"Is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?"

"The liner note offers a telegraphic recall of those halcyon days of pirate radio and convoys of cars heading out on the motorway looking for the huge parties in the countryside. “The summer of ’89: Centreforce FM, Santa Pod, Sunrise 5000, ‘Ecstasy Airport’, ride the white horse, the strings of life, dancing at motorway service stations, falling asleep at the wheel on the way home.”   Jaunty and wistful at the same time, the songs catches Cocker swept up in the collective celebration yet remaining deep-down a doubtful bystander. “Is this the way they say the future's meant to feel? Or just twenty-thousand people standing in a field?” As the MDMA wears off and dawn rises, a disconsolate Cocker finds the sensations of unity to have been ephemeral: not one of the grinning strangers he’d bonded with earlier in the night will give him a lift back to the city. In the CD single booklet, the text goes frantic with doubt: “There’s so many people – it’s got to mean something, it needs to mean something, surely it must mean something. It didn’t mean nothing”. The final four words are undecidable in their perfectly poised ambiguity: a curtly cynical dismissal of the whole rave dream-lie?  Or an admission that he can’t shake the lingering utopian feeling that divisions of all kinds really were dissolved for one magic night? It’s an older-sister song to The Streets’s “Weak Become Heroes”, Mike Skinner’s 2002 memorial to rave’s fugitive promise, a mirage of cross-class unity that vaporized on contact with the harshness of reality."

from the director's cut of my essay in I'm With Pulp, Are You?