Hello Dogs,
In our mission to research the history of electronic underground culture - especially centered on techno, rave, hardcore... we set ourselves a new objective:
To shine a light on the context of its popular, re-occurring, "meme" like vocal samples.
Why did these occur in the first place?
Music that existed around the 1st heyday of Techno - late 80s, early 90s - was not as sample heavy, most of the time. Like glam metal, pop-rock, the first boybands...
Vitamin - My House is your House
Well, the reason is that most of the productions were made by low-budget, low-brow (and sometimes low-life) producers.
The other "dance" epigons of those times were able to hire professional singers, or whole orchestras to layer over their dance grooves (hello S.A.W.!)
Just sampling something else was a much cheaper method.
There were other, more high-brow reasons, too:
Techno dismantled the way music was supposed to be, to sound, to be produced.
No more real guitars and "real" percussion. To exchange the human voices made of flesh that dominated recent decades - from the Beatles to Madonna - with the digital croaking of the sampler, made perfect sense.
And sampling was a new tech, could be used in ways that are out there, psychedelic, zany. The right soundtrack for the jilted generation.
Let's stop right here. And get to our first exhibit.
"We wanna be free"
One of the earliest samples in one of the earliest "rave" hits. Later it has literally been used in 1000s of other tracks.
I assume only a minority of the sweat and smoke-drenched ravers were aware of the actual origin of the samples.
It's from a 1960s movie called "the wild angels".
So let's talk about it:
The Wild Angels (1966) - On Hippieploitation, Peter Fonda, and an iconic movie of 90s Rave Culture (that most Ravers never actually watched)
The movie stars a still very young peter fonda - a few years before his role in "easy rider". Other actors to note are Nancy Sinatra and Bruce Dern.
The movie is on the fringes of the "hippieploitation" movie fad of the 60s and 70s.
These movies were often marketed as exposing the horrors, s*x, and violence (and music) of the 60s counterculture to the boomers and squares of the precedent generation.
Of course, these horrors to the most part only existed in the imagination of the boomers.
They often ended up attracting the very counterculture generation they warned about. The hippie youth was interested to see some wild exploits of bikers, hippies (i.e. themselves), revolutionaries and drop-outs too, of course.
And I guess most directors and studios knew this.
And, despite this pulp / schlock framing, some, or rather, most of the hippieploitation movies are quite well-made, deep, and sincere work of arts. They just had a smaller budget than the "big hollywood" productions.
#1 Primal Scream - Loaded (Official Video)
Peter Fonda seems to have been a central star of this movie-wave; apart from the wild angels he also starred in other movies with a similar concept, like "The Trip", or the abovementioned easy rider.
I said this one is borderline hippieploitation, as the topic is not directly hippies, but real rough outlaw bikers.
The outlaw biker culture is somewhat lumped into the 60s "counterculture" media perception lens. Bikers play prominent roles in other iconic counterculture flicks as well, like fritz the cat or - "Easy Rider" again.
The bikers serve as a channel for a lot of "hippie" vibes in this media creation. Like the concept of "free love", living outside society, job or work culture. And there is quite a lot of talk by Fonda and his friends about sticking it to "the man" and otherwise dodging and fighting boomer-based authority figures.
It's not totally lovey-dovey all the time. They are a brutal and violent gang despite this. And the plot contains a "redemption" arc for the Fonda character, leaving the nihilism and mindless violence behind.
Hardsequencer - We Wanna Be Free
Before this happens, the movie actually ends on a real downer, with a scene that even I, as a life-long horror and "outrageous" movie consumer, find very hard to stomach or to watch.
I guess the hippieploitation / exploitation concept shines through here. The idea to "shock" the audience.
I won't say too much on it, but the sequence involves trespassing, booze, an *rgy, a priest, swastikas, and a coffin.
This "final segment" (that slams the lid on the coffin, so to say) is preceded by a speech of the Fonda character, that became a countercultural symbol in itself.
The priest asks the unruly bikers "But, tell me, just what is it that you want to do?".
To which our young Fonda replies:
"We don't want nobody telling us what to do. We don't want nobody pushing us around.
We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We wanna be free to ride! We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we're gonna do. We are gonna have a good time. We are gonna have a party."
Defcon 2 - To Be Free
And I guess this is good evidence that the movie really is not "just" about a criminal gang on motorcycles.
Like I said, they serve as a vessel for countercultural values, within the narrative and metaphor of the movie.
And the following generations seconded that motion.
The speech became iconic and was used, re-purposed in a myriad of media, which is impossible to count or keep track of.
Most importantly it found its home in the techno, rave, acid house, hardcore and gabba scenes of the mid-80s to mid-90s.
An early example is the Primal Scream track "Loaded" (the title should give a hint, right?"
But it kept being re-used, re-purposed.
Tempest 2000: Future Tense
I suppose one could trace a kind of countercultural continuum there.
The values of the early hardcore ravers and acid house punters were not that far away from those of the 60s (free love, free substances... having a party).
So they felt "understood" by this 60s movie, even though it belonged to the earlier generations.
But plotting such a continuum would bust the scope and scale of this feature.
Maybe at another time, in another place, in another world.
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