Rave

Rave Description

Following on his monumental examination of `the most contrary and most political, the most radical and rich, the most unstruggling decade of decades,' the 1980s in his ruthless debut novel Insane, his analysis of RAF terrorism in Kontrolliert, and his monumental forerunner of `uncreative writing', the trilogy 1989, Buchner Prize-winner Rainald Goetz turned his critical sensibilities on 1990s pop culture in a series of five books gathered under the collective title This Morning, his great history of the present. Rave opens the series, and is the fruit of Goetz's intense collaboration with major figures from the early electronic music scene, among them Sven Vath and DJ Westbam. An unapologetic embrace of the nightlife under the motto `Meet girls. Take drugs. Listen to music', this fragmentary novel attempts to capture the feel of debauchery from within while at the same time critiquing the media structures that contribute to the 'epochality' of pop culture phenomena. Throughout the four decades of his career, Goetz has sought to dissolve the critical distance between writer and object which, in the quest for distance, actually distorts its object; in Rave he dives fully into dissolution, celebrating what is neither counter-culture nor `mass culture' in Adorno's disparaging sense, but a new way of experiencing mental processes and intimacy. ?Rainald Goetz is the most important trendsetter in German literature.' ? Süddeutsche Zeitung