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

silky symphonic strings and mellifluous vocals with gospel’s imagery of salvation and succour, this strain of house was sufficiently worthy and wholesome to win over English soul boys such as Paul Weller and his fanboy clone Doctor Robert (formerly of The Blow Monkeys). Weller actually covered ‘Promised Land’ in early 1989.
    In house, there’s a divide between finding yourself (through becoming a member of the house) and losing yourself (in solipsistic hallucinatory bliss). The split in house between finding an identity/expressing your self and losing self/losing control could be mapped on to the tension in gay culture between the politics of pride, unity and collective resilience, and the more hardcore ‘erotic politics’ of impersonal sexual encounters, ‘deviant’ practices and drugs. House offered a sense of communion and community to those who might have been alienated from organized religion because of their sexuality. And so Frankie Knuckles described The Warehouse as a ‘church for people who have fallen from grace’, while another house pioneer, Marshall Jefferson, likened house to ‘old time religion in the way that people just get happy and screamin”. Male divas like Daryl Pandy and Robert Owens had trained in church choirs.
    In ‘deep house’, the inspirational lyrics often echo the civil rights movement of the sixties, conflating the quest for black civic dignity with the struggle for gay pride. Joe Smooth’s ‘Promised Land’ and Db’s ‘I Have A Dream’ both explicitly evoke Martin Luther King; the first promises ‘brothers, sisters, one day we’ll be free’, the latter dreams of ‘one house nation under a groove’. The Children’s ‘Freedom’ is a fraught plea for tolerance and fraternity. The spoken-word monologue beseeches ‘don’t oppress me’ and ‘don’t judge me’, and asks, bewildered and vulnerable: ‘can’t you accept me for what I am?’ The name ‘The Children’ comes from Chicago house slang: to be a ‘child’ was to be gay, a member of house’s surrogate family. ‘Step-child’ was the term for a straight person accepted by gays.
    In other house tracks, religious and sexual rapture are fused in a kind of Gnostic eroto-mysticism. Jamie Principle’s ‘Baby Wants To Ride’ begins with a prayer from Principle, and then the Voice of God declaring that it’s time to relate ‘the Revelation of my Second Coming’. But the ‘coming’ is revealed to be decidedly profane: an encounter with a dominatrix, who strips him and makes him beg on bended knees, then rides him through a porno-copia of sexual positions. Principle revels in the passivity of being a plaything, a (sexual) object, feyly gasping: ‘She took me . . . She made me scream.’ A Prince obsessed androgyne, Principle – née Byron Walton – told Melody Maker : ‘Men always want their women to scream when they’re having sex. But the men aren’t meant to scream or wouldn’t admit to doing it. But I can’t accept that male role. If a woman makes a man scream, I think that’s just as important, just as much a success. If I want to scream, I scream.’ Not content with blasphemously conflating SM with the Book of Revelation, ‘Baby Wants To Ride’ adds politics to the liberation theology: Principle exhorts the South African government to set his people free, disses AmeriKKKa as a ‘bullshit land’, and complains it’s hard to ride ‘when you’re living in a fascist dream’.
    In Fingers Inc’s ‘Distant Planet’, this longing for sanctuary from racial and sexual oppression takes the form of cosmic mysticism, à la Sun Ra. The distant planet is a place ‘where anyone can walk without fear’; if you’re treated like an alien, you wanna go where the alien feels at home. Eerie and trepidatious, the track has a mood of desolate utopianism. The musical brains behind Fingers Inc, Larry Heard, is an interestingly conflicted house auteur. With its nimble-fingered fluency and