>Europe had an _audience_ for techno, yes but also an audience for some of the cheesiest garbage dance music on the planet.
That's actually a sign that a genre has taken hold and reached maturity in a location, with subgenres catering for every layer of society.
As a genre ambassador, you know you've won when your sound (even a watered down version of it) has become the sound of pop music chart-toppers. That happened in Europe in the early 90s, in America in the early 2010s.
> Don't lecture us, Detroit and Chicago are the heart and soul of techno, even if the artists from there weren't always appreciated at home.
I don't know, that's a bit like saying that Helsinki is the heart and soul of Linux, and Uppsala that of MySQL, which is technically true but ... this isn't really where it came of age and blossomed.
> Europe has been exporting its garbage trance and progressive crap since the 90s. Soul driven techno from African-American artists had a way of being exported over to Europe, absorbed by the locals, and exported back as soulless amphetamine driven crap.
That's controversial. Techno is often described as the child of African-American soul music on one side, and white European experimental electronic music on the other.
It's trendy to stress the former and downplay the latter, and that's certainly fair enough for house music.
But when it comes to trance, eurodance, etc, I think that owes almost nothing to America or African-American music, and everything to Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre.