The connection between synth-pop and house/tecno music

cheesy house is cool - are you sure?

Well you got me there. Overall, house and techno in general are well-respected by the critics whereas synth-pop isn't.

it tends to be the opposite actually.

Yeah, I was about to say -- whereas that there 'rock' criticism school of things embraces synth-pop nowadays, at least, house and techno are still this strange 'other'...

yeah i've noticed this as well...when i originally started listening to techno,i got into it through a group of friends who had a very techno purist/snob point of view,and i remember commenting at the time that i thought techno would be really good mixed with other types of music,(which i still do sometimes,but in general i now like the way it seems to be a world in itself),and someone saying that techno "doesnt sound good good mixed with other music...except eighties pop,for some reason..." it does seem odd that techno,which, much and all as i love it,can often be fairly po-faced, seem to unashamedly accept the value of cheesy pop songs in a way it would never tolerate,say,drum and bass(quite the genrealization,i know,but to give an example,a set a few months ago in dublin by david donoghue,a local minimalist techno/electronica musician who i saw yesterday in a "sound installation" in a theatre where people were not allowed in and out of the theatre it took place in for fear of disturbing the performance,included the pet shop boys and some random disco song i didnt know,and it didnt sound nearly as odd as most other types of music would have...)

sorry,that could have been expressed more clearly,but im tired...

These ears generally find punk to be much more chee-z than house/techno and synth/pop.

i had a friend who once said that he couldn't listen to techno because it made him "nauseous." he only wanted "nitty gritty punk rock." he was an idiot. in fact, i think i'll use this story about him in my human league piece.

the connection is such: georgio moroder. begin to dig around in the world of electronic dance music pre-1986 and you'll find things to be so gloriously muddled as to defy untangling. what separates cybotron's "clear" from the jonzun crew from "computer love" from "acid trax" from "enjoy the silence"? got me.

The critically cool old synth stuff is things like Kraftwerk and Suicide, plus for instance Giorgio Moroder - these things were a major influence on the development of techno. The cheesy '80s synth pop is of secondary importance to techno, but it's very close to Kraftwerk, say, so unsurprising that techno people can get onto its wavelength so easily.

Also, the coolness and critical viewpoint we're discussing here is rather an NMEcentric rockist one - if you read the dance mags, their canons and pantheons are quite different, and so is the stuff they despise and mock, and that's the way it should be. (Stop reading here if sickened by pretension.) A Postmodern world requires a multiplicity of metanarratives.

"No Lies" by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (ca. 1986) goes into "Spirit" by the Slam boys (ca. 1995) LIKE BUTTA. it IS weird how techno's among the most purist of genres yet uses the cheeziest fucking handclap sounds EVER. micheline i agree: there's something big in this, but i can't draw it out. i think robin's closest so far.

Listening to a lot of old 80s stuff I used to listen to (courtesy of Morpheus) I finally realized what the essence of the difference between crap 80s synth-pop and cool 90s techno is : Big Snares

Eighties electro-pop would be funky and brilliant if it wasn't for those CRAP big, echoey snare sounds. (Form Linns and Fairlights?)

But 90s house / techno basically lost the big snares in favour of clipped, crisp 808 snares or handclaps.

Then I remembered reading about Genesis and how Peter Gabriel (I think) banned cymbals from their recordings, which allowed the tibrality of other drums to come through. So now my theory is the abandonment of big snares had the same effect. Without big snares filling up huge amounts of the groove, both in terms of sound spectrum, and decay time, house and techno artists could explore tighter funkier rhythms and more subtly timbral effects (like analog filter sweeps, etc.)

Read Techno Rebels by Dan Sicko. Original Detroit techno geezers were big on all sorts of 80s synthpop, cheesy and otherwise. Kraftwerk and Giorgio were just the tip of the iceberg.

Also, people like Larry Heard were well into Yes, Genesis and other bad 70s art rock.

The so called "purism" of techno is way overstated. Basically based on one endlessly recycled Derrick May quote and the fact that techno fanboys can be really annoying.

Critics who rail against said purism should remember that techno and house were heavily influenced by some of the most critically reviled genres known to men.

the connection between synth-pop and techno/house is that if you take the bassline/chord progression from a synth-pop hit (or a disco number for that matter) and use it in your techno song, you have a guaranteed dance hit

All that stuff -- the Sheffield groups, Visage, Ultravox -- were popular at NW Detroit parties in the early '80s.

endlessly recycled quotes + irritating fanboys = purism. multiplied by all those minimal loops.

Where the fuck is Omar?