Branded @ Green & Blue

Ever felt like you were someplace you didn’t belong? Like you might never have strayed farther from home? If I were to dance inside a "distraction factory", would it look, feel and sound like this? Perhaps I'd swallowed the Blue Pill and landed in Seahaven? I was preoccupied by such questions on September 2 at Green&Blue, a daytime outdoor electro dance festival held at a swimming centre in Obertshausen near Frankfurt am Main and operated by Sven Väth’s Cocoon outfit.

A couple of months back I wrote about the emergence of Dionysus Pty Ltd (or GmbH) now mounting the fully licensed Limit Experience near you. This is the corporate sponsored and state regulated experience consumed throughout tourism and entertainment industries. With its festivals soaked in nascent marketing and promotional strategies, electronic dance music culture is deeply implicated in this branding tsunami. The trend can probably be traced to the mega-rave carnivals like Sunrise and Energy held in secretive locations off the London orbital roads in the late 1980s. Back then, events were illegal, covert, outrageous, inspirational. Party-goers disembarked from odysseysian flights into the night, and, for a charge, entered the gates of temporary sonicities, extravagant multi-staged dancescapes, theatres of abandonment, with the experience often recalled in the breviloquent language of awe and revelation. And the feeling that one was participating in a clandestine world derived in part from, as Simon Reynolds pointed out, “cocking-a-snook” at the police.

With the mega-raves, the dance concert had come into being. The separation of performer from audience explicit to the concerted rave-olution revealed a professionalizing trajectory within EDM culture, and exposed just how distant this experience was from the anarcho-sensibility experienced at free teknivals where dancers face walls of bass bins not the DJ, or, for that matter, the kinesthetic maelstrom of proto-disco, where the seamless mix began. These events also saw the flourishing of the international mega-star DJ, whose performance within a Western concert tradition became critical to reputations within what would become an increasingly competitive production and performance environment. At the orbitals, names were flown in from the US to play at cross-genre venues featuring multiple stages or tents. Rising stars were scheduled to play up against each other, hurling in dance anthems in progressively shorter set times (now the standard is one or two hours). And when the 10 second break between DJ sets was implemented and filled with applause, the artist/spectator, brand/consumer divide had been firmly established, a separation that has seemingly grown into an impassable gap since - perhaps exemplified by the local security outfit at Green&Blue called "Deescalation Service Team", along with the absence of a Chill Area.

The government sanctioning of the Dionysian vibe would be orchestrated by dance festival enterprises possibly originating with the UK’s Tribal Gathering, first held in 1993 when it attracted 25,000. More recently, we’ve seen huge club-style brandscapes like Miami’s Ultra Music Festival (part of the Winter Music Conference), the transnational Creamfields phenomenon (which had grown out of one of Britain’s first super-clubs, Cream), and the UK’s Global Gathering, which this year featured the Sputnik Vodka Launch Pad, a two story luxurious VIP deck, “extreme rides” and a fly over from the Red Arrows aerobatics team (and in 2006 was exported to Las Vegas as the Bacardi Global Gathering). In Germany, on a somewhat smaller scale, Green&Blue nevertheless finds its place in the tradition of the outdoor dance spectacle.

Branded, Literally

Green&Blue is saturated with branding, and in various ways. To begin with, in a multitude of motifs, icons and stylized devices emblazoned on t-shirts, hats and sunglasses, brands are worn by participants as fetishistic ensigns of their membership, in, or aspirations towards, an invisible community – a community inhabited by those who identify with youthful immediacy, freedom, defiance and spunk, identifications augmented by advertising campaigns, wherein such sacra are tactically fused to distinct symbols, the very symbols displayed here and now in an open-air peer-2-peer brandscape.

Secondly, various ‘partners’ and sponsors are given exclusive rights to flood the event with their product (and thus brand): typically alcohol and tobacco. With its distinctive red ensign implicit to its design, a stylish and seductive Marlboro "Flavour Lounge" featuring plush seats and free lighter give-aways, betrays an industry response to the desires for “independence, hedonism, freedom, and comfort” which tobacco giant, and owner of the Marlboro brand, Philip Morris has identified (in intensive market research) in the lifestyles of young consumers worldwide, (as reported in this article). Besides Marlboro, other products circulating included Binding beer, Red Bull, Rosmann’s Big Appler apfelwein, and Jägermeister, employing promotional campaigns aimed to attract individual stakeholders with varying promises: e.g. spontaneity, sophistication, energy.


And at the convergence of these trends, in concerted efforts to reinforce brand loyalty, build brand communities and develop branded personalities, participants are lavished with ‘free’ gear like Marlboro jet flame lighters, Jäger glow-in-the-dark pendents, sun hats, and bikinis distributed by heeled high Jägerettes and other cute and bubbly spokesmodels (and often in return for mailing addresses for future direct promotion campaigns). In possibly the rawest promotional strategy, partiers already drunk on the spectacle and a cocktail of intoxicants, offered their bare skin for temporary logo tattooing by the Jägerettes in


















return for a free mouthful of the sweet liqueur. Literally branded on necks, arms, and foreheads, participants in various states of delerium prostrated themselves before corporate efforts to foment what has been labeled “brand energy”: where a brand becomes associated with a meaningful and positive experience. There are possibly fewer contexts more effective than a dance festival (or indeed a sports event) to raise this kind of energy. Within a branded vibe little removed from the mall in downtown Default City, the temporary character of the corporate logo amplifies the fleeting and tragic character of consumer tribalism.

Electromegalomania

Administering his sound high above this scene, yet deeply implicated in it, was Sven Väth, once referred to in the NME as the “Holy Man and Big Chief of European Techno”. Obertshausen is the hometown of Väth the “trancehouse” pioneer and electro practitioner who performed before over 6,000 people in a distinctly Electro-fied atmosphere. Down on the floors and across the venue, its a big day out for a mostly working class population from Frankfurt in their late teens to late twenties, some of whom have arrived from parties the night before,














or are even part of groups implicated in more traditional rituals.
Among many males I detected a slick muscle-pumped confidence between short tapered hair and denim jeans, for females, a fashion doll body consciousness.














Within the soundscape provided by electro, and echoed in the demeanour of elevated male (there were no females on the lineup) poseurs spinning records and mastering cool, the entire venue seemed to be a staging ground for the performance of inflated personalities, not uncommon to any dance environment fueled by a mix of beer, speed, ecstasy and cocaine. If The Matrix was a dance floor, I’d imagine it might look like this - complete with de-escalation agents. And, all day at the side of the main stage, or indeed as an extension of it, a raised platform was jammed with friends-of-Sven, disco-sycophants, and other seekers of attention, the entire gesticulating edifice a stage for coke-fueled self-exaltation.

Down far below this spectacle, I was deep inside Handbag Country. There were no Indian or locally made utility belts to be seen here. Common to the world of psytrance, and certainly not uninfluenced by fashion stakes, utility belts evince practical sartoriality, enabling one to optimise the potential for entering sustained states of self-transcendence far from home without concern for possessions (e.g. cameras, money, credit cards, passports, mobile phones, rolling tobacco, magic potion), which are slung around the waist of the dance-traveller in states of self-abandonment at multi-day and night events. But here within the landscape of the electro-tourist big-day-out spectacular, I was remote from the multi-pocketed lifestyles and visionary mindstates of the psychedelic trance-traveler.

Not a head music, this was most distinctively a body music, one which is not only the mark of Green&Blue but hugely popular throughout Germany. In his recent Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, Peter Shapiro makes a curious point about popular dance forms (in American culture).

After wars and traumatic events, American popular music has always returned to the body as a locus of meaning and turned its back on language: after the Civil War, barn dances and square dances were all the rage, and this was also when burlesque dancing began in the United States with the vaudevillean skirt dance; the end of World War I saw the dawning of the Jazz Age, World War II saw rock and roll.

And he suggests that at the end of the 1960s and Vietnam war protest America experienced an escape into disco. Following this logic, and shifting our focus to Germany, the post-Wall (and Cold War) context appears to have conditioned the turn to the non-rhetorical grounds of electro – in a body re-unifying context of consciousness loss and narcissism. What is also interesting in this and other forms of music, is that the underground and rebellious sensibility passing from the earliest disc-cultures into all subsequent dance cultures, appears spectacularly corrupt and faux at Green&Blue. According to Shapiro, the defiance of fascism embodied in the Hitler-era Jugend Youth (or “Swing Kids”) in Germany and other clandestine disc-cultures in Paris during the Occupation, gave critical shape to disco - and, as we might read, to subsequent electronic dance cultures where an outlaw sensibility is commonly adopted, even when those who make party do so within totally licensed and commodified dancescapes. Green&Blue appears to have stronger roots in the concert tradition and in the standardisation of clubbing, entertainment and recreational experience than the “Swing Kids”.

And back up on the main stage, while Ricardo Villalobos performed at the electro-house stage, apparently retaining the “selfacknowledged narcissism” he’d acquired in the early 1980s (see his biography on the Väth's website), Väth had his way with the crowd, grinding away for 6 hours before finally yammering ejaculatory remarks into the microphone at the death (of the set and the festival) coinciding with a climactic fireworks display. Given that electro appears to be a genre characterised by an unpredictable series of explosions, pulsations and appearance, this spectacle seemed more than appropriate.

Alice Out of Wonderland

During the day Wolfgang Sterneck told me “there are too many highlights in this music”. Wolfgang is founder of the Alice/Connecta project, the drug and culture project I had arrived at the event with. At Green&Blue Alice was a breath of fresh air, so far from Wonderland. In my view Alice offered the only element directing the vibe of the festival away from the spectacular brandscape. And it was quite a contrast. As something of a safety portal offering access to parts beyond the Matrix, Alice volunteers set up an information stall at the rear of the area (with a couple of “guerrilla” stalls at other locations closer to either floor). Basic yet vital information about a range of substances circulating within dance scenes is provided on small attractive cards, many with psychedelic designs. But the cards aren’t merely instructive about drugs. One card is entitled “Party-Politics” and reads “Every party is political. There needn’t be banners hanging with a political demand everywhere”. “Who makes money out of the party? Is it a single person who thrives on inflated admission charges?” “How do people interact with each other at a party? Is it collaborative or are all on an Ego-trip?” “Do all reverentially look up to the DJ and acclaim whatever he may do?”

Pertinent questions in this environment.


Thanks to Wolfgang Sterneck for many of these photos