Rave

Much the world has changed since the ol' times of Buddy Holly. Wikipedia sets the origins of the rave parties of today back in that moment. Illegal parties in many occasions, one must say. If I were to define what I understand by "rave" I would say: "gregarious and frequently illegal congregation of people in unusual places where they drink, dance, consume and abuse of toxic and illegal substances all together as a pack".

I doubt that the rave gatherings of today still share the political aspiration, literary suppuration or exotic inspiration -drugs, sex and all included- of the past, but the two very features of "gregarious" and "illegal" remain.

At first sight, the scenes of rave behavior look unstoppable, as a utter cry of freedom. But this is nonsense. It is indeed a fact that the book of History we read and remember daily is composed by big-case footnotes and margin comments, while the main body of the text is discrete and hidden in small-sized letters. And so, where we see freedom and justice in the Beat movement, for instance, we fail to recognize the core of those pages, what -I believe- it was all about: an unstopped imposition of moral degradation.

The infamous rave stuff (now a hot topic in the news in Spain, after the dead of two youngsters from excess of thorn apple in a rave party) is the umpteenth example in recent decades of moral degradation and individual dissipation. I must underline: the two very features standing still across the years in the rave movement -gregarious relations and illegal congregations- are the reflection of two evils of our civilization: the giving-up of individual freedom to the benefit of social networks (same old, same old) and the popularization of anti-social behaviors.

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