Free Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture by Simon Reynolds

next stage, replacing pelvic-thrust and booty-shake with a whole-body frenzy of polymorphously perverse tics and convulsive pogo-ing.
    Etymologically, ‘jack’ seems to be a corruption of ‘jerk’, but also may have some link to ‘jacking off’. The house dancefloor suggests the circle jerk, a spectacle of collective auto-eroticism, sterile jouissance . ‘Jacking’ also makes me think of jacking into an electrical circuit. Plugged into the sound-system, the jacker looks a bit like a robot with epilepsy (itself an electrical disorder of the nervous system). In jack tracks like Fast Eddie Smith’s ‘Jack To The Sound’ and Secret Secret’s ‘We Come To Jack’, lyrics are restricted to terse commands and work-that-body exhortations. Eventually, acid house bypassed verbals altogether and proceeded to what felt like direct possession of your nervous system via the bass-biology interface.
    Robotnik vacancy, voodoo delirium, whirling dervishes, zombiedom, marionettes, slaves-to-the-rhythm: the metaphors that house music and ‘jacking’ irresistibly invite all contain the notion of becoming less-than-human. Other aspects of the music exacerbate the sense of attenuated self-hood. With a few exceptions, house singers tend to be ciphers, their vocals merely plastic material to be manipulated by the producer. In early house, the vocals were often garbled, sped-up and slowed down, pulverized into syllable or phoneme-size particles, and above all subjected to the ubiquitous, humiliating stutter-effect, whereby a phrase was transformed on the sampling keyboard into a staccato riff. Ralphi Rosario’s classic ‘You Used To Hold Me’ divides into two distinct halves. At first, diva Xavier Gold is in the spotlight, putting in a sterling performance as the cynically materialistic and vengeful lover. Then Rosario takes control, vivisecting Gold’s vocal so that stray vowels and sibilants bounce like jumping beans over the groove, and transforming one syllable of passion into a spasmic Morse code riff.
    House makes the producer the star, not the singer. It’s the culmination of an unwritten (because unwriteable) history of black dance pop, a history determined not by sacred cow auteurs but by producers, session musicians and engineers – backroom boys. House music takes this depersonalization further: it gets rid of human musicians (the house band that gave Motown or Stax or Studio One its distinctive sound), leaving just the producer and his machines. Operating as a cottage factory churning out a high turnover of tracks, the house producer replaces the artist’s signature with the industrialist’s trademark. Closer to an architect or draughtsman, the house auteur is absent from his own creation; house tracks are less like artworks, in the expressive sense, than vehicles, rhythmic engines that take the dancer on a ride.
    As well as being post-biographical, house is post-geographical pop. If Chicago is the origin, it’s because it happens to be a junction point in the international trade routes of disco. Breaking with the traditional horticultural language we use to describe the evolution of pop – cross-pollination, hybridization – house’s ‘roots’ lie in deracination. The music sounds inorganic: machines talking to each other, in an un-real acoustic space. When sounds from real-world acoustic sources enter house’s pleasuredome, they tend to be processed and disembodied – as with the distortion and manipulation inflicted upon the human voice, evacuating its soul and reducing it to a shallow effect .
    But this is only one side of house culture: the machine-music side that evolved from jack tracks to acid house, music that’s all surface and post-human intensity. Just as important was the humanist, uplifting strain of ‘deep house’ that affiliated itself to the R & B tradition: songs like Sterling Void’s ‘It’s All Right’, Joe Smooth’s ‘Promised Land’ and his album Rejoice . Combining Philly’s