Let's talk about Derrick May

so sad that the US disavowed hip hop. will we never understand this strange and exotic music the way the UK does?

lool some steaming hot-takes

is this Leeroy Thornhill

I'm guessing he means UK hiphop, but it's a puzzler.

literally what the fuck are you talking about with this bullshit?
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 14:17

It's not bullshit. There's no hip hop in Derrick May's vision of detroit techno. May was a complete europhile (probably the most europhilic out of that bunch.) So when people like Michael Taylor called hardcore awful, it makes sense why. I mean it was $25 to get into the music institute, hardly cheap in peak reagan
era was it? May has marketted himself well, which is why people are shocked by him being an absolute piece of nasty work, because detroit techno is not a righteous music at all, not until UR and Mills come about. And Rob Hood was a big Public Enemy fan and Mills started out in hip hop. It's why they had a greater taste for hardcore and minimalist sounds.

Not really clear though how Derrick May is representative of US attitudes toward hip hop.

(also debatable that there's no hip hop influence in his music or DJing)

(also weird for views on techno and hip hop to stop somewhere in the early 90s)

also weird because Mills was a popular DJ in Detroit before May even started

Not really clear though how Derrick May is representative of US attitudes toward hip hop.

He isn't. That would disqualify a lot of aux 88, Drexciya, detroit electro and ghettotech orientated djs like DJ Assault (who incidentally has played chipmunk hardcore and jungle.)

But the US (and tbf UK Mayday purists) almost see dance music as being opposite to hip hop. In the UK hip hop merged into dance music. Quite a bit of hardcore actually has a britcore chassy which at the time was called hardcore cos it was faster than US HH.

And behave yourselves: there is no such thing as UK HH, it's a post-93 invension, angsty whiteboy rubbish.

yes, Mills was a hip hop orientated radio DJ. That's my point!

so in other words, the UK didn't have much of a hip hop scene, so they ended up embracing dance music that drew influence from and embodied the spirit of hip hop, while in the US, which has a massive hip hop scene, people tended to just enjoy hip hop. I think this mystery has been solved.

so in other words, the UK didn't have much of a hip hop scene, so they ended up embracing dance music that drew influence from and embodied the spirit of hip hop, while in the US, which has a massive hip hop scene, people tended to just enjoy hip hop. I think this mystery has been solved.

Yes, hip hop and acid house were part of the same imported street beats continuum. It's why we were all over Todd Terry sampladelic ny hip house, even if that stuff was unthinkably mechanical for the proper disco/paradise garage-descended bods.

But, for instance, James Stinson and Gerald Donald were far more inventive than May ever was, but they don't fit into the same kind of white mythologising, because their music is not as susceptible to mythmaking. Whilst I cringe at this guys personal journey he has a point about a lot of white detroit purists:

The sense was like ‘they’ had tried to tell you that techno was something white, something cheesy, something commercial. Something soulless. But here, so the counter-narrative would have it, was ‘high tech soul’, made by real, oppressed black people (dreaming of space from a post-industrial ghetto). It was, so the riddle ran, a music so unquestionably authentic that to present an opinion to the contrary would invoke an accusation of ignorance, or even heresy, followed by a lecture on the Belleville Three. For white kids from the Melbourne suburbs, this allowed them to be righteously proud of aligning themselves with a noble tradition, which, in turn, allowed them to make peace with the fact that they all grew up listening to…. Technotronic, Snap, and M People, of course. Is it any different to the quiet joy of the Vanilla Ice fan who discovers Ice T and Ice Cube? He who ended up in Wu Wear often began with Twelve Inches of Snow. Never, ever underestimate the power of guilty pleasures in shaping musical taste.

So many old bods love Pink Floyd, one of the most obnoxiously English posh boy public school bands of all time. And actually, a lot of italo disco is the cheesy eurodance of its day. Noone in London likes it, because the black electroboogie/rnb from America (which maydays high school prep parties swerved to an extent for europhilia) was just so much more ahead of plustwo - melody or crazy gang babys song. I like both of those records, but I don't call them 'progressive' they are cheesy as all hell!

oops here's the article I pulled that quote from. http://mnmlssg.blogspot.com/2008/06/detroit-myth-hating-myth-creating-part_19.html

But the US (and tbf UK Mayday purists) almost see dance music as being opposite to hip hop. In the UK hip hop merged into dance music.

I don't think this is remotely true at all! It ignores the existence of the ghetto house/juke/footwork continuum, ghettotech, electro in its various forms, Baltimore/Jersey/Philly club, Miami bass, NYC house going back as far as Todd Terry, LA beat scene/wonky stuff, ballroom/voguing beats, Detroit house, hip house, like 75% of Afro-American dance music ever made. Maybe true of whitewashed festy stuff and techno europhiles and some of the more purist house strains (the latter of which absolutely embraces other pre-electronic Black American musical forms), but so much US dance music has been intimately connected to hip-hop all along, just not necessarily the stuff that's been embraced the most by the yt dance establishment. And Moodles' point applies as well. If I go see any of my friends DJ, at least half the tracks they drop are going to have explicit hip-hop influences, if not just straight up dropping hip-hop tracks into their dance sets.

James Stinson and Gerald Donald were far more inventive than May ever was, but they don't fit into the same kind of white mythologising

what?!?!?!

because their music is not as susceptible to mythmaking

WHAT?!?!?!

Does Derrick May extensively play ghetto house or juke? Because I never heard him do so and ive listened to quite a lot of his sets. i saw DJ Rashad in London at around the same time I saw May, and I know which one I would go see again, if he were still alive.

Pink Floyd rules

I feel like this goes back to the argument we had on twitter a while back when you described east coast club as posh, middle class, student-y dance music, which is not how I as a Black American experience that music at all.

xp: not afaik, but it looked like you were painting US dance music in general with that brush, not just Derrick May

But the US [...] almost see dance music as being opposite to hip hop.

would absolutely see rashad over may

same, although seeing Carl Craig end a ight by dropping "Strings of Life" and playing air piano was an absolute moment of bliss

night*

ohhhh fuck, I completely missed the assault accusation stuff :(

Fair point. By dance music I meant more the house/techno mainstream. I have to remember that here house+techno in its more mainstream ittiration shies away from our more (hate the term) but 'urban' dance music forms.

I feel like this goes back to the argument we had on twitter a while back when you described east coast club as posh, middle class, student-y dance music, which is not how I as a Black American experience that music at all.
xp: not afaik, but it looked like you were painting US dance music in general with that brush, not just Derrick May
― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 22:23 (one minute ago)

tbf I wasn't referring so much to the actual jersey club stuff there but more this kind of Lotic/M.E.S.H/Mhysa (SP?) pan deconstructivism. I'd be the first to admit I know very little about jersey club, but its not my thing. Then again, this nicely segues into the point you made about experience. To me, Club was only presented through this university night slugs prism, by kids who would pretend to be so bad and heavy when they were anything but. And that is the charm of techno. This misinterpretation of italo disco, basically a music that predominantly has an afterlife outside of Italy and is not remembered as fondly over there.

A UK crowd at a Slimzee sidewinder set is totally different in every way to a UK crowd going to see Moodymann, Atkins or May. They just are, not even racially.

But then, conversely, people in UK crowd at a banging night seeing Surgeon and Jeff Mills are more likely to be into Wiley or Giggs. And most of them will probably be huge Remarc fans. That's how I got into techno, through jungle. so the fast banging stuff is not an aberration for me.

ftr I don't think all dance music has to be influenced by hip hop and not all electronic music I enjoy is so. But I can't see why May would else rail against breakbeat hardcore when it was no more cheesy than the Italo gash of his highschool days. In fact there is not much overtly evil darkside Italo is there? Whereas even in '91 there was quite a bit of dark breakbeat hardcore, Eon/Jay Saul Kane immediately come to mind.

tbf I wasn't referring so much to the actual jersey club stuff there but more this kind of Lotic/M.E.S.H/Mhysa (SP?) pan deconstructivism.

Yeah that's really an entirely different lane, which yes is more middle-class and studenty and intellectualized (and tbh really a bit past its peak), whereas actual club is just populist straight-up party music. The Baltimore stuff in particular is actually pretty deeply influenced by your beloved hardcore in its use of breakbeats to break away from a 4x4 house structure, which carries through to the Jersey and Philly stuff even if they drop the breakbeats a lot of the time. The deconstructed stuff is pretty explicitly a more middle class reinterpretation of more vernacular dance forms (club among others) though.

Try these on for size:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP0UV5My4vA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsxaYtu-Klk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj70BvCC7JE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZiY8xb_lGk

Fair point. By dance music I meant more the house/techno mainstream. I have to remember that here house+techno in its more mainstream ittiration shies away from our more (hate the term) but 'urban' dance music forms.

Sure, and that rings true here as well, but in our case "mainstream" mostly just means divorced from its cultural, if not necessarily musical, roots. I don't really care that much what white american dance music people who don't fuck with most of the shit I listed earlier are into or not.

I guess my ultimate point is that May's europhilia and disinterest in if not outright rejection of hip-hop is ultimately much more exceptional among Black American dance music producers/DJs than not.

i actually was at a gig that UNIIQU3 played at, i think it was a butterz night with Elijah and Skilliam, DJ Q etc. But I arrived at the end of her set cos my friends were being weird. Will give em a listen. Do you know this queen beat byrell the great? They did this quite cool vogue house mix, but it was very clattering, almost like 90s (hate the term) but 'tribal' rimshot vibes. This must have been 2014 or so, will need to check my hd.

Yeah Reynolds describes the archetypical house/techno head in the UK, upper working to lower middle class and quite discerning as a form of separation. As someone who is Asian i tend to see positives in both the ruffneck junglist warriors and the cool, composed shirts and shoes garage/rare groove types. If I was a white kid though I'd probably be more punk about this. Thank heavens thats not the case.

But I can't see why May would else rail against breakbeat hardcore when it was no more cheesy than the Italo gash of his highschool days.

Yeah Byrell definitely lives up to his name. I don't know him personally (although I do know some of the other Qween Beat folks) and never seen him play in person. And yeah vogue beats are pretty heavily influenced by 90s "tribal" house. A lot of those tracks were what people vogued to at the time before it split off into its own thing in the 2000s. Stuff like "Wtich Doktor" and "Icy Lake".

I feel like in the US, outside of the places where they have deep roots, "proper" house/techno have a lot of the time been a more classed, often older, and definitely in the latter case more white. In recent years a lot of younger people have been getting into techno though, including a project of reclaiming its Black origins, and interestingly to me a lot of the EDM festy kids of 10 years ago seem to have aged out of that style into house. I have this distinct memory a few years back of going to a long running house night that had been mostly populated by oldheads and seeing this long line of young EDM kids waiting to get in, which seemed like a notable turning point.

I guess my ultimate point is that May's europhilia and disinterest in if not outright rejection of hip-hop is ultimately much more exceptional among Black American dance music producers/DJs than not.

Sure, I agree. I don't buy the May hype though. I think he's a good salesman, and I can understand what people see in his ethereal strings, but give me Juan and Saunderson any day. And, I'm saying the quiet bit out loud now, but I think The Black Dog did that elegiac vibe better. That's not to discount his historical impact but I mean I find the whole idea that people say like: 'detroit techno has the soul which no other city can capture' (usually said by white guys who want to look more righteous than thou.) So three weirdo white guys from Sheffield via London didn't make one of the greatest soulful techno albums in 1993? and it was just an imitation of detroit? ok then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46Ai2OjJNXQ

But either way this binary is just so false. I went to see DJ Stingray multiple times (fantastic, some of the best nights of my life) and whilst there is a soulfulness in his alien electro it's much less directly tied to that 70s disco lineage. People forget just how brutal some of the detroit jocks can get.

This timeline makes no sense. Italo disco’s zenith was 85-86, barely a year before May, aged 24, produced Strings Of Life.

You're missing my point. Italo is not credible music. It's the cookiecutter eurotrance of its day. It's actually not very liked in Italy amongst serious music types. Nothing wrong with that, but how is it ok for May and Craig to love that shit but then for May to rail against UK hardcore for perverting the detroit vision? It's hardly as if he came out of his mums womb with a pristine musical taste.

compare and contrast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Qb1tsoYZg

with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWytoa9ut8o

Also re: all this talk of europhilia vs hip-hop, it’s probably notable that major German techno pioneer WestBam (short for Westphalia Bambaata) produced a ton of hip-hop and most notably, scored a worldwide hit with his remix for 2 Live Crew.

I’ve actually been on a bit of a Westbam revisit the past week to see if his work still holds up 35 years later and if there’s more to him as a producer than just rose-tinted nostalgia for his (awesome) 90s rave hits - so far I have to say it does and there is.

I mean, Derrick May's always been a bit up his own ass, not sure what else to say.

Worth noting that a lot of the OG Chicago house types were pretty heavily influenced by italo too although they didn't necessarily have the same obsession with its trappings and within a few years they'd shed a lot of that influence.

Re: Italo not teken seriously in Italy, did anyone read The History Of Italo Disco by Francesco Cataldo Verrina? Be warned that the English translation is atrociously bad (think Google Translate, ten years ago), but that kind of feels on-brand for a book on Italo.

Anyway, through the mangled prose and some blatant attempts at mythmaking, it does manage to shine quite a bit of light on the reasons why the Italian critics never took Italo seriously (rampant rockism of the 70s protest generation, mainly, coupled with kneejerk xenophilia, ie “it’s local so there’s no way we can take this seriously”).

Also it’s striking that despite the appearance of cheap cheesiness, the producers themselves did take the music very seriously, one thing that becomes quite clear through the dozens if interviews in that book is that this was not at all like the rave days with bedroom producers on Amigas, these Italo dudes were perfectionists that would slave for days to get the right electro tom sound out of some pretty expensive studio gear.

Anyway, recommended.

abesimpsonwalkinginandout.gif

I mean, Derrick May's always been a bit up his own ass, not sure what else to say.

Sure. My detroit heroes in the less Millsian vein are Anthony Shakir and Claude Young. Who continued putting out records, unlike May who stopped around 1990. I have a semi-conspiracy theory that a lot of Mays seminal tracks have heavy input from Marty Bonds, but no music journalist will know who that is. Hint: he's the guy who ltj bukem sampled in Atlantis lads. Original real by real track is immense:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv0Ze8vtf2Y

I mean the reinforced boys also spent days with amigas. They are powerful tools, I don't understand why they have this reputation of only being about simple production. Some of the chops and changes in Bizzy B tracks are quite crazy, and to think he did it all by hand.

Worth noting that a lot of the OG Chicago house types were pretty heavily influenced by italo too although they didn't necessarily have the same obsession with its trappings and within a few years they'd shed a lot of that influence.

Yes, this is why (to me) chicago house was more techno than first wave techno. The original techno almost.

“Your love” feels pretty italo to me as an example. Always kind of funny it’s the signaturate Frankie tune cuz it’s a slight outlier

used to hear this a lot at oldskool hardcore nights as the warm up, the cowbell loop bongo percussion used to spin me out. Proper mechanical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WywgPyAN4M

heard Paul Damage play this Saunderson joint amongst a load of woody mcbride/midwest acid, pitched up. Big Kev knew the score. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l96W1LJTmg

Yes, this is why (to me) chicago house was more techno than first wave techno. The original techno almost.

iirc the early (post-Cybotron) Detroit stuff was just considered house until Atkins dubbed it otherwise as the scenes were starting to move in different directions.

“Your love” feels pretty italo to me as an example.

Definitely. A lot of 84-86 era stuff in general.

It blew my mind when I realized Raze is Vaughan Mason of "Bounce Rock Skate Roll" fame

I mean I love italo disco to death and I dig a good critical rehabilitation story as much as the next guy, but I don’t really buy the supposed huge italo influence on the detroit producers, even though it makes a great story, and some great retrospective DJ mixes. Much more a case of parallel development than sequential. EBM and electro/hip-hop, different story. But hey, what do I know, I never walked at night through Detroit in 1986.

Also, as I’m getting older, I get more and more annoyed with some of the grand mythmaking bullshit of my generation. This bizarrely common idea that detroit techno was somehow amazingly innovative and unique amidst everything that came before and after, and got usurped by terrible cookiecutter hardcore/rave (that same chestnut gets wheeled out for each subsequent style btw, from trance, uk garage, hardstyle, italo dance, hard house psytrance, dubstep you name it). But you go back and listen to a random selection of late 80s techno 12”s (or livesets) and you notice the same hihat patterns, sound banks and structures in just about every fucking song, such mind numbing uniformity, I’m more and more realising that each scene clearly has its own cookiecutter, only the chefs are so caught up in the moment that they delude themselves into thinking the cutter doesn’t exist in their kitchen. And I used to believe all that shit too when I was young.

Honestly I'm kind of a latecomer to techno period because when I was coming up that scene here was dominated by egghead Moby clones, so I never bought much into that specific mythos or veneration.

to be fair detroit techno guys are hardly the only mythmakers out there, it’s so ubiquitous you can practically make a bingo card for it, when you watch any music documentary.

Honestly I'm kind of a latecomer to techno period because when I was coming up that scene here was dominated by egghead Moby clones, so I never bought much into that specific mythos or veneration.
― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Wednesday, 30 June 2021 01:16 (four minutes ago)

I mean I used to say there are techno strains of dubstep when it came on the pirates and people used to be like this guys chatting nonsense, but I think this is why I've always had a problem with the club as the prime experiential space. For me this music really unlocked its potential at peoples yard, huge spliff being passed around, a good sub

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgdw3_rVrRY

Not to mention the inherent 'we are the clique' aspect of club doors. At first I thought it was amazing to be part of this select few and quickly I realised I don't actually have much in common with these people.

That Italo book I mentioned does that too btw - the author’s main message is that Italo Disco was unique and rich and varied, full of amazing artists, skilled producers, inspired by a rich musical history, wrote only the most marvelous, uniquely Italian melodies - clearly the best thing ever. While of course it’s crystal clear that the Italo house that displaced it in one fell swoop in 1988 was cheap, badly produced cookie cutter garbage by talentless hacks, just out for a buck.

And yet despite all that, it’s an immensely entertaining (and informative) read.

I prefer the cheesy piano stuff personally