Were the UK rock kids listening to dance music before the US rock kids?

Group hug.

i was just referring to the line you quoted in your question.

[If this thread is squarely about that Daft Punk lyric, then scrap today's session of musical Cliff's Notes.]

i was listening to colourbox/ yello/ new order /mantronix and enjoyed the electro music that Peel played in 1985, even at 15 - I was ahead of my peers.

The CBGBs ref is interesting re that infamous D.Byrne line however it went: "Disco production techniques are much more of a revolution than punk". (I can't be arsed to look it up). I think THeads were copping dance cred a long time before UK punx (who chose reggae/dub as their ideal other.)

The fact that there is an ILM version of this thread (which has gone down a different avenue of discussion and started referencing hip-hop) has been completely messing with my head for the last few minutes. I was scrolling through thinking 'how the hell did it go from Talking Heads to Musical Youth so quickly?'

as for america, although i guess they weren't really rock kids as such (although maybe they were, i don't know), minnesota has always fascinated me, because, as i understand it (drop bass network, woody mcbride etc), there was a very big scene there in the mid90s?

i think this question is interesting in ways i'm not really sure of yet

I think that Daft Punk is probably the best reference that could have been made in the lyric. It was rock kid (or, strictly speaking, indie kid) friendly music that was also acceptable to house / techno kids...the music nerd narrator is not saying that he introduced electronic music to rock kids, he's saying that he played them electronic music that they could really get into that wouldn't get them mocked too badly by other music nerds (unlike, say, Fatboy Slim or the Prodigy).

Back on topic...

As for rock kids in the US being late to dance music...it's hard to say. the former rock kids and skater types who were throwing parties that played UK 'ardcore (and later Jungle) in NY in the early nineties looked to London for the music they wanted to dance to in much the same way that UK party organizers in the late 80s had looked to Chicago.

Also, bear in mind for a lot of the 90s dance music was omnipresent in the UK in a very mainstream way. I can't say for sure, but that doesn't seem to be the case with the US, hip-hop and rnb filled that role. I think the Prodigy-Chemical Brothers-Fatboy Slim inroads helped... 90s dance music was relatively easy to ease your way into. I'm sure all that chart rave stuff helped as well.

It's also possible that trance and later UK Garage blew the whole thing off course to an extent - all the rock kids I knew found techno, drum and bass and house easier to relate to in a way.
Trance in particular seemed to be the byword for outright derision.

And it would be foolish to overlook the importance of drugs in all this.

Was Blondie's 'I'm On E' really about E?

i'd say e did hit america around 92 also, but in pockets, california and minnesota in particular? (but am on possibly tenuous ground now)

i think this thread is calling for the presence of messrs chow and matos

It was definitely in some of the bigger NYC clubs in 88 (my girlfriend used to work at Danceteria / Tunnel back then and remembers it being all over the place)...probably earlier in the case of underground / gay clubs? I remember reading somewhere that its earliest regular recreational use was in clubs in Texas (while it was still legal and could be purchased at the bar).

1. 'X' for sale in Dallas, in bars, until '85. Spent my entire freshman year listening to a rich girl from Corpus Christi talk about how she put it on Daddy's Amex and how she was missing it since reclassification.

2. Memorabilia by Soft Cell is the first acid track. It is oddly one of the very first records I got (my dad got it in a job lot of records sent to his bar for le jukebox). MA and the Taboo crew had the first ecstasy of Brits.

3. Chicago/Detroit made the records, sure, but it was a gay thing in Chi (Warehouse = house) and a Kraftwerk thing in D; hence techno. This goes great lengths to explaining the midwest thing as a grassrots development; also the record stores which did imports and employed many DJs were owned by the same people who owned Twin City Imports and the second the British started picking up on house/techno (Matos' and my pal Rod would probably say the music started being possible/our ears changed due to midi) it kind of melded with their industrial bent and their anglophile bent and the seeds were planted (Chi also had WaxTax which those not from Chi would mix with the house).

Meanwhile, I'm in NY and in '87 my Detroit friend's boyf was working in Transmat. Moby is DJing our dances, dropping the kind of playlists that would be called techno/Balearic in a couple of years. People are excited about Haçienda/London coverage due to Anglophilia and wanting new stuff. Some might call these people scenesters, but they are all new! music! inquisitive! and total music pushers/musicians/writers in training. The second the stuff gets written about in NME, we're all over it (irony: Helen, one of my best friends NOW initiated that coverage before I knew her). We like too many genres to be indie kids.

4. In the Midwest, things are interesting. Woody, a 1st Ave DJ, gets into rave. Lots of people like New Beat and nitrous. There's a guy called David Prince who did Furthur, a rave in the Midwest, which was a marker for hippie raves in like '94. Things were happening in MN/WI/IL/MI from '91/2 and it commodified from '93. Candy ravers everywhere, plugged into a pronoia hippie thing as an alternative to grunge and Phish/Deadheading. There were a few radio shows but you had to participate if you wanted to hear the music.

5. British culture has a way of desegregating things wihich would be incredibly segregated in their countries of origin, which is what happened to house/tech AND hip-hop here. Also no palaver between disco freaks and rappers with homophobia issues in the UK, unlike US.
Besides, the keenest Brits made hay while the sun shone over this one and put their trainspotter side to good use getting hold of the records and making connections with their makers.

Aagh massive post and am prob not done yet.

7. American 'dance' was in its warehouse party/infancy/gay bar phase when there were M25 orbital parties and E by the truckload in Britain. There is this whole interlude of mainstream activity in Britain that maybe resonated with clubbers in NYC who liked SNAP! and Technotronic; Queen Latifah and Monie Love had house elements in their hip-hop but as said before the male rappers were NOT down with house at all, as it was considered pejoratively gay by most of them (which was an easy enough conclusion to be drawn because of Sound Factory). That's when Hacienda had that week-long NYC residency where Deee-lite played (hello, Project X club kids) and so did Happy Mondays, where Anthony H. Wilson said 'wake up America, you're dead!'. Also in greater NYC there's the Latin influence coming in which may have kept people whose British doppelgangers would be really into it, right out of it and busy with that hot 97 sound.

The entire song is a series of jokes.

Maybe in a cave somewhere.

stevem you are a bad mang