Origins of PLUR I also had the wonderful experience of meeting Frankie Bones not too long ago, at a warehouse rave in Brooklyn. Among other things, what makes him so special is that he is the person from which the PLUR acronym came from. At a rave comprised of around 25,000 people, a fight broke out between two people. Frankie was spinning at the time and he suddenly stopped his set and he went on the mic and said if the people there don’t start showing some peace, love, and unity, then there’s going to be problems, to put it nicely. From then on, someone added on the R for respect and thus the Raver’s Manifesto was born. Since Frankie Bones is an integral part of PLUR, I will let him speak for himself concerning how it turned into what it is today. Some important parts of his message are below. “Right from the very start of New York City’s underground rave scene, the mission was to make sure the people involved would be peaceful, have love for what we were doing and show unity if something was to go down. I reached out into the industrial wastelands of Brooklyn, New York and threw warehouse parties. I just kept sharing that experience, of the music and what happened. Once my closest friends experienced the music combined with the effects of Ecstacy, that was it. The message was clearly out, and there was no stopping us. The thing about Ecstacy is it breaks down everything society wants us to be and the minute you understand that, you look at things different. I think what it does to you is makes you find a common peace which exists in all people. It broke down things on many levels and combined with Electronic Music, it was like nothing else anyone ever experienced. We always made sure our parties were safe. To insure that we would put the parties in really bizarre spaces. Way out to no man’s land in Brooklyn. We had several little problems, but from 1990-1992 everything was based on The Peace, Love and Unity Movement and most of the kids loved that because they never experienced anything like it. 15 years go by and people tend to forget. But I never decided I was going to start this thing called P.L.U.R. and everyone was going to live happily ever after. I mean the legend of STORMrave is not some kind of fairy-tale. With any tale or legend comes those people who try and change the actual story, or say it never happened in the first place. Take, Laura for instance (from Hypereal). Her name seems to come up whenever P.L.U.R. is mentioned and she goes into length about how she spun records at STORMrave in 1993. STORMrave ended on December 12, 1992. I never met the woman personally. Thank the American Library Of Congress for the copyright of my 1990 record release called P.L.U.M. (The Peace, Love and Unity MOVEMENT). And that was the beginning. In 1993, I released a track called “Peace, Love, Unity” (The STORMrave Story). The first word written after the title credits says “Respect”. To the German band Genlog. So whoever thought of sticking the eighteenth letter to make it into P.L.U.R. must of been looking at that record. The first actual ‘rave’ in America was on June 30, 1990. Called “Atmosphere” in New York City. On September 7th, 1990, Los Angeles had its first actual ‘rave’. Movement rather then Respect. Because you cannot have Peace, Love and Unity without Respect, yet without MOVEMENT, you cannot have Peace, Love, Unity and Respect. What good is it without movement? And it started out as violence actually. But there is no such thing as a peaceful revolution. “You better start showing some Peace, Love and Unity, or I will break your $%^ing faces”. That is how it started. The fight that broke out was a couple, boy and girl having a domestic problem which happened like a tornado, right into the main rig where I was spinning. And my reality clashed with the one thing I was trying to prevent from day one. So I took it personal. Being at ground level, I jumped up onto the office desk which had the turntables and mixer on it, to give me a four foot height advantage, and yelled into the Mic to stop the fight. I told the crowd, “You all need to respect each other and if you see something happen, get involved to stop it.” There are very few uplifting experiences such as today’s raves. The peace is there, the love is felt, the unity is seen, and the respect is understood. Just as the (genuine) hippies of the 60s believed wholeheartedly in peace and love, so do the ravers of the 90s and today. Likewise, this website is called Peace and Loveism, thanks to a song with the same name produced by Sonz of a Loop Da Loop Era in the heart of the raver generation in the early 1990s. Perhaps there will be yet another resurgence and revival of these elements sometime in the future when the raver ideals in PLUR subside and are seen less frequently. However, at the current state of things, PLUR is going strong and has no signs of leaving anytime soon. Naturally, there will be those who are experiencing nostalgia about how in the 90s, raves and ravers were all about the ideals of PLUR and these individuals will berate the present-day rave scene and sometimes even act in an antithetical manner that goes against the very ideals they are talking about. As long as even one person embodies these ideals, they are alive. Have hope that society, as a whole, will shift to the consciousness levels that are experienced by those in the rave scene who truly embody Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect. Manifestos, Handshakes, and Ka
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 19:56:50 +0000