One Foot in the Rave: Aging Ravers’ Transitions to Adulthood and Their Participation in Rave Culture

Abstract

Challenging adolescence limited life-course theory, this article presents the results of an online survey in 2016 that aimed to establish if, how and to what extent ageing ravers continue to participate in rave culture. The survey collected data from members of the original rave generation. We explored the ravers’ transitions to adulthood, and how these influenced their participation in club culture. We found that our ravers continued to participate in rave culture; their persistence is related to the frequency of their engagement at a younger age. Adopting interdisciplinarity, we apply theories from both life course research and youth culture studies and argue that the persistence of leisure practices, such as raving, can be understood in the same way as persistence of drug use: frequent behavior in adolescence determines persistence in older adulthood. Consequently, we are able to recognize patterns of leisure beyond adolescence, thus making leisure choices more predictable.

Keywords:

• Lifestyle
• aging
• enduring involvement
• life course

Acknowledgements

We thank our two anonymous reviewers and Professor Judith Aldrigde for their helpful comments.

Notes

1 This idea chimes with discussions about the persistence of drug taking and its relationship to pleasure (see, for example, Williams, 2013).

2 The survey was designed by the first author who has been collecting data about lapsed clubbers since 2015. The second author became involved in the study at the data analysis stage.

3 Memories, Communities & Belonging: The Lapsed Clubber Heritage Map of Greater Manchester 1985–1995 was a Heritage Lottery funded project (OH-16-02562), running from 2015 to 2018. At the time of the survey, networks had already been created, which allowed easy access to the community of ravers from Greater Manchester.

4 Unfortunately, data about ethnicity was not collected.

5 This is to be expected, especially because the rave scene was at its peak from the early 1990s to 1995.