Happiness Is...A Pill?: Rave New World

It's hard to talk to women at raves, says Ben Wilke. The big beats drown out small talk. If you really need to, you can go to a "chill-out" room for get-to-know-you conversation. And if you really need them, there's "a moderate amount of drugs," says the 17-year-old from Houston. But for him, raves are "all about the music." Says Wilke: "Real party kids don't do drugs. We go to dance and have a good time." He goes on: "A lot of people don't understand it, but the guitar thing's been done. Electronic music is all I listen to. It beats my heart."

First we had the Beat Generation; now we have the Beats-per-Minute Generation. And it's not just about ecstasy.

Simply defined, a rave is a party--often an all-night-long party--at which some form of electronic, or "techno," music is played, usually by a deejay. A rave can be as small as 25 people or larger than 25,000. And while raves have been around for a decade, the rituals, visuals and sounds associated with raves have finally started to exert a potent influence on pop music, advertising and even computer games. Several new films about raves are either in theaters or coming soon, including the British comedy Human Traffic and the documentaries Better Living Through Circuitry and Rise, a study of the rave scene in New Orleans. Says Jason Jordan, co-author of Searching for the Perfect Beat, a new book about raves and visual art: "Rave culture is youth culture right now."

"Rave culture is affecting pop culture in ways similar to the Beat Generation--and it's being misinterpreted in the same way," says Greg Harrison, director of the new movie Groove, a fictional take on the rave scene. "In the case of the Beats, a complex and subtle ethos was distilled by pop culture to marijuana, goatees and poetry. I would argue that just as there was much more to the Beats, there's something more subtle and interesting about the rave scene."

To find a rave, you can pick up one of the artfully rendered flyers at cafes or cool record stores like Other Music in New York City or Atomic Music in Houston. Or you might surf the Net and check out sites like ravedata.com or raves.com Or you might just ask a friend in the know. Raves have traditionally been held in venues without permits or permission, giving them an outlaw allure. Today, however, an increasing number of raves are legal ones, and places like Twilo in New York City specialize in re-creating the rave feel in legitimate clubs. "The New York club scene was not about music until Twilo opened," says Paul van Dyk, a popular deejay who specializes in trance--a soft, transporting form of techno and one of the genre's many, many offshoots.