Its soundtrack lacked Trainspotting ’s brilliant edge, but it also imbibed the electronic rhythms and breakbeat flows throughout its winding, fracturing narrative that were its soundtrack to the underground. It was somewhere between Fiction and Trainspotting, yet more immersed in the low cost seedy ways of city nightlife and youth’s fascination with living the ultra life. In contrast, Go, which was written by John August, was a more humane, more truthful document, and ultimately the deeper, kinder laugh. The truth is, Trainspotting celebrated heroin too much, and more than it celebrated ecstasy, the latter proposed as a salve to kicking the smack habit Pulp Fiction on the other hand was homicidal mania riding the heroin high of rock ‘n’ roll, a film that dared audiences to laugh at a poor kid’s head exploding at the end of John Travolta’s pistol point-blank. Looking back now, it’s the film’s comment on the universal search for the spiritual. “It’s like, ‘Hey man! How’s the ground down there?’" So says a raver to Go ’s lead characters Ronna and Claire in a van outside a warehouse party, believing he’s high on what is fake ecstasy. Go didn’t kill its way into minds and hearts. Following his 1996 hit Swingers, Liman’s 1999 Los Angeles rave comedy was written off by some critics as a Quentin Tarantino copycat. I know, many of us probably remember Boyle’s Trainspotting more than Liman’s Go, and yet the latter has grown as a 1990s cult classic in its own right. Which in a way is kind of funny because maybe Doug Liman had it right more than Danny Boyle did, at least it seems from this Californian’s vantage.
When the electronic music revolution began, it was that excitement one could hear in synthesized chords and machine beats that said “Go!” There was and sometimes still is the exciting sense that we are surfing the waves of change. Why? It seems disappointingly clichéd to write, but we all know, and I would argue many of us knew, that history can’t simply be outdone or outrun. Electronic music, house, techno, EDM, whatever one wants to call it, was the sonic precognition of the digital age, and for those who were there to hear it, and if you were lucky, dance to it - long before the giant music festivals and its pop music conquests - it’s safe to say things haven’t turned out as expected.
Disruption is no longer the mantra of Silicon Valley but the mixed outcome across the planet. It’s also been over a year since I posted here on Ghost Deep. That’s the overwhelming mood in 2022, thirty years after the “rave” revolution began. Lotus Magazine, Issue 38, 2002, and Seconds magazine’s “Future Tense” interview with Future Sound of London, 1994, via.