Holly Dicker Dance Or Die: A History of Hardcore

What is hardcore? It means many things to many people, and they’re all correct. It’s best described as a feeling, an attitude, and way of life. Dance or Die is the first critical and expansive study of hardcore as a music, a subculture and an enduring “phuture” rave movement, full of colourful anecdotes and first person accounts from artists, fans and the core of hardcore.

Hardcore is revolutionary, schismatic, and a global phenomenon that refuses to die, because hardcore will never die. Its symbols have been tattooed onto millions of bodies, as its sounds and relics have been passed down and upcycled through the decades.

This book tracks the outsider youth who banded together over the last 30 years to party in protest, on ecstasy, in rage and escape, as a nighttime community more family than family, who need this hard, loud, fast/slow, aggressive, noisy, occasionally silly, kick drum – or breakbeat – style of radical and divisive dance music, to connect with people, to survive the world, and to get through the week.

Hardcore: Either you’re in, or you’re out. And if you’re in, you’re in all the way, diehard and dancing to the death. Dance or Die!

“From Rotterdam gabber to Scottish ‘tartan techno’, from the industrial strength beats of Brooklyn to the hedonistic mayhem of UK hardcore, ‘Dance or Die’ explores some of the lesser-documented areas of rave culture with enthusiasm and journalistic vigour, affording them the historical significance they deserve.” Matthew Collin (author of Dream Machines, Rave On and Altered State)

“Holly Dicker‘s definitive chronicle charts the amazing, ridiculous rise of the most outrageous club music in history with a journalist’s eye and a raver’s mania.” Michaelangelo Matos (author of The Underground is Massive)