Energy Flash II: The Updated Book About Rave Culture And Dance Music

Wow! I have such epic news coming out of the electronic music channels today: Simon Reynolds, author of the book on rave culture titled "Generation Ecstasy" in America and "Energy Flash" in the UK, is releasing an updated edition! For the 20th Anniversary edition, he's added 40,000 new words, spanning 6 new chapters that cover the emergence of 2 step/garage and its spawn dubstep and grime, plus electro, breakcore and micro-house! According to a blog that is documenting the arrival of the new book:

20 years since acid house and Ecstasy revolutionized pop culture, here’s the expanded and updated version of Simon Reynolds’ landmark history of rave. Containing substantial new material covering dance music developments in the ten years since its original publication, Energy Flash is now even more definitive. Blending vivid reporting, probing research and passionate opinion in the style of his acclaimed postpunk history Rip It Up and Start Again, Reynolds guides the reader on a thrilling journey from the druggy daze of Ibiza and Madchester via London’s gritty pirate radio culture of jungle and garage to the elegantly wasted clubland of contemporary Berlin. From trance to 2step, microhouse to grime, electro to dubstep, Reynolds tracks the scenes and sounds that have kept electronic music at the vanguard of pop culture. Now more essential and authoritative than ever, Energy Flash is the classic chronicle of rave’s quest for the perfect beat and the ultimate rush.

Wikipedia concisely sums up the first edition of "Energy Flash":

Energy Flash is a comprehensive history of what became rave music, starting with Detroit techno and Chicago house and tracing the evolution of the music back and forth across the Atlantic, all the way up to the late 1990s. Reynolds combines analysis of the music, social background and history, and interviews with big names of the day. One of the most notable aspects of the book is Reynolds' analysis of the role of drugs, particularly ecstasy, in rave culture.

The book will be available in late February 2008. Reynolds just released "Bring The Noise" last year, which is "a collection of his writing themed around the relationship between white bohemian rock and black street music." (Wiki) That book is also a must-read for fans of this music with a journalist or literary slant.I'm pretty excited to see what he's added. The first edition had some pretty good stories about fairly underground music movements. Not sure if this guy is a "head" in the culture or just an anthropological observer, but he does seem to have a pretty good view from the inside. Not too many books cover these music genres, so I'm sure many will be happy to devour it, just to have something about the music they love.The new cover looks horribly inappropriate though, which is weird because the cover of the first edition was so decent. This one looks hippie-oriented, but grime and breakcore are pretty anti-hippie. Alas, the author rarely has any control over the graphic design.