A crowd at NASA Rewind in New York City on April 3rd, 2004.

A basic figure-eight move with both strong lights and slow lights

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Hardcore/ Rave

A rave (sometimes referred to as a rave party) is an all-night dance event where DJs and other performers play electronic dance music and rave music. The slang expression rave was originally used by people of Caribbean descent in London during the 1960s to describe a party. more...

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In the late 1980s, the term began to be used to describe the subculture that grew out of the acid house movement that began in Chicago and New York and flourished in the United States and United Kingdom club scene.

The availability of drugs—particularly ecstasy—has caused raves to be targeted and criticized by law enforcement officials and parents' groups.

History

Mainstream raves, sometimes described by the backronym Radical Audio Visual Experience, began in the late 1980s as a product of, reaction to, and rebellion against trends in popular music, nightclub culture, and commercial radio. (See also List of noteworthy raves for more about specific events.)

In order to maintain distance and secrecy from the mainstream club scene (or perhaps due to a lack of affordable, receptive venues) warehouses, rental halls, and outside locations are most often served as rave venues. Some police and government officials from several countries have presented laws that make raving illegal, in an effort to curtail rave parties. Such laws consequently forced regional electronic dance music events to move to formal venues, such as nightclubs and amphitheatres. Some venues and jurisdictions additionally prohibited certain types of rave fashion and paraphernalia - i.e. glowsticks

Early raves were completely do it yourself; only a small number of people contributed to event production and promotion. Self-styled production and promotion companies have increasingly organized raves; the "companies" were usually unofficial or loosely defined. Some of the more well-known rave promotion companies have included Brotherhood of Boom, Go ventures, Insomniac, Mushgroove, Freebass Society, and Pure. The companies promote their events by creating and distributing fliers and online bulletins. The illegal nature of these events and the need to play 'cat and mouse' with police forces have undoubtedly contributed to the 'underground' appeal of the events.

As law enforcement agencies increasingly began paying attention to raves, concealing a party's location became important to an event's success. To that end, event organizers sometimes either promoted events solely by word-of-mouth, or would only reveal the date and location of the event to subscribers of an electronic mailing list or via voicemail. Some even went so far as to provide a series of clues or map checkpoints that ultimately led to the location of the rave.

1980s

What could arguably be called raves existed in the early 1980s in the Ecstasy-fueled club scene in clubs like NRG, in Houston, and in the drug-free, all-ages scene in Detroit at venues like The Music Institute. However, it was not until the mid to late 1980s that a wave of psychedelic and other electronic dance music, most notably acid house and techno, emerged and caught on in the clubs, warehouses and free-parties around London and later Manchester. These early raves were called the Acid House Summers. They were mainstream events that attracted thousands of people (up to 25,000 instead of the 4,000 that came to earlier warehouse parties) to come, dance and take ecstasy.