---
title: "4: On the Death of Rave"
has_articles:   [

    "whathappenedtorave.md"
  
  ]
authors: ["nikomas.md"]
---

**On the Death of Rave**

It is common to hear of people lamenting the death of rave, where any continuation of the movement they participated in or identify with seems to bear less and less familiarity with what they knew. Typically you hear "it's not the same as it was", and somehow this seems undoubtedly true, primarily because everything changes, and novelty suffers social entropy - the only future we can predict is death, collapse, and so on, so any prophecy including death seems inevitable. 

This is not what is interesting about the decline of rave, however, and in this essay we try to articulate some of the precise changes that happened to rave, ravers and rave culture, and the contexts which they exist through. 

We see the millennium as a cliff's face that we have driven off, not just in regard to rave culture, but in regards to culture full stop. Having moved into the era of hyperreality and nihilism, anything that was radical about rave culture was slowly neutralised, leaving an empty shell of the former, and leaving ravers to wonder what happened, why do things look the same but feel different.  
