So what is “New Rave”? Can we say for sure what it means? It’s such an ugly term and it makes no sense. New Rave. Say it out loud. It must have something to do with New Wave, right? Or it’s a progression of underground club culture? Oh, wait, it’s another genre invented by the British music press for the sole purpose of hyping up a style of music that doesn’t exist; and who are the perpetrators this time? That’s right, it’s everyone’s favorite bastions of pointless print journalism, The NME.

New Rave is a genre devoid of all meaning. It’s a construct of The NME that in no way represents any of the bands that have been tarnished with its brush. That is not to say that the bands don’t make good music – they are some of the most creative acts around – but really what do they benefit from being thrown haphazardly into this genre that represents the needs of the media more than the music scene?

At the start of the new millennium we had Electroclash; this in turn became Electro-rock; and now Electro-rock is not cool, so it has received this new, less-than-cutting edge moniker to re-brand it. The music hasn’t changed, and the bands who were making Electro-rock have carried on as if nothing happened, but The NME has a new term to splash all over its pages and convince malleable minds that terminology is more important than music.

It’s all “HYPE! HYPE! HYPE!”, as if we need yet more dreary bands thrust in our faces and proclaimed as “the next big thing”. No doubt this year there will be another term thrown into the mix and The NME’s front page will inform us “New Rave is Dead! Long Live Rave-Rock!”

New Rave, Neu Rave, Electroclash, Electro-rock, Disco-punk, Dance-punk, Indie-rave: They’re all the same. None of the bands making the music have gone anywhere, yet the media plays on fickle readers’ minds by repackaging the same thing, year after year, under a different guise; and consumers lap it up!

You may have caught a Youtube video of a Klaxons’ gig with hordes of teens brandishing glowsticks. Some media circles have cited this as meaning that the original Rave era that began in 1988 has come full-circle and begun again in a post-modern format. The difference now is that there is nothing revolutionary about New Rave, but that hasn’t stopped the media insisting that this is a rave-revival. Is there really anything “Rave” about “New Rave” music? Rave was never supposed to be trendy.

Bands typically associated with New Rave include Datarock, recent Bangkok-visitors Shitdisco, and, primarily, Klaxons. The latter, however, has publicly denounced New Rave as nothing more than a joke that got out of hand.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s an in-joke between me and my friends,” said Klaxons’ front-man Jamie Reynolds. “Just the fact that it’s become a sort of international media phenomenon I find really strange.”

What’s frustrating for music-lovers is that the hype generated by this new genre almost overshadows the great songs of bands like Klaxons. The NME does a wonderful job of over-hyping new bands while simultaneously forgetting about the bands it was hyping a month earlier. This makes if difficult for new music to grow, because it is replaced by something almost identical within a matter of weeks. Furthermore, consumers are being told that they should adopt a new identity to fit in with the music they are listening to. Whatever happened to the music itself?! Consumers seem to have become increasingly lazy, relying on the media as a whole, not just The NME, to tell them what to listen to.

So what have we learnt from New Rave? Well, we can be sure that electronic music has met rock, but we already knew that. Ultimately we don’t gain anything from the propulsion of New Rave as a marketable form of music. However, if it helps new bands achieve success then some good does come of it, particularly if, as Klaxons have done, the bands speak out against the label they find themselves under.

Techno’ tags: New Rave, The NME, Klaxons, Electro-rock