As an artist, researcher, and activist, my work meets at the intersections of creative arts, politics, culture, and education, with a focus on youth and subcultures. A writer and photographer, I received my BA as a Riggio Honors Writing and Democracy Scholar at The New School; my undergraduate thesis (supervised by prominent cultural critic, Greil Marcus) chronicled the criminal history of expressive dance culture in New York. My dissertation for the MA programme in Education in Arts and Cultural Settings from Kings College London continued these explorations by focusing on the criminalization of rave and underground dance culture throughout the UK, with a concentration on the capital city, since the introduction of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994. Upon completing an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, I relocated to Los Angeles, where I’m currently juggling two long-form writing projects: a novel centered on underground dance culture and the art world, and a screenplay about straight-edge culture and militant veganism in ’90s-era Salt Lake City.
Supervisors: Greil Marcus [The New School for Public Engagement, School of Writing], Anwar Tlili [King's College London, Education in Arts and Cultural Settings], Stephen Knight [Goldsmiths, University of London, English and Comparative Literature – Creative Writing], and Eva Gardos [Sundance Institute, Screenwriting]
Supervisors: Greil Marcus [The New School for Public Engagement, School of Writing], Anwar Tlili [King's College London, Education in Arts and Cultural Settings], Stephen Knight [Goldsmiths, University of London, English and Comparative Literature – Creative Writing], and Eva Gardos [Sundance Institute, Screenwriting]
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I was comforted by songs of the past, particularly British 2 Tone tunes, which confronted racism explicitly. They denounced their right-wing, nationalist-leaning government. They pleaded with their countrymen to eradicate racism. And they took their music into the streets, becoming full-on activists.
2 Tone’s influences knew no borders—sonically, nationally, or racially. It connected directly with the American civil rights movement; where Nina Simone demanded equality, Aretha Franklin wailed alongside Martin Luther King, and Marvin Gaye begged to know what was going on, The Specials, The Beat, The Bodysnatchers, and The Selecter were intentionally multicultural and contributed to the soundtrack for Rock Against Racism, which urged young Brits to challenge Thatcherism, bigotry, and apartheid.
2 Tone drew equally from the folk movement, as expressed in The Specials’ cover of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” another politically motivated musician whose songs sparked public conversations about disillusionment in the American dream. And, obviously, as ska practitioners, 2 Tone followed in the footsteps of Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, and other reggae soothsayers, who spoke not just for Jamaicans, but the entire Black diaspora.
This presentation aims to discuss the success of 2 Tone to enact social change through musical activism, and more importantly, to unpack how their model might be used to breed a new generation of activism today.
Nico Rosario is an artist, researcher, and activist based in Los Angeles. Rosario received her BA as a Riggio Honors Writing and Democracy Scholar at The New School and her M.Ed in Education in Arts and Cultural Settings from King’s College London. She is currently juggling two long-form writing projects: a novel centered on underground dance culture and the art world, and a screenplay about straight-edge culture and militant veganism in ’90s-era Salt Lake City.
A solidarity movement against oppression, racism, apartheid, and authoritarianism used the radio as its town square, dancefloor, and after-hours. It replaced IRL with something even more real: a haven to listen, vibe, and commune with people we didn’t realize were the same as us.
“Radio is a sound salvation,” Elvis Costello once declared, and it is in this spirit that I propose to examine the impact of Radio Alhara as a social movement, cultural phenomenon, and worldwide community of politically-aligned cosmopolitans, all searching for ways to enact change. In an age inundated by social media, 24-hour news cycles, and everything available in an instant and served a la algorithm, what can radio possibly do? As it turns out, it might hold the key to our collective liberation. And the soundtrack is amazing.
Nico Rosario is an artist, writer, researcher, and activist based in Los Angeles. She received her BA as a Riggio Honors Writing and Democracy Scholar at The New School, an M.Ed in Education in Arts and Cultural Settings from King’s College London, and an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. Nico is the Director of the Academy for Theatre Leadership at Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles and is currently juggling two long-form writing projects: a novel centered on underground dance culture and the art world, and a screenplay about straight-edge culture and militant veganism in ’90s-era Salt Lake City.
“Glory to Hong Kong” sung in defiant unison by crowds throughout public spaces across the city. A late-night aria performed in contempt of the military-enforced curfew imposed upon the Chilean capital. And techno – lots of techno – rumbling out of sound systems in London, Tbilisi, and Beirut, as citizens “protested by day and partied all night.” They say hardcore will never die; here it was reborn as the soundtrack of war.
This paper explores the use of rave as performative resistance, focusing on how 2018 employed contemporary underground dance culture in ways that have become emblematic to the protest movements of today. Analyzing activist happenings such as the R3 Soundsystem, (a series of organized raves protesting populist politics in the UK and US), the Georgian impromptu “rave revolution,” and the DIY rage-and-rave responses in Lebanon, I also aim to uncover the correlation between these socio-political movements. Were they incidental and singular, or did they speak to a wider trend of behavior by young people united not just by ideology but also a global dance movement?
Bio: Nico Rosario is an artist, researcher, and activist, whose work meets at the intersections of creative arts, politics, culture, and education. A writer and photographer, she is the director of the Academy for Theatre Leadership at Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles and is currently working on a novel centered on underground dance culture and the art world and a screenplay about straight-edge culture and militant veganism in ‘90s-era Salt Lake City.
But what, exactly, is the legacy of rave? As suggested by Arjun Appadurai, “the past has different shapes which ordinary people produce, as historians, et cetera, with both the notion of different temporalities and the questions of memory and forgetting.” Indeed, the framing of rave culture has long suffered from selective amnesia: on the one hand, it has crystallized in the collective psyche as a menace to society, quashed in the name of the public good and safety; on the other, a form of collateral damage for an increase in gentrified and domesticated spaces. A once-vibrant, unruly and fresh youth empowerment movement has now become clichéd, sanitized, and staid within the domain of the mainstream and an overwhelming factor in sculpting its amorphous shape into something more concrete has been through public policy initiatives and regulations.
How does legislation undermine the production of counterculture, both through explicit bias via lawmaking (i.e. the Criminal Justice Act) and implicit bias, or what Steven Tepper refers to as “quiet” regulation? Can unregulated spaces work as models for resistance as well as agents of change? And more importantly, can the call of the underground ever truly be silenced by a gavel and block?
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 made attending and producing raves illegal in the U.K., which were defined as “gatherings on land in the open air of 100 or more persons at which amplified music is played during the night… [and whereby] ‘music’ includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”1
Reaction to the bill’s enactment included challenges from electronic dance music (EDM) pioneers such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Orbital, who began disrupting beat structures in their music and/or issuing warning labels on their CDs. They asked: What if the “repetitive” beats in question were randomized, syncopated, or otherwise altered in order to comply with the bill? Would broadcasting or performing that music still be criminalized?
It struck me that there were likely other musicians influenced by the bill in similar, yet subtler ways. Such began my quest to explore the ways in which EDM evolved in reaction to the Criminal Justice bill. Using the “Hip-Hop Word Count” project as a research model, I’ve begun to trace the musicality of EDM before and after the bill was passed to see if distinctions could be made in the ways the music was produced. Using BBC Radio 1’s “Essential Music” archives (the U.K.’s first public radio EDM program) as well as archival audio files from local pirate radio stations, British-based dance music charts, magazines and other rave culture artifacts, I will establish that a pattern of behavior emerged that deemphasized repetitive techno and acid house music in favor of break beats, garage, and more bass-driven EDM.
I would like to introduce my preliminary findings at the 2015 EMP Pop
Conference and use this data to further investigate the ways that criminalization has impacted EMD culture worldwide, sometimes in seemingly innocuous ways.
1 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994, c. 33, Part V: Powers in relation to raves.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/V/crossheading/powers-in-relation-toraves#commentary-c1980912
(Bio)
I am a postgraduate student at King’s College London. My current research
investigates the criminalization of rave and underground dance culture in New York City and London. I began my inquiry whilst a Riggio Writing and Democracy Fellow at The New School; my undergraduate thesis chronicled the criminal history of dance culture in NYC. “Breaking the Beat…” is an innovative project that aims to extend my research and engage others in my topic of interest.
In Desiree Burch’s one-woman show, Tar Baby, she examines the performativity of ‘blackness,’ a term that is problematic and unquantifiable yet emblematic of how people of color are often codified within American society. Though this dilemma did not originate with hip hop, we argue that the music’s current, long-term popularity has set the most recent parameters on black speech and performance. Using Burch’s play as a frame for conversation, we challenge this predominant signifier of blackness and question its marginality within the black community.
We also investigate the greater power of the hip hop voice, as one that is embedded in American culture-at-large, clearly distinguishable from other Anglophonic cultures. With widespread usage of this vernacular outside of its specific cultural origins, can we still claim that hip hop automatically equates blackness? Is hip-hop now or can it ever be post-black?
Often, when the term “forgotten” is used to describe the lack of history of a subject, it’s really that an “erasure” has taken place; these archivists share a common need to feel represented as part of the culture in which they are also contributors. My paper explores the importance of a diversified archival space and ways to preserve all forms of the subcultural experience.
I was comforted by songs of the past, particularly British 2 Tone tunes, which confronted racism explicitly. They denounced their right-wing, nationalist-leaning government. They pleaded with their countrymen to eradicate racism. And they took their music into the streets, becoming full-on activists.
2 Tone’s influences knew no borders—sonically, nationally, or racially. It connected directly with the American civil rights movement; where Nina Simone demanded equality, Aretha Franklin wailed alongside Martin Luther King, and Marvin Gaye begged to know what was going on, The Specials, The Beat, The Bodysnatchers, and The Selecter were intentionally multicultural and contributed to the soundtrack for Rock Against Racism, which urged young Brits to challenge Thatcherism, bigotry, and apartheid.
2 Tone drew equally from the folk movement, as expressed in The Specials’ cover of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” another politically motivated musician whose songs sparked public conversations about disillusionment in the American dream. And, obviously, as ska practitioners, 2 Tone followed in the footsteps of Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, and other reggae soothsayers, who spoke not just for Jamaicans, but the entire Black diaspora.
This presentation aims to discuss the success of 2 Tone to enact social change through musical activism, and more importantly, to unpack how their model might be used to breed a new generation of activism today.
Nico Rosario is an artist, researcher, and activist based in Los Angeles. Rosario received her BA as a Riggio Honors Writing and Democracy Scholar at The New School and her M.Ed in Education in Arts and Cultural Settings from King’s College London. She is currently juggling two long-form writing projects: a novel centered on underground dance culture and the art world, and a screenplay about straight-edge culture and militant veganism in ’90s-era Salt Lake City.
A solidarity movement against oppression, racism, apartheid, and authoritarianism used the radio as its town square, dancefloor, and after-hours. It replaced IRL with something even more real: a haven to listen, vibe, and commune with people we didn’t realize were the same as us.
“Radio is a sound salvation,” Elvis Costello once declared, and it is in this spirit that I propose to examine the impact of Radio Alhara as a social movement, cultural phenomenon, and worldwide community of politically-aligned cosmopolitans, all searching for ways to enact change. In an age inundated by social media, 24-hour news cycles, and everything available in an instant and served a la algorithm, what can radio possibly do? As it turns out, it might hold the key to our collective liberation. And the soundtrack is amazing.
Nico Rosario is an artist, writer, researcher, and activist based in Los Angeles. She received her BA as a Riggio Honors Writing and Democracy Scholar at The New School, an M.Ed in Education in Arts and Cultural Settings from King’s College London, and an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. Nico is the Director of the Academy for Theatre Leadership at Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles and is currently juggling two long-form writing projects: a novel centered on underground dance culture and the art world, and a screenplay about straight-edge culture and militant veganism in ’90s-era Salt Lake City.
“Glory to Hong Kong” sung in defiant unison by crowds throughout public spaces across the city. A late-night aria performed in contempt of the military-enforced curfew imposed upon the Chilean capital. And techno – lots of techno – rumbling out of sound systems in London, Tbilisi, and Beirut, as citizens “protested by day and partied all night.” They say hardcore will never die; here it was reborn as the soundtrack of war.
This paper explores the use of rave as performative resistance, focusing on how 2018 employed contemporary underground dance culture in ways that have become emblematic to the protest movements of today. Analyzing activist happenings such as the R3 Soundsystem, (a series of organized raves protesting populist politics in the UK and US), the Georgian impromptu “rave revolution,” and the DIY rage-and-rave responses in Lebanon, I also aim to uncover the correlation between these socio-political movements. Were they incidental and singular, or did they speak to a wider trend of behavior by young people united not just by ideology but also a global dance movement?
Bio: Nico Rosario is an artist, researcher, and activist, whose work meets at the intersections of creative arts, politics, culture, and education. A writer and photographer, she is the director of the Academy for Theatre Leadership at Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles and is currently working on a novel centered on underground dance culture and the art world and a screenplay about straight-edge culture and militant veganism in ‘90s-era Salt Lake City.
But what, exactly, is the legacy of rave? As suggested by Arjun Appadurai, “the past has different shapes which ordinary people produce, as historians, et cetera, with both the notion of different temporalities and the questions of memory and forgetting.” Indeed, the framing of rave culture has long suffered from selective amnesia: on the one hand, it has crystallized in the collective psyche as a menace to society, quashed in the name of the public good and safety; on the other, a form of collateral damage for an increase in gentrified and domesticated spaces. A once-vibrant, unruly and fresh youth empowerment movement has now become clichéd, sanitized, and staid within the domain of the mainstream and an overwhelming factor in sculpting its amorphous shape into something more concrete has been through public policy initiatives and regulations.
How does legislation undermine the production of counterculture, both through explicit bias via lawmaking (i.e. the Criminal Justice Act) and implicit bias, or what Steven Tepper refers to as “quiet” regulation? Can unregulated spaces work as models for resistance as well as agents of change? And more importantly, can the call of the underground ever truly be silenced by a gavel and block?
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 made attending and producing raves illegal in the U.K., which were defined as “gatherings on land in the open air of 100 or more persons at which amplified music is played during the night… [and whereby] ‘music’ includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”1
Reaction to the bill’s enactment included challenges from electronic dance music (EDM) pioneers such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Orbital, who began disrupting beat structures in their music and/or issuing warning labels on their CDs. They asked: What if the “repetitive” beats in question were randomized, syncopated, or otherwise altered in order to comply with the bill? Would broadcasting or performing that music still be criminalized?
It struck me that there were likely other musicians influenced by the bill in similar, yet subtler ways. Such began my quest to explore the ways in which EDM evolved in reaction to the Criminal Justice bill. Using the “Hip-Hop Word Count” project as a research model, I’ve begun to trace the musicality of EDM before and after the bill was passed to see if distinctions could be made in the ways the music was produced. Using BBC Radio 1’s “Essential Music” archives (the U.K.’s first public radio EDM program) as well as archival audio files from local pirate radio stations, British-based dance music charts, magazines and other rave culture artifacts, I will establish that a pattern of behavior emerged that deemphasized repetitive techno and acid house music in favor of break beats, garage, and more bass-driven EDM.
I would like to introduce my preliminary findings at the 2015 EMP Pop
Conference and use this data to further investigate the ways that criminalization has impacted EMD culture worldwide, sometimes in seemingly innocuous ways.
1 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994, c. 33, Part V: Powers in relation to raves.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/V/crossheading/powers-in-relation-toraves#commentary-c1980912
(Bio)
I am a postgraduate student at King’s College London. My current research
investigates the criminalization of rave and underground dance culture in New York City and London. I began my inquiry whilst a Riggio Writing and Democracy Fellow at The New School; my undergraduate thesis chronicled the criminal history of dance culture in NYC. “Breaking the Beat…” is an innovative project that aims to extend my research and engage others in my topic of interest.
In Desiree Burch’s one-woman show, Tar Baby, she examines the performativity of ‘blackness,’ a term that is problematic and unquantifiable yet emblematic of how people of color are often codified within American society. Though this dilemma did not originate with hip hop, we argue that the music’s current, long-term popularity has set the most recent parameters on black speech and performance. Using Burch’s play as a frame for conversation, we challenge this predominant signifier of blackness and question its marginality within the black community.
We also investigate the greater power of the hip hop voice, as one that is embedded in American culture-at-large, clearly distinguishable from other Anglophonic cultures. With widespread usage of this vernacular outside of its specific cultural origins, can we still claim that hip hop automatically equates blackness? Is hip-hop now or can it ever be post-black?
Often, when the term “forgotten” is used to describe the lack of history of a subject, it’s really that an “erasure” has taken place; these archivists share a common need to feel represented as part of the culture in which they are also contributors. My paper explores the importance of a diversified archival space and ways to preserve all forms of the subcultural experience.