Detroit Techno: Race, Agency, and Electronic Music in Post-Industrial Detroit

I always wondered if there was something to the fact that many parties were thrown in similarly decrepid shelled-out industrial zones. And did the neccessity of locale create/transform the asthetic for producers and djs like it did for myself?

As for the race issue, well I dunno. Let me digest it a bit. Great read by the way.

The Co-opting of Race, Agency, and Electronic Music by the Ford Motor Company

There are of course other reasons that Detroit's urban space is in a bad way, but the death of industry is chief among them. Recently Detroit has been luring computer companies, bank HQs, and casinos to downtown, not to mention Comerica Park and Jennifer Granholm's "Cool Cities" initiative (seriously), which may or may not have something to do with the White Stripes and the Von Bondies and the DEMF.

BBC IXtra present Deviation Detroit Special including Derrick May, Recloose and Kenny Larkin

<em>Check below to hear Detroit legends talk about the impact the Motor City has had on black music. Don't forget to tell us what you think about Detroit.</em>

As BBC Music note:
<em>1Xtra's Benji B took a trip to Detroit - listen again to the programme, where legends talk about the impact the Motor City has had on black music. Then add your point of view on the messageboard.</em>

A recent study showed that the majority of jobs in Detroit are now white collar.

Do you have links to any of the Cabaret Voltaire/Sheffield articles?
I'd be interested to read those.

A central point of this paper, arrived at most especially after conversations with Shake, was that urban decline did not beget depressing music, but music that was emotionally ripe. Detroit techno to my ears isn't mechanical in the sense that it submits to the rule of the robot. It incorporates "industrial" sounds, certainly, but in a way that gives voice to human beings and their real-life, often political desires and circumstances. The same could be argued for some Sheffield bands, too, and I would make that argument before I would lay out the reasons why the city was responsible for the music. Thus was the question of agency raised.

btw, I'm also very curious to hear your reactions.

Yes, that's precisely the problem with Brewster, and why I think he typifies the journalistic reaction to techno - the influence of Kraftwerk blinds these writers to the music's black roots.

There's a quote somewhere in there where Atkins derides house for being "gay," but of course Derrick May never would have made the same statement because he remembers that his career was made standing on the shoulders of house musicians.

And, yeah, Mr. Fingers and Lil Louis and nowadays Kenny Dixon Jr. make it frequently impossible to distinguish between house and techno, on this continent anyway.

In Chicago and New York, disco and house, drugs are usually part of the narrative, but when does it come up with techno? It doesn't seem to until, who, maybe Hawtin?

Shake's take on it is something to the effect that people in Detroit had seen too much devastation to think of drugs as a way to party . . . I take that for the anecdote that it is, but he may have a point.

I'm curious to read this article.

One of my profs at Wayne State wrote a book on Contructivism that explores techno, Ford and Detroit:

http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/books.html

Good stuff as well.

Who is Matthew Ingram?

I was trying to search for the specific articles but my browser crashed. In the specials he has some great scans of classic detroit stuff and some later detroit-derived stuff, like the first Morgan Geist ep.

In conclusion, you can't get much more African-American or "street" than me.

so don't be misled.

the notion of causality in this thesis is reductive and a little silly.

you waited 5 years to tell him that?

yes

hmm, can someone re-post the thesis? i'd be interested in reading this.

synchronicity principle

in

something-something

Wow! Cool to see this revisited five years later.

For those interested in reading the thesis, it's <a href="http://weirdvibrations.com/Thesis/";>here</a>. Apologies for it being in separate docs.

In terms of the notion of causality, I have to confess it's been a while since I read the piece at all, but to the best of my recollection I think I was arguing against assumptions of easy or direct causality. Still, Amateurist, I'd definitely be interested to hear more about what you mean.

Just copy/paste the URL, no need for code!

http://weirdvibrations.com/Thesis/

Things sure have changed! (Thank you.) I can't edit that, can I?

Can anyone recommend any other published scholarly writing on this sort of thing.

I'll try my best to at least skim through what I can of this (out of curiosity, what department/program did you do this thesis for?).

Scholarly writing on techno, do you mean?

It was for my undergraduate history thesis at the University of Michigan.

Yes.

Ben, nice work. I gave it a cursory glance & will get back to it later. As a fellow UM alum (2001), I am curious: What department did you write this for?

Pillbox: I was in the department of history.

EDB: There was very little good scholarly writing dealing specifically with techno at the time that I was writing my thesis. Dan Sicko's book is excellent, but it's not in an academic vein. Likewise Simon Reynolds' work, and Kodwo Eshun's as well. I worked with a lot of material on black music and the black diaspora in general, including Paul Gilroy's "The Black Atlantic." But his work didn't mention techno at all, so it was a matter of making second-order connections.

I would imagine that things have changed a lot since then, though. Denise Dalphond at Indiana works on this stuff. She has a blog. http://denisedjsdetroit.blogspot.com/