The loveparade during the 90ies

A milestone in rave culture – input from our 90ies special event:

The Loveparade has been called many things but because it went through a huge process even only looking at the 1990ies, it is hard to categorize.
Originally starting as a 150 people-party held by DJ Dr.Motte and Danielle de Picciotto 1989 in Westberlin (just four month before the fall of the Berlin Wall), then moving from Bahnhof Zoo towards Ku’damm and Olivaer Platz it became a rave of 1,5 million people following the call of the Loveparade in 1999.
At this time, there were around 40-50 trucks blasting music with 250 Djs playing. With 12 million visitors since the beginning it was the biggest dance event in the world.
When the Loveparade was moved out of Berlin after 2006, it was held in the Ruhr area in Germany but came to a sad end in 2010, when through a crowd rush and inadequate security precautions lead to the death of 21 people and probably more than 500 injured.
A process..
Traditionally, the rally ended with DJ sets which were transferred through the connected trucks; a rare chance to play in front of more than one million people which happened to Djs like DJ Tiesto, Paul Van Dyk, Carl Cox, Armin Van Buuren, DJ Rush, DJ Hell, Westbam, Drum Connection, Miss Djax, Marusha or Chris Liebing.
Many in Berlin remember people climbing trees, streetlamps, telephone booths and commercial sign booths, which lead to the nickname “greatest amateur circus on earth”.
There are voices which would describe the original idea in a way that is was the goal to carry a free awareness of life to the streets and that this already was not the case anymore when the Loveparade had to change the location from Ku’damm to the Siegessäule in Berlin in 1996.
Every year there were more big ‘mobile’ speakers put on trucks which made even more people dance to the music – at the same time the focus of music changed during the decade.
When in the very early beginning people here were talking about Acid House rather than about techno, elements of techno actually already existed inside the musical style ‘industrial’ – just without the whole ‘party-culture’ and scene. Gradually the term and techno itself became popular, comprising the new forms of electronic repetitive music:
This is when the Berlin expression ‘Tekkno’ came into being, a kind of counter reaction. Tekkno should represent a rougher and harder version or approach towards Techno music, influenced by the local industrial surrounding and punk attitude of Berlin at that time.
As this was the original (musical) approach of initializing the parade, the first edition was announced “as a political demonstration for peace and international understanding through love and music” (http://www.thefullwiki.org/Love_Parade 6th of January 2019 10pm).
“Back when it was booming, the Berlin Love Parade grew from an expression of solidarity and freedom after the fall of the Berlin Wall into a giant dance music phenomenon. The Love Parade was the elixir of the early post-Communist era.

The sheer size of the parade itself meant it was somewhat loosely organised at best, but once it got going in the mid-afternoon, it was an unstoppable force, crossing the city then melting into a seemingly infinite number of afterparties in clubs, flats and anywhere two people could get together. One of the most common expressions of the parade was the hedonistic clothing, brought on by the […] tolerant crowd of straight and gay participants. […] Half the fun was seeing how far people would push it outside of their ordinary daily lives. […] the Love Parade was always relatively law abiding, despite its size. As early as 1997, the Love Parade went international, with the first offshoots taking place in Sydney, Buenos Aires and Leeds” (https://www.berlinloveparade.com/ 6th of January 2019 10pm).

In the 90ies the club Tresor shared many moments of the Loveparade with Sven Väth. “The Tresor (…) became a symbol of the successful reunification of the youth of two formerly separated German states, who danced and celebrated here together from the club’s inception” (https://tresorberlin.com/history/ 6th of January 2019 10pm).
Since the middle of the 90ies, the so called techno music scene was already slowly distancing itself from the development of the loveparade which had tendencies to become commercial.
The Fuckparade was initiated at that time. Whereas the music of the Loveparade (mostly trance, house and techno) only in the beginning contained hard techno, hardcore and gabber the Fuckparade maintained these styles within their counter demonstration. Consumerism, attracted by the hedonist vibes of the Loveparade, was watering down its authenticity – a turning point which hardly is to define.

Also compare with following references:
https://tresorberlin.com/history/
http://www.thefullwiki.org/Love_Parade
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/dj-veteran-tanith-30-jahre-techno-wir-wollten-es-krass/23054648.html

 

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