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History of Techno

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Re: History of Techno

#151

Post by evanelias »

kristopolous wrote: post #70
_the_inflator wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They try to be as concise as possible. For example, they completely missed out Front 242, Nitzer Ebb. However they at least mention the genre, EBM. And to be honest: what is techno else than Tallas invention in a record store? Frontpage magazine? So many things left out, but who cares? You either witnessed parts of the 90th or not. ;) I never understood my parents fondness for Woodstock and how an e guitar could be t…

I think my main contention can be illustrated by trying to discover where Disco comes from. I was looking for this kind of shoestring style story for years. Then I gave up trying to construct it. The reality is it's a bunch of things smashed together like pressing all the buttons at the soda fountain at once. That's what happened. That's where techno came from as well. Sometimes the narratives are super clean, like r…

> I think my main contention can be illustrated by trying to discover where Disco comes from.

Isn't the concise answer Philadelphia? :) Partially joking, I know this is an oversimplification.

In any case, this interview with Earl Young from The Trammps, discussing the origin of four-on-the-floor, is pure gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsf51_a1ceI

Re: History of Techno

#152

Post by renaudg »

_bohm wrote: post #143
renaudg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot to quote the "best" bit a few paragraphs later : >It's important to first explain the horrible template that ruined Trance music. Somehow a musical artform that devoted itself to hypnotic rhythms and spacey soundscapes became, inside of a decade, a mass produced assembly line McProduct for middle class Europeans (pejoratively known as Trancecrackers because they're white. Terribly, tragically, sunblindingl…

For someone who seems to have been around the scene for quite a while, you come off as woefully uneducated on the history of electronic music. Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it. The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was bor…

> For someone who seems to have been around the scene for quite a while, you come off as woefully uneducated on the history of electronic music.

I suppose that's one way of saying you have a different perspective from mine.

>Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it. >The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was born out of mixing UK Hardcore with Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall/Dub music.

I've addressed most of your points in another comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26981256

A lot of the genres that Ishkur despises are every bit as European homegrown as Motown is African-American to the bones.

> Nobody "owns" electronic music, and the scene is so much better when people stop claiming that anyone does.

Sure, but that's a bit like saying Silicon Valley doesn't own the Internet. It's technically true but SV is still (or was until very recently) a mecca, ground zero for all things Internet.

There is such a thing for music genres as well, and a good indicator of that is the extent to which that genre has bubbled up into mainstream pop music charts.

Re: History of Techno

#153

Post by cmrdporcupine »

renaudg wrote: post #146
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

North American techno fan for almost 30 years here. Europe had an _audience_ for techno, yes but also an audience for some of the cheesiest garbage dance music on the planet. Don't lecture us -- Detroit and Chicago are the heart and soul of techno & house, even if the artists from there weren't always appreciated at home. Europe has been exporting its garbage trance and progressive crap since the late 80s. Soul drive…

>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…

> That happened in Europe in the early 90s, in America in the early 2010s.

Not my recollection, though? "Electronica" was a mainstream record store category and a huge market in the late 90s and early 2000s in North America long before this "EDM" label was applied later.

I think, yes, that it fell out of fashion post 9-11 and so in the 10 year gap the EDM thing happened later. So we're really talking about a generational horizon thing here, where EDM was the re-emergence of the mainstream top-40 "rave" thing 10 years later for the next generation.

But I remember 3 waves of this stuff:

very early 90s, late 80s, crap like C&C music factory, etc. was the mainstreamization of house music. "pump up the volume" KLF "What Time is Love" etc. was chart topping mainstreamization of acid house, hell it got played all the time on the jukebox in my smalltown / rural Canadian high school. I worked an indoor mall amusement park and the early 90s equivalent of today's EDM was on constant rotation. Dance megamixes, etc.

mid-late 90s, "Electronica"; Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Underworld, etc. were big. And then the tail end of that it just was everywhere.

And then later, this EDM thing.

So 10 year waves, and at no point has it really been foreign to North America. There were huge several thousand person raves all through the late 90s. It's just that in _context_ of hip-hop R&B dominance in North America and its exports, maybe it looks to Europeans as non-existent.

Re: History of Techno

#155

Post by circlefavshape »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #108
circlefavshape wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, any musician that wants to get big should know that the fastest way is to add words/lyrics Ahem. I think you'll find it's a little bit more complicated than that

It's not though. In the last 50 years, you can probably count the number of chart-toppers without lyrics on one hand. Animals, Axel F, Doop, Flat Beat, and Sandstorm (and I am not sure if these even topped charts everywhere). Sure, if you are into the niche of EDM or techno club music, the situation is different, but none of those tunes sell millions of copies.

It is though. The number of non-chart-toppers with lyrics is beyond counting. You don't make yourself a chart-topper simply by writing music with lyrics

Re: History of Techno

#156

Post by renaudg »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #153
renaudg wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> That happened in Europe in the early 90s, in America in the early 2010s. Not my recollection, though? "Electronica" was a mainstream record store category and a huge market in the late 90s and early 2000s in North America long before this "EDM" label was applied later. I think, yes, that it fell out of fashion post 9-11 and so in the 10 year gap the EDM thing happened later. So we're really talking about a generati…

I'm not questioning the experience of North American music lovers and club-goers like yourself, I'm sure you could get your hands on that stuff.

But take a look at the Wikipedia pages for the tracks and artists you mentioned, and see how high they went in the US vs European charts (to be fair, I was surprised that the Prodigy did so well in the US)

My claim is that the degree to which a genre becomes mainstream in a location is a good reflection of this place being "ground zero" for it.

Re: History of Techno

#158

Post by bogomipz »

If you want to go back a little further and understand why Germany and Kraftwerk always feature so prominently in articles written about the history of Techno then I recommend reading about WDR Studio in Köln.

WDR Electronic Music Studio was sponsored by the then West German state beginning in the early 1950s. Its charter was basically to promote a musical identity that was a contrast to the GDR's populist state music policy. Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter listened to the radio broadcasts that came out WDR. Everyone from Karlheinz Stockhausen to Conny Plank worked out of WDR Studios. The following are couple of good articles on WDR Studio:

http://120years.net/wdr-electronic-music-studio-germany-1951...

and

https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/08/stockhausen-ph...

This is also a good article on the environment in and around Dusseldorf that birthed some of the artists mentioned in the Beatport article:

https://www.factmag.com/2016/02/02/dusseldorf-krautrock/

Re: History of Techno

#159

Post by mmmmmk »

I'm a little confused by the American focus of the article. Kraftwerk's Autobahne came out in 1974, and there was a well established electronic movement coming out of krautrock, which became techno. Americans were late to the scene.

Re: History of Techno

#160

Post by _bohm »

renaudg wrote: post #152
_bohm wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone who seems to have been around the scene for quite a while, you come off as woefully uneducated on the history of electronic music. Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it. The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was bor…

> For someone who seems to have been around the scene for quite a while, you come off as woefully uneducated on the history of electronic music. I suppose that's one way of saying you have a different perspective from mine. >Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it. >The Techno that…

I'm happy to acknowledge that there are many subgenres of electronic music, including some of my favorites, which truly were grown and blossomed in Europe.

I took issue with your original comment because of the claim that electronic music is basically an ethnically white, European phenomenon. The SV->Europe comparison would be apt here if Europe were indeed _the_ mecca for all electronic music. This is obviously false unless you ignore huge swaths of the history or massively constrain your definition of what constitutes electronic music.

If you use the charts to measure what's happening at the underground/local level of any place, you're never going to get a good picture. Based on the charts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_number-one_ai...) it would appear that Europeans seldom listened to music written by Europeans in the 90s!

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