Raver bashing

Atari Teenage Riot fight techno-fascism

by MIREILLE SILCOTT

In 1994, noted youth culture journo Gavin Hills left England for a weekend at Berlin's annual 100,000-headed street rave, Love Parade. "It's a celebration of peace, love and tolerance," he gushed. "And a damned good excuse to dance and take lots of drugs."

Now welcome the backlash. "We have been a very important element in destroying the myth of German rave," says Alec Empire, head masher of Digital Hardcore Recordings and flagship group Atari Teenage Riot. "We've been telling everyone in the press why it is shit."

It's shit because, for the most part, the apoliticism of Mr. Smiley washed out an E-generation that has opted for intellectual numbness. "Freedom to dance" created a giddy utopia filled with non-starters tanked on vaporous partying.

So when politics do enter the rave stage­as they have in Germany­those behind it get the pleasure of some very malleable heads. And the German right wasn't far behind. By 1993, Germany's gabber scene, the speed-fueled hardcore segment of the technoscape, had become a platform for nationalism. Prominent DJs like DJ Dag were sporting old Third Reich T-shirts and partyers were shouting "Sieg heil" in clubs like Berlin's E-works. Now the movement is gaining momentum: this year, famed Love Parade promoter Dr. Motte told a Parade crowd that "Jews should stop moaning about German history."

"Many ideas in German techno have become right-wing and racist," says Empire, "and the country's society has become so racist that everybody thinks it's normal. There are neo-Nazi clubs. Neo-Nazi magazines are writing about techno. They love it."

It's not hard to decipher why nationalists picked techno. In the early 1990s, Germany's techno scene became one of the most influential in the world. The sound of mega-parties like Mayday and DJs like Westbam were an understandable source of national pride for all involved. It is these very sounds that Atari Teenage Riot (Empire, MC Carl Crack and vocalist Hanin Elias) use in bristling tracks like "Hunt Down the Nazis." A punk parody of the high rave style, they cram radical left politics to the tune of many Pacmans dying speedy, electronic deaths.

And while lyrics like "Raverbashing! Let's go!!" could seem like hollow anarchist posturing wrapped for the digital '90s, one only needs to think of Gavin Hills whistling easy peace while Dr. Motte surveys Love Parade's sweaty platz to understand Empire's Riot.

Atari Teenage Riot and the Cardigans open for Beck at Metropolis on Wednesday, April 2