Frankie Bones Is Breaking Bones With the Return of ‘Bonesbreaks’

Whether you know it or not, you owe the best nights of your life to Frankie Bones. When he was 23, Bones traveled to England for the first time to play his first “rave” party. Back then, that word meant almost nothing here in the States. What he saw—in the faces of the 25,000 dancers that crowded into an airplane hangar to hear him play—was a movement. When Bones returned to New York, a city then broken amid racial disparity and the crack epidemic, he knew what he had witnessed in the UK would become the catalyst for change at home.

His legendary Storm Raves were the birthplace of the North American rave movement. They provided a safe space for the city’s youth to escape the troubles of their wrecked surroundings, and they provided the inspiration for what would become his enduring legacy: the creation of PLUR.

Bones is a living, breathing historical landmark and musical archivist, and he continues to be a pivotal force within the electronic community to this day. He’s left many legacies since he first brought rave culture to America, including his celebrated Bonesbreaks series, a groundbreaking set of compilations launched in 1988 and debuted at a time when you had to rely on mixtapes to get your techno fix outside the party. After witnessing how far rave culture has come, Bones is re-educating today’s dancefloors and bringing the series back to life with its first installment in 16 years.

Bonesbreaks Volume 17, available now on Bones’ recently launched Bangin Music​ imprint, is a return to the early days of rave, full of hypnotic rhythms and analog bliss. And with so many new electronic music fans joining the movement, its release serves as a proper education in the roots of American dance music.

We chatted with Frankie Bones about the evolution of PLUR in the past 30 years and the next steps for the worldwide rave movement.

How well do you think the principles of PLUR have held up over the years?
In the very beginning of the scene in the United States, I was looking to create a movement—the Rave Scene, not the club scene, which already existed in the larger cities in America. The club scene was what we were trying to escape, and we pushed the movement as the Peace Love Unity Movement from 1990–93.

This began with the subway car we painted in New York, but that was only realized after experiencing the underground scene of Los Angeles east of Downtown in 1990. That lit the torch, so to speak. We had outlaw parties in New York, but the movement created all-nighters, parties that went past sunrise. We had to install peace, love and unity into every single person who came into our unit.

Since we only knew DJ culture through clubs and hip-hop, we soon realized that when you jack into a lamppost for electricity and the sun comes up, the sensor switches off the light and the power goes off. Hip-hop parties never went into daylight, I suppose. What became of PLUR was for the kids: the candy, the beads, etc. We started it more for safety than anything else, but it was like a family value. The evolution may have grown past its original intention, yet as a family, it still and will always mean looking out for the next person with care. If you see something wrong, say something—loud.

A lot of the same social turmoil that brought the rave scene about in the late ‘80s seems to be repeating itself these days. Do you think that need for escapism has anything to do with the current explosion of electronic music?
As one of the only American DJs to witness and play the Summer of Love in the UK in 1989, I saw something that didn’t seem logical in the United States. But the youth culture in the UK took American underground music—house and techno—and created this huge movement around that. I knew we were onto something [and were] creating a movement in New York City, but I never thought about EDM. If anything, it was UDM: underground dance music. Nothing wrong with EDM, but it also is EveryDay Music— music coming out of a speaker in a gas station as you pump gas; I heard a Skrillex track like this. It’s nice when teenagers get into their 20s, because as they get into this culture [for more than five years], they want the underground—because EDM is what everyone does. To find a signature, you have to dig deeper; that is what it is all about, to me.