It's been ten years since the English seized on Detroit techno, Chicago house, and New York garage as the seeds of what's generally agreed-over there, at least-to be the most significant music since punk, and they're celebrating with a slew of historical studies. Simon Reynolds attempts to bridge the gap with "Generation Ecstasy," an exhaustive compendium of almost every rave-associated sound and idea, both half-baked and momentous, that traces the digital Diaspora back and forth across Europe and America.

Using the multiple perspectives of music critic, enthusiastic participant, and sociological outsider to trace the development of dance music's "rhythmic phsycadelic

," Reynolds, finds two predominant, contrasting strains: the search for gnosis, or spiritual revelation, and the desire to get completely out of it at the weekend. Setting these timeless

The drug-tech interface gives "Generation Ecstasy" a narrative backbone that applies again and again, across continents and cultures from Texas, where Ecstasy culture first reared its head in the mid-'80s, to Scotland, Holland, and Germany. The story starts with the initial, utopic discovery of Ecstasy and its boundary-lowering qualities, and ends, with varying degrees of speed, with the descent into polydrug abuse and depression. Resisting easy moralizing, Reynolds' analysis of the dialectic remains admirably balanced, sensitive to both the consciousness-expansion which can inspire insights that carry over into everyday life, and the tunnel-vision nihilism which is usually the outcome of rave as an end in itself.

At times, the scales tip; Reynolds' persistent reading of this most abstract music in terms of class and race politics is welcome, particularly his analysis of Detroit techno as a suburban phenomenon (which goes against the usual British fetishization of it as the authentic product of an oppressed black underclass

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 695
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)