser calls "the posse.''
''It looks sort of like a tribe, but a tribe is somehow geographically separate from the main culture.'' Fraser finishes his cigarette and feeds his dog some leftover Indian food from dinner. "A posse is very definitely an urban thing. It's just a group of people, sharing technology, sharing all the raves and music as an organization. We even call them `posses putting on raves.' I really don't think there's such a thing as personal illumination anymore. Either everybody gets it or nobody gets it. I really think that's the truth.''
UFO, a collective effort of Fraser's posse, opens in an abandoned set of train tunnels at Camden Lock market. This English party is not at all like a San Francisco or even a New York club. It is an indoor version of the old-style massive outdoor raves. The clothing is reminiscent of a Dead show, but maybe slightly less grungy. Batik drawstring pants, jerseys with fractal patches, love beads, dredlocks, yin-yang T-shirts, and colorful ski caps abound. In the first tunnel, kids sit in small clusters on the dirt floor, smoking hash out of Turkish metal pipes, sharing freshly squeezed orange juice, and shouting above the din of the house music. In one corner, sharply contrasting the medieval attire, ancient stone, and general filth, are a set of brain machines for rent. In the second tunnel, dozens of kids dance to the throbbing house beat. Even though we're in a dungeon, there's nothing ''down'' about the dancing. With every one of the 120 beats per minute, the dancers articulate another optimistic pulse. Up up up up. The hands explode upward again and again and again. No one dances sexy or cool. They just pulse with the rhythm, smile, and make eye contact with their friends. No need for partners or even groups. This is a free-for-all.
A cluster of young men are hovering near the turntables with the nervous head-nodding and note-taking of streetcorner bookies. They are the DJs, who are each scheduled to spin records for several hours until the party breaks up at dawn. Tonight's music will be mostly hard-core, techno-acid – style house, but there are many house genres to choose from. There's ''bleep,'' which samples from the sounds of the earliest Pong games to extremely high-tech telephone connection and modem signals. New York house, or "garage'' sound, is more bluesy and the most soulful; it uses many piano samples and depends on mostly black female singers. There's also ''headstrong'' house, for the hardest of headbangers; "techno,'' from Detroit; ''dub,'' coined from Gibson's Neuromancer for Reggae-influenced house; and "new beat,'' from Northern Europe. Less intense versions of house include ''deep'' house, with more space on the top layers and a generally airier sound, and the least throbbing kind, and "ambient'' house, which has no real rhythm at all but simply fills the space with breathy textures of sound. Of course, any or all of these styles may be combined into a single song or mix, along with samples of anything else: Native American ''whoops,'' tribal chanting, evangelists shouting, or even a state trooper calling a mother to inform her "your son is dead.''
The DJs consider themselves the technoshamans of the evening. Their object is to bring the participants into a technoshamanic trance, much in the way ancient shamans brought members of their tribes into similar states of consciousness. A DJ named Marcus speaks for the group:
''There's a sequence. You build people up, you take `em back down. It can be brilliant. Some DJs will get people tweaking into a real animal thing, and others might get into this smooth flow where everyone gets into an equilibrium with each other. But the goal is to hit that magical experience that everyone will talk about afterwards. Between 120 beats a minute and these sounds that the human ear has never heard before, you put them to music and it appeals to some primal level of consciousness.''
If it didn't, house would never had made it across the Atlantic to America, where it could manifest not only on a primal level but a marketing one.
Chapter 10
Making the Golden Rule Trendy
Building on the foundations of shamanism in the English house scene, Americans in San Francisco focus on the techno side. While the English rave has a quality of medievalism, tribal energy, and Old World paganism, the American cyber disco is the most modern mutation of bliss induction, and uses whatever means necessary to bring people into the fractal pattern.
As Jody Radzik explains: ''In a really good house experience, you want to create something like the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. You're trying to create an environment where people can get outside of themselves. There gets to be a certain point in the night where people just cut loose. The party just reaches a kind of critical mass. A synergy of shared consciousness occurs and boom. You'll know it. It'll have a certain sparkle to it.'' Rising above the muted grit and gristle of the British pagans, American technojunkies sparkle and buzz to the same throbbing beat.
Rather than abandoning the television aesthetic and discouraging the urge to be ''hip,'' club promoters use hipness as bait. Jody Radzik, who designs house clothing when he's not promoting the club Osmosis, believes that as house gets on MTV, "a whole new culture will be created. This will be a result of it being trendy. At the bottom line, that's what makes things run: narcissism. Trendiness. I'm always trying to be the trendiest I can be. It's my job. I do design. People get into this because it's a hip new thing. Then maybe they have an opening and get exposed to new ideas. But the fuel that's going to generate the growth of this culture is going to be trendiness and hipness. We're using the cultural marketing thing against itself. They consume the culture, and get transformed. House makes the Golden Rule trendy. That's why I'm trying to create the trendiest sportswear company in the world.''
For Radzik, marketing is the perfect tool for transformation. Rather than discard the system that has dominated until now, the system is used to destroy itself. The machinery of the industrial culture – be it technology, economics, or even the more subtle underlying psychological principles and social mechanisms – is turned against itself for its own good. Just as the earth uses its own systems of feedback and iteration to maintain a viable biosphere, house culture exploits the positive feedback loops of marketing and data sharing to further human consciousness. Radzik explains his take on the Gaia hypothesis and McKenna's prediction about the year 2012:
''This bifurcation we're coming up to, this shift, will be the awakening of the planet's awareness. That's the shared belief of the raver camp in the scene. House is the vehicle for disseminating that culture to the rest of the planet.''
And how does house conduct this dissemination? By imparting a direct experience of the infinite. In the dance is the eternal bliss moment. The social, audio, and visual sampling of innumerable cultures and times compresses the history and future of civilization into a single moment, when anything seems possible. The discontinuous musical and visual sampling trains the dancers to cope with a discontinuous reality. This is a lesson in coping with nonlinear experience – a test run in Cyberia. A tour of Radzik's clothing studio makes this amply clear. His design arsenal is made up of the illustrations from an eclectic set of texts: Decorative Art of India, with pictures of Indian rugs woven into patterns reminiscent of fractals; Molecular Cell Biology, with atomic diagrams and electron microscopy of cells and organic molecules; The Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness, with fractals and mathematical diagrams; and Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity, a collection of hieroglyphics and graffiti-like ancient scribblings. Radzik composes his designs by computer scanning images from books like these and then recombining them. With a keen eye for the similarities of these images, Radzik creates visually what house does musically: the discontinuous sampling of the symbology of bliss over time. The images' similarities give a feeling of comfort and metacontinuity.