Raves, What They Really Are

A Rave party is usually a party which is associated with excessive drug usage, loud music and laser shows. A rave is actually an event which calls for empathy, intimacy and spirituality. People who have a broad, a more open opinion follow the real intention of the rave. People, who associate it with the earlier mentioned characteristics, do what is done now, indulge in excessive drugs, which leads to death and destroy the real intention of the rave.

At these parties people dance to music played by DJs and occasionally live performers. The genres of electronic dance music played include House, Trance, Electro House, Dubstep, UK Hardcore, Hardstyle,

Drum and bass, Gabba, Psytrance, and Jungle with the accompaniment of laser light shows, projected images and artificial fog.

In the late 1950s, in London, saw the term "Rave" used to describe the "wild parties". In 1958 Buddy Holly recorded the hit "Rave On," citing the madness and frenzy of a feeling and the desire for it to never end,

Buddy Holly, was an American singer-songwriter and a pioneer of rock and roll.

Before a rave party was associated with electronic music, which was in the 1980s, the word "rave" was a common term used regarding the music of mid-60s garage-rock and psychedelic-rock bands. Along with being an alternative term for partying, the "rave-up" referred to a specific crescendo moment near the end of a song where the music was played faster, heavier and with intense soloing or elements of controlled feedback. It was later part of the title of an electronic music performance event held on 28 January 1967 at London's Roundhouse titled the "Million Volt Light and Sound Rave" which was organised by Paul McCartney of The Beatles.

In the mid to late 1980s a wave of psychedelic and other electronic dance music, most notably acid house and Techno, emerged and caught on in the clubs, warehouses, and free-parties around London and later Manchester. These early raves were called "Acid House Parties". They were mainstream events that attracted thousands of people, up to 25,000 instead of the 4,000 that came to earlier warehouse parties. Acid House parties were first re-branded "rave parties" in the media, during the summer of 1989, however, the ambience of the rave was not fully formed until 28 May 1991. In the UK, in 1988-89, raves were similar to football matches in that they provided a setting for working-class unification, in a time with a union movement in decline and few jobs, and many of the attendees of raves were die-hard football fans.

In the late 1980s, the word "rave" was adopted to describe the subculture that grew out of the acid house movement. Activities were related to the party atmosphere of Ibiza, a Mediterranean island in Spain, frequented by British, Italians, and German youth on vacation. The fear that a certain number of rave party attendees used "club drugs" such as MDMA, cocaine, amphetamines and, more recently, ketamine, was taken by authorities as a pretext to ban those parties altogether.

A lot of Raves have happened over the years and the most recognised of them all was Germany's Love Parade. The parade first occurred just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was started by the Berlin underground at the initiative of Matthias Roeingh AKA "Dr Motte" and his then girlfriend Danielle de Picciotto. It was conceived as a political demonstration for peace and international understanding through love and music. It was supposed to be a bigger birthday party for Roeingh, later "Dr Motte", and the motto Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen ,which, in English -- Peace, Joy, Pancakes, which, stood for disarmament (peace), music (joy) and a fair food production or distribution (pancakes). Roeingh dissociated himself from the parade in 2006 because of the commercialization of the event.

Many people from Germany and abroad traveled to Berlin to take part in the Parade -- over a million attended in the years 1997 through 2000 and 800,000 in 2001. Attendance at the 2001 festival was significantly lower because the date of the parade was changed with little advance notice. 2002 and 2003 also saw lower figures, and in 2004 and 2005 the parade was cancelled because of funding difficulties and coordinated opposition from most of Germany's green parties. The parade had inspired opposition because of the damage to the Tiergarten by participants, who were provided with insufficient toilet facilities. Opponents allegedly complicated matters for organisers by booking their own events in Berlin and so to exclude the parade from being able to register with city police. In 2004, however, a scaled-down version took place which served more as a mini-protest and was promoted with the title Love Weekend. Dozens of clubs promoted the weekend-long event all over the city, with various clubs staying open for three days straight without closing. In 2006, the parade made a comeback with the help of German exercise studio McFit.

The Love Parade 2007 was planned for 7 July 2007 in Berlin. However, the Berlin event was cancelled in February because the Senate of Berlin did not issue the necessary permits at that time. After negotiations with several German cities, on 21 July, it was announced that the parade would move to the Ruhr Area for the next five years. The first event took place in Essen on 25 August. The parade in Essen saw 1.2 million visitors in comparison to the 500,000 who attended the 2006 parade in Berlin.

In 2008, the festival took place in Dortmund on 19 July on the Bundesstrabe 1 under the motto Highway of Love. The event was planned as a "Love Weekend", with parties throughout the region. For the first time the Turkish electronic scene was represented by its own float, called "Turkish Delights". The official estimate is that 1.6 million visitors attended, making it the largest parade to date.

The 2009 event, planned for Bochum, was cancelled; a year later, the deaths of twenty-one attendees at the Duisburg venue prompted the parade's organiser Rainer Schaller to declare an end to the festival. "The Love Parade has always been a peaceful party, but it will forever be overshadowed by the accident, so out of respect for the victims the Love Parade will never take place again," Schaller said. The parade was one of the oldest and largest festivals of electronic music, together with Zurich's Streetparade, Mayday and Nature One. The most recent Love parade happened back in 2010 in Duisburg with approximately 8,00,000 patrons, with its motto "ART OF LOVE". The most crowded Love Parade was in 2008 in Dortmund with double the amount of patrons, a WHOPPING 10.6 LAKH ATTENDEES!!