How did techno become the catchall for dance/electronic music?

House, in the ears of most people, was mostly about digital samples. Sure, I am aware that some of the first Chicago pioneers used some analog synth, but the first crossover house hits by the likes of M/A/R/R/S, S-Express and Bomb The Bass all had a sound dominated by "hard" digital sounds. Thus, the term "techno house" was invented as soon as somebody actually used analog synths as an important part of the sound. And as the analog synths became more and more dominant, "techno" became the term.

"she" = the female character. sorry, i'm a little spacy today.

This a gross oversimplification, though, so if you really want to know more, pick up a copy of the book "Last Night A DJ Saved My Life", which explains the history of house music better than I ever could.

And I do remember the terms "techno-pop" and "techno-house" being around in the late-80's and early 90's. The former dates back at least to Kraftwerk (the title of their 1983 album that never was). I'm not sure how the latter term came about.

whoah! i thought i was hallucinating this...i seemed to remember the vinyl was titled the former, but my cd copy is called the letter. whats the story?

xp

hee hee. "That techno-rock you guys listen to is gutless!!"

GUTLESS!

this line and the Plimsouls make that movie classic.

yet they probably wouldn't refer to the last Kylie minogue single as "techno"

I mean, some house was faceless and banging, but techno/rave was *really* faceless and banging - and the most faceless/banging house was acid house which may as well be techno anyway. While house can still be related back to disco, techno marks out much more clearly the *break* with previous music; "Get Ready For This" more threatening than "Gonna Make You Sweat". Even now when there are news specials on raves/clubs/drugs etc. the music is always techno/trance/hard house rather than house, partly because that's the music raves play but also I reckon because it sounds so much more alien to people who aren't into dance at all.

Explain to me the term "electronica"

Generally, people trace techno back to early 90's rave and Euro-dance. Similarly, a lot of people think metal means Van Halen and Twisted Sister in the mid-80's (however misguided that may be).

Or it sounds like the name of a corporation

It's not misguided at all. Again, Van Halen and Twisted Sister are to some extent descendents of Black Sabbath, and 90s rave music is to some extent a descendent of Detroit techno (as is Euro-dance, maybe, though obviously its bigger ancestor is pre-techno Eurodisco.) On the other hand, if I was going to write a *500 Greatest Techno Albums* book, I WOULD include not only Cerrone and Kraftwerk and Silver Convention and Soul Sonic Force, but Aqua and Toy Box and Mo-do and Crystal Method and Company B too, just like I included Van Halen and Link Wray and the Troggs and Poison and an Osmonds album and lots of Funkadelic in my metal book. What is the point of being a boring purist schoolmarm about any of this stuff? That's no fun at all!

the term 'techno' is just perfectly evocative and succinct in describing a wide enough range of dance music. personally i don't have a problem with it because i got so annoyed with the definition in the UK becoming so narrow (having to explain to my friends that techno WASN'T just what Billy Bunter or whoever played if at all).

Sure, they're subconsciously noting a connection between 2 Unlimited and Derrick May when they clap along to "Get Ready For This" at a hockey game, but it's silly to claim that "most people refer to May/KMS/Atkins when as techno".

I remember hearing "synthy-pop" (really) or "synth-pop," but not "techno-pop." (Just reporting experience, not denying that the "techno-pop" was used. Also, I think I was mostly getting my terminology from colleg radio djs rather than music critcism.)

Wait, so if they heard Rhythm is Rhythm or Richie Hawtin they WOULDN'T call it techno? What would they call it?? (And doesn't that contradict the claim in the post at the beginning of this thread?)

xp

I remember being nineteen and secretly loving things like Culture Beat and N-Trance, but if you'd asked me back then I would have been the first to say "Oh, that stuff's crap, give me Aphex, Orbital, or some hardcore ragga jungle". The truth was that I loved both the "serious" techno stuff and the "cheesy" dance-ier stuff, but in my mind I couldn't reconcile the two, and consequently ended up talking a lot of shit.

Purism can not only make you boring - it can make you a hypocrite!

Sadly, you just summed up me and a lot of my peer group from age 19 through age 23. Mind you, I had my head up my ass about a lot of things
back then. I'm fond of saying that if I could go back in time I would meet 20-year-old me and slap him upside the head.

Real McCoy's greatest hits album a couple years ago was good. (They even sort of pioneered the Rammstein/KMFDM-voiced bellowing Sprockets guy with cutiepie barbie-girl-twirl-tweet mix that Aqua and Toy Box bettered a few years later {partly by having way cuter and catchier music than Real McCoy did.) Though Boney M used that deep gutteral Kraut voice before anybody else, I suppose.

I try to let them peter out so we can start dancing, or at least talking about cute girls instead.

(sorry I'm yelling, but it's really loud in here)
(xpost, damn, Alba stole my thunder, oh well)

Oddly, Chicago house, which was canonical throughout the nineties, was simultaneously effectively marginalised - people paid lip service to it, but when they said "house" they weren't thinking of Trax so much as Strictly Rhythm. It's something I spent a lot of time thinking about when I had to write about the Trax Retrospective release - the idea that this music was so well-known and yet in many ways was still a "secret". I think it's a very good thing that this music has now become such a big reference point for the current good house producers: house which seeks to combine sex with menace isn't necessarily better than house which just goes for sex, but it frequently is.

LINK PLZ.

But this is the entire point of the thread! Actually, I was about to get all sneery about the way that the American general public defines all dance/electronic music as 'techno' and then realised its exactly the same as the way the British general public now defines almost all guitar-based music as 'indie'.

Rolando: 'yes, i suggest a multi-permutational door to door pamphlet campaign'

Banks: 'we'll call it hi-tech jazz from now on'

Rolando and everyone else: '....'

I'm going to rip this out of its context as a joke because I was thinking about this thread this morning, and it's not just salsa (still being recorded pretty heavily) or swing (which I'd be more willing to agree is dead musically, though maybe swing dance fans would argue). Even if you weed out relatively dead dance music forms, I think the following dance music styles (which are either normally acoustic or often acoustic) are still going: samba, though I guess this is pretty localized to Brazil, but Brazil is populous country; merengue and bachata (mostly electronic when I hear it in the clubs, but I think that would be less true in the Dominican Republic, where they originate, and maybe in South America--and a lot of the merengue&bachata that makes it to the clubs I go to is actually coming from Puerto Rico); all of that Mexican stuff like ranchera; cumbia, though a lot of that is electronic now; African music like rumba which seems to be going through a revival (or at least that's what the western world music magazines say), but also guitar-based music like soukous and high-life, mbalax, Afrobeat; maybe belly dance music (which may not be forging ahead, but is still generating a remarkable number of new recordings each year); and I'm sure I could go on, with a little research.

But then there is all that music that people still dance to and listen to, even if there's not a lot of new music being recorded in those genres: tango, fox trot, swing, polka, waltz, etc.

Thing is, we also have these things called *country clubs* over here.

sure you can rubbish the genre name because of the word "dance" but the reason it's most effective is because it's quite a neutral meaning. the word "rock" is hardly full of meaning is it? what about dance music with thrashing guitars in it? or vocals?

the reason a neutral meaning is important for "rock" or "dance" is because both are so huge.

as regards what's easier to dance to, well that's entirely a matter of personal opinion, but I think it's fully understood in Europe that the purpose of going to see an electronic music DJ is to dance. other clubs are not so specific over here.

uh, yes.

I have no idea what "neutral meaning" means, though. It sounds like you absolutely *want* to limit what gets called "dance music," to an extent that neither the "dance" nor the "music" remotely matter. How is that "neutral"? (And just because most DJs are lazy or subservient or uncreative enough to only play music specifically produced or geared to so-called dance clubs doesn't mean that people should accept their dumb limited definition. They could play old ZZ Top or Matys Bros. or Bob Wills or Trickeration songs if they wanted.)

I don't think the name "dance music" matters a great deal, "electronic music" is fine with me, however I think the assumption that all DJs should play all different styles is rubbish.

Why doesn't a country music DJ play Jeff Mills Chuck? Cos in a club full of people who like country the chances are it'd sound utterly shit and they'd think "what on earth is he doing!". it's not as though a lack of electicism is unique to techno/house dj sets!

Also what about mixing? Do I even want to ask that question? (nb I am not a total mixing purist before that rant starts)

this happens all the time now. Tiga or Erol playing The Cult or AC/DC etc. where's Matt DC with that recent anecdote about hearing 'You Shook Me All Night Long' in a club? they played frickin' 'Midlife Crisis' when we went to The Social the other week as well!

xp

which is really lazier, playing records which are already classics, or getting a crowd going by combining records they don't know with some they do, or even none they do.

if you want to see a lazy DJ set go and see 2manydjs, loads of genres, no creativity, lots of subservience. eclecticism is ten times more lazy.

x-post Chuck just admit this gripe is basically centred on a general distrust/dislike for dance music and then we can cease the argument. I mean you've obviously never enjoyed a techno/house/drum and bass DJ set and have very little idea of what it's all about. it's far easier to argue on this thread from the point of view of someone with absolutely no interest in the genre you're discussing.

How is playing tracks by ZZ Top or Trickeration or the Matys Bros not doing this??? I bet when I've DJed, most people didn't recognize a fraction of what I played. Do you think every record that isn't remixed specifically for clubs is a "classic that everybody knows"??

I said that the records were made to be mixed together, and to be used in DJing, and to be manipulated in DJing. were you mixing when you DJed? if not, can you accept that actual beatmatching can cause a difference to the DJ set?

I don't think a personal example of you DJing is really concrete argument, in this case, either.

http://www.rockcritics.com/features/discocritics.html

xpost

But no, it is not necessary. In fact, it's probably way overrated.

its necesary if you want to dance longer than fiev minutes at a time.

If you did it so well, why not make an mp3 mix and we'll see how great it is, and easy etc etc, and how free from subservience.

what exactly was your point again? that dance music people and dance djs are idiots? or lazy? or what?

is it not possible to accept that electronic music is a valid subculture, and that DJs don't have to use every set as a chance to show what a big eclectic cock they have. smacks of insecurity to me, if a DJ starts whacking out music from every genre, left right and centre. there are different sets for different crowds, different records for different crowds and times. there are EASILY enough different styles within electronic music to cater for this, not that that's an absolute rule.

But this I agree with (and don't share chuck's apparent belief that eclecticism somehow results in better music than digging into a particular tradition or style does, but maybe I'm just misunderstanding him).

there's no point in arguing with someone who thinks that there is no "fun" "curiosity" or "wit" involved in an entire genre they have a dubious amount of knowledge about.

It's nothing about patrons being "taught" to expect it, this is elitist arrogant bullshit on your part. As I've already said, they're not limiting themselves to any one genre, they're simply playing sets when they play which are mostly electronic.

As I've already said there are alot of different things you can do with dance DJing, your position is based on the assumption that all electronic music clubs are playing the exact same music, and all electronic music DJs are playing the exact same sets.

it's utterly ignorant aging rock critic bullshit.

there are electronic records for thousands of possible clubnights and atmospheres and dj sets, the nature of the genre and its focus on the 12 inch single ensures that there are more records at any one time than anyone can keep up with. it's minimalist and it's based on repetition and hence the beatmatching aspect and blending aspect can be extremely important and interesting.

can you name me some "smart enough" people who've DJed and made clubs *more* fun then, besides yourself of course. I'm sure you are the greatest DJ on the planet.

x-post this is just dumb faux naivety on your part. oh and by the way MIX CDS are not live dj sets!

honestly this fucking bilious hatred for nuance is sickening.

> your position is based on the assumption that all electronic music clubs are playing the exact same music, and all electronic music DJs are playing the exact same sets.<

where do i assume either of these, ronan? my definition of "dance music" is way *larger* than your definition, not smaller. you're the one who seems dead-set on limiting its definition, not me.

there are hundreds of black metal (and death metal, and grindcore, and post-john-mayer/david-grey singer songwriter, and you name it) records released every year as well. that's the nature of the entire recording industry these days, not just the dance music industry. but most of those hundreds of records sound exactly the fucking same to anyone who is not some boring specialist examining them under a high-powered microscope. and i can't imagine choosing to limit myself to any of those genres (even for one single night of my life), either.

Chuck's comment about disco letting the whole world in is OTM, at least as I remember it. Populism was the greatest thing about the era, but that aspect is completely overlooked. Now people think disco and it's like it was some underground phenomenon that you had to be hip to know about, like VU or something.

you imply that only a "boring specialist" can want to mix and match micro genres of dance music, and that's simply a value judgement. if this is the case why is dance so popular with glossy magazines and stuff over here?

it's funny, the usual prejudice in Europe is that electronic music is IDIOT music etc!

And as you say, sometimes it's random, but obviously when a DJ is doing it it's not, and the records are made for this purpose and the people are there to hear him mix them, and they're there to see a brief and only relatively purist or puritanical artistic statement. everything about electronic music is made for that environment.

dance artists don't make albums, most of them. I remember elsewhere you complaining that fans of the genre act like it's some weird loop. you were right. it IS a weird loop.

I think you are missing the point that people may get a very specific feeling or type of feeling from a specific genre. I can dance to salsa all night and enjoy it because it simply gives me something that other types of music-for-dancing do not. A lot of salseros won't even dance to the merengue and bachata that usually gets mixed in (in the clubs I go to anyway). I understand that. I don't feel that way, because merengue has it's advantages (easy to lead, for one thing, easier to play with, good if I'm feeling tense and need to relax) and I like a bachata or two. But I'd be quite happy to just dance to salsa, and most of the time I'd rather go to a dance setting where I am going to get to dance to salsa alongside a few closely related genres--and that's it: no house, no techno, no hard rock, etc.

You wield the accusation of other people being "no fun" as though it were a club (the kind you hit people with that is). I can get into a very specific semi-altered state of consciousness through Afro-Latin dance music. Other dance music that I've tried does not take me to the same place. It's really that simple. I'm also open to trying other things, but now when I'm out and I want to have a good time.

Doubt I ever wrote this, Ronan. I'm pretty sure you're confusing me with somebody. You should read the "Repetition Repitition Repitition" chapter of my second book, if you doubt me. I LIKE loops.

>You wield the accusation of other people being "no fun" <

No, I was trying to explain what kind of club would be more fun for *me*. I'm not arguing that other people don't have fun at clubs where I wouldn't. Of course they do; and vice versa. And people have fun at Creed concerts, too; I've never denied anybody that - more power to them. And I'm sure the guys in Creed have lots of fun on stage sometimes. But that doesn't mean I should pretend to like Creed. (And I bet Disco Tex and the Sex-o-Lettes had way MORE fun on stage.)

as regards "sounds British!", thankfully I'm not a particularly patriotic Irishman!

yes, i agree, it's also the same reason i got so heavily into house music and then (to a lesser extent) the rave culture that house arguably spawned. it's why 20 years on, i'm still one of the faithful. really good scenes are always inclusive like this i think....maybe the populism is overlooked, but not in the actual dance music community. come join my cult.

i don't think we've seen just exactly how microgenres will change things although i can certainly name populist microhouse djs and artists for example. (villalobos and crackhaus respectively)

many xposts

Okay, I did use fun that way. I should have said "I can't imagine why people who have MUCH fun etc. in them." But right, maybe their sense of fun is just way different than mine. I admit it. (But sorry, again, Disco Tex's fun is just plain FUNNER than Creed's fun. I honestly believe that. Some artists are just more capable of wit and curiosity than others. And part of my job is to figure out who.)

I just can't imagine why people who have any fun or curiosity or wit in them at all would want to do that

Again, try to imagine someone who has sampled lots of different types of music and then finds that certain ones repeatedly give him feelings or pleasures that he especially values. They aren't the exact same feelings or the exact same pleasure or high, but different examples of music in the same genre produce experiences that bear a family resemblance to each other. I think it's perfectly understandable why that person would emphasize those particular genres or sub-genres (or whatever: it could be particular artists, it could be "anything with xylophone and choir").

Chuck, that article is wonderful. Thanks for the link!

The problem with eclecticism as a ruling aesthetic is that there's always going to be someone more eclectic, more well-versed, more impossibly enthused about every little crevice of the broad expanse of musical history than anyone else. But these DJs are rarely good because they don't know how to construct a framework within which that eclecticism can be understood, so it becomes meaningless to the audience - I saw a pretentious DJ at a Melbourne International Arts Festival gig thing the other night who thought she was blowing everyone away by serving Brazilian prog-jazz after early 80s jazz funk after ol skool hip hop after pleasant deep house after 60s British pop but in truth the event was utterly vibeless. The music itself was fine but there was no discernible thread, no axis upon which momentum could be built.

By contrast when hip hop "let the world in" it did so by disciplining the world to its own ruling ethos; had it been subservient to the world outside it would not have been nearly as distinctive or exciting. Early 90s ardkore techno was similar: anything with a hook was fair game, but at the same time sampling classical strings or old reggae did not equate to becoming those things, to losing the music's identity as ardkore. And this has always been the creative friction which exists within genres, the struggle (between adherence to genre and transcendence of it) which makes a lot of the best music. This is all really obvious stuff but I'm slowly getting to a point:

The mistake I can occasionally make when thinking about this is in assuming that the music which flings open its borders to the most possible outside ideas while preserving its identity is consequentially the music that is most exciting, most vital - the cosmopolitan sound of current dancehall is a good example of this. But I think this is not necessarily the case; it might be equally true to say that music which has much stricter, more severely defined genre boundaries generates just as much friction in its smaller, more subtle infractions and excursions into the outside world. The friction generated is at least partially based on the balancing of the forces on both sides ("for genre", to keep the music's identity coherent; "against genre", to expand or vary that identity). It's like, in a comedy of manners tension is generated in the ambivalence over how far certain characters can break certain circumsribed rules while hanging onto their reputation; this is less obviously dynamic than a film about war where lives and countries hang in the balance, but the tension generated can be the same.

A good mono-genre DJ set is a bit like that comedy of manners: the DJ lays out a broad framework of expectations - the rules - in the overall stylistic coherence of his set, but said coherence is challenged by constant minor disruptions of this coherency, moments of "letting the world in". However there is usually a natural limit to how far these disruptions can go: if they topple the rules governing the set, they also topple the context in which they can be seen to be disruptive, and that particular tension generated collapses (only to be replaced by a new set of rules in which such major infractions were permitted). Sometimes the ground covered by these rules and the infractions against them can be incredibly small objectively, but to focus on that overlooks the fact that what we're talking about is essentially a game between the DJ, the records and the dancers/listeners, and there's a reason why friendships have been destroyed forever by "mere" games of Monopoly - the stakes cannot be measured by some external arbitration process, they exist in the minds of the participants.

Bravo! (Really, not ironically.)

2. as for the subsequent tangential argument regarding genres and eclecticism, i think its kind of important for genres to be narrow and focussed. i think eclecticism is a bit of an anomic proposition in its own way, the creeping death of the anomic bourgeoisie. partly this is because, if genre is less important than artist, we are left with the single, vacuum-packed artists, as islands in a sea of nothing, beacons in the light. and i dont think the great records that have been made in history are like this. i think they are one offs that come from genre, but also typify genre

i think scene/genre is vital, much more so than any individual artists (even a giant as big as bob wills is not 'bigger' than western swing). its the interplay between people working within a seam, the incremental advances, the idea of a cohesive movement or genre, which is what provides the great music, i think. and, for this to occur, there must be a reasonably solid sense of scene/genre, and that involves resisting any urges towards eclecticism. eclectism is the last refuge of the dying genre

3. aside from the music itself, there is the social aspect a scene encompasses, which them feeds back into the music itself, the sense of a gang, of exclusion of other things, of sense of purpose, the resistance of dilution. the idea must be take over, not to be taken over.

4. many genres work best, when the constituent parts meld together into a greater whole. obviously this is most apparent in any kind of psychedelic music, but often a great mix is one that gradually unfolds, not jarring from one thing to the next (though that, in other contexts is equally valid)

these are the main reasons i think eclecticsm must be resisted. the growth and establishment of any genre is dependant on this. there is nothing wrong with purism, and i certainly see no value in seeing, jeff mills, say, playing andre popp, and if i go to see jeff mills, i dont want him to be playing the misfits. and i certainly dont want to be 'educated'

lets not spend so much time trying to knock down genre boundaries.

(i gotta say, there are some noticeable parallels between this thread and the "one in a million" 'taking sides' thread - chuck feels genre x is unnecessarily limiting itself in its modes of expression (aaliyah doesn't sound enough like a gay axl rose/jaques lu cont doesn't sound enough like old zz top), tim f arrives and points out that what might appear as stylistically insular and navelgazingly change-resistant might actually be understood as a nuanced dialectic between restraint/sameness and release/otherness)

Once you get down to this level of the debate there is a bit of the "Is there anything more to say really?" vibe colin mentions. But I guess I'd say there are good and bad examples of the dialectic, and I think it's important to try to work out what makes some forms of it work so brilliantly and others fall short so dramatically (eg. why do I get excited by Get Physical and not Plastic City, Music For Freaks and not Naked Music). Is there a meta-theory which ties it all together or is it just a matter of personal taste?

gragga or raggrime (not like ragtime though) = ragga grime
gRime&B = grime and R&B
grungle = grime and jungle

ok, maybe not.