Repeating beats: The return of rave, memories of joy and nostalgia between the afterglow and the hangover

Abstract

The British rave scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s is widely remembered as a moment of elation and bliss. Contemporary cultural representations position the Second Summer of Love of 1989 – when thousands of young people attended illegal parties, experienced the hypnotic beats of house music and had their first brush with the drug ecstasy – as an object of nostalgia. I argue that rave nostalgia is suspended between two dispositions: the afterglow and the hangover. Whereas the former involves happiness, reversibility and continuity, the latter is defined by melancholia, irreversibility and discontinuity. On this basis, I consider two texts that creatively combine these dispositions in their evocation of rave: the music video for The Streets’s ‘Weak Become Heroes’ and Jeremy Deller’s documentary Everybody in the Place. Finally, I assess how the euphoria associated with rave nostalgia helps to augment and advance the recent turn to joy in memory studies.