Independently influenced by the same Euro sounds, Cybotron’s cold, synth-dominated sound and drum-machine rhythms paralleled the electro then emerging from New York. Their first single, ‘Alleys Of Your Mind’ – released on their own Deep Space label – was playlisted by the Electrifyin’ Mojo in 1981 and became a big local hit, selling around 15,000 copies in Detroit alone. The next two singles, ‘Cosmic Cars’ and ‘Clear’ did even better, resulting in Cybotron being signed by the Berkeley, California label Fantasy, who released the Clear album.
In Detroit, everybody assumed Cybotron were white guys from Europe. And indeed, apart from a subliminal funk pulsing amidst the crisp-and-dry programmed beats, there was scant evidence to hint otherwise. Davis’ vocals had the Angloid/android neurosis of a John Foxx or Gary Numan, making Cybotron the missing link between the New Romantics and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. But for all their futuristic mise-en-scène, the vision underlying Cybotron songs was Detroit-specific, capturing a city in transition: from industrial boomtown to post-Fordist wasteland, from US capital of auto manufacturing to US capital of homicide. Following the late sixties and early seventies syndrome of ‘white flight’ to the suburbs, the decline of the auto industry, and the de-gentrification of once securely middle-class black districts, Detroit’s city centre had become a ghost-town.
With its dominant mood of paranoia and desolation (‘I wish I could escape from this crazy place’, as Davis sang it in ‘Cosmic Cars’), Cybotron’s tech-noir should have been the soundtrack to Robocop, the dystopian sci-fi movie set in a Detroit of the near-future. Songs like ‘Alleys of Your Mind’ and ‘Techno City’ were ‘just social commentary, more or less,’ says Atkins, citing ‘thought-control’ and the ‘double-edged sword’ of technology as Cybotron’s major preoccupations. Lyrics like ‘enter the program / technofy your mind’ and ‘don’t you let them robotize your behind’ – from the gloom-funk epic ‘Enter’ – testify to an ambivalent investment in technology. As Atkins puts it, ‘With technology, there’s a lot of good things, but by the same token, it enables the powers that be to have more control.’
‘Techno City’ was inspired by Fritz Lang’s vision in Metropolis of a future megalopolis divided into privileged sectors high up in the sky and subterranean prole zones. According to Davis, Techno City was equivalent to Detroit’s Woodward Avenue ghetto; the dream of its denizens was to work their way up to the cybodrome, where the artists and intellectuals lived. Again, these utopian/dystopian fantasies were just a thinly veiled allegory of the unofficial apartheid taking shape in urban America, with the emergence of privately policed fortress communities and township-like ethnic ghettos.
Perhaps the most extreme expression of Cybotron’s ambivalent attitude to the future – half-anticipation, half-dread – was ‘R9’, a track inspired by a chapter in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. ‘What you have on the record is the War of Armageddon,’ laughs Atkins. But despite the track’s jagged gouts of dissonance, hideously warped textures, and background screams for ‘Help!’ this is no nightmare vision of the future, says Atkins. ‘For the people who don’t have anything, any kind of change is good. There’s two ways of looking at it.’ The fevered apocalyptic imagery climaxed in ‘Vision’, with Davis whispering about a ‘vast celestial wasteland’, then whimpering ‘I need something to believe in’.
Off to Battle
After ‘Vision’ was recorded, Cybotron split. Davis – ‘the Jimi Hendrix of the synthesizer’, according to Atkins – wanted to go in a rock direction. ‘I felt that we had built up a strong following on records like “Alleys”, “Cosmic Cars” and “Clear”,’ says Atkins. ‘Why would you come with a rock ’n’ roll record, when you had all the black radio programmers all over the country eating out of your hand?’
Atkins started working on his own material using the name Model 500. Setting up his own label Metroplex, he put out ‘No UFOs’; the sound, Motor City motorik, was harder and faster than Cybotron, streamlined and austere, with ciphered vocals demoted low in the mix. Then Eddie Fowlkes – now calling himself Eddie ‘Flashin’ ’ Fowlkes – decided he wanted to make a record too; his ‘Goodbye Kiss’ was the second Metroplex release.
Suddenly, the other members of the Deep Space clique wanted to get in on the action. Up to this point, Derrick May had conceived of himself as primarily a DJ; he’d had some success outside Deep Space, spinning at Liedernacht, a club located in the ballroom at the Leland House Hotel, and DJ-ing on the radio. His first recording effort, ‘Let’s Go’ – effectively a collaboration with Atkins – was Metroplex’s third release on Metroplex. Finally, Kevin Saunderson joined the fray with ‘Triangle of Love’, recorded under the name Kreem.
Although the clique was tight, pooling its limited equipment and helping out on each others records, there was friction. Soon, each member of the Belleville Three was running his own record label. May’s Transmat began as a sub-label imprint of Metroplex.
‘If you notice the catalogue numbers on Transmat releases, they’re all MS,’ says Atkins. ‘That stands for Metroplex Subsidiary . . . The kind of guy Derrick is, if his records had been released on Metroplex, me and him would probably not be friends today. Because Derrick would have tried to tell me how to run the company.’ Saunderson, meanwhile, started his own label KMS, which stood for Kevin Maurice Saunderson. ‘I was working a security job at a hospital and running my business from telephone booths and hospital phones.’ Eventually, all three labels settled in close vicinity to each other in Detroit’s Eastern Market district.
With their cottage industry independence and their futuristic sound achieved using low-level technology, the Belleville Three fit the model of ‘the Techno Rebels’ proposed by Alvin Toffler in his The Third Wave. Rejecting Luddite strategies, these renegades embraced technology as a means of empowerment and resistance against the very corporate plutocracy that invented and mass-produced these new machines. And so Juan Atkins described himself as ‘a warrior for the technological revolution’. But songs like ‘Off To Battle’ and ‘Interfear-ance’ were aimed as much at rival cottage-industrialists as at the larger powers. ‘“Off To Battle”,’ says Atkins, was addressed to ‘a lot of new, amateur electronic artists . . . It was a battle cry to ‘keep the standards high.’
Where Model 500 records were tough, glacial and a little eerie, Derrick May’s music – as Mayday and Rythim Is Rythim – added a plangent, heart-tugging poignancy to the distinctively crisp and dry minimalism of the Detroit sound. On tracks like the elegantly elegaic ‘It Is What It Is’, he pioneered the use of quasi-symphonic string sounds. In one case, they were genuinely symphonic: ‘Strings of Life’ was based on samples gleaned from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. May reworked these orchestral stabs into a sort of cyber-Salsa groove. His own phrase was ‘23rd-Century ballroom music’.
Atkins and May both attribute the dreaminess of Detroit techno to the desolation of the city, which May describes in terms of a sort of sensory-cultural deprivation. ‘It’s the emptiness in the city that puts the wholeness in the music. It’s like a blind person can smell and touch and can sense things that a person with eyes would never notice. And I tend to think a lot of us here in Detroit have been blind: blinded by what was happening around us. And we sort of took those other senses and enhanced them, and that’s how the music developed.’ Hence the oddly indefinable emotions in May’s tracks like ‘Nude Photo’ and ‘Beyond The Dance’, the weird mix of euphoria and anxiety.
Having grown up in New York until he moved to the Detroit area in his early teens, Kevin Saunderson was the most disco-influenced of the Belleville Three. His tracks – released under a plethora of aliases, including Reese, Reese and Santonio, Inter City, Keynotes, and E-Dancer – had titles as baldly self-descriptive as the music was stripped down and coldly compulsive: ‘The Sound’, ‘How To Play Our Music’, ‘Forcefield’, ‘Rock To The Beat’, ‘Bassline’, ‘Funky, Funk, Funk’, ‘Let’s, Let’s, Let’s Dance’. Of the three, Saunderson had the sharpest com
mercial instincts, and the greatest commercial success. But he also produced the darkest avant-funk of the early Detroit era, with Reese’s ‘Just Want Another Chance’.
Recorded in 1986, the track was inspired by Manhattan’s celebrated proto-house club Paradise Garage, which Saunderson would visit when he returned to New York to see his older brothers. ‘I used to imagine what kind of sound I would like to have coming out of a system like that,’ he remembers, referring to the infamously low-end intensive, tectonic plate-shaking sound-system. ‘It made me vibe that kind of vibe.’ Over a baleful black-hole bassline running at about half the speed of the drum program, Saunderson intones the gutteral monologue of some kind of stalker or love-addict. ‘I just vibed that, started thinking about this cat in a relationship, how this person was deep with this other person, really wanted to be with them, and kind of screwed up.’ The ‘Reese bass’ has since been resurrected and mutated by a number of artists in the nineties, most notably by darkside jungle producers Trace and Ed Rush.
Displaying the kind of canny, market-conscious versatility that would characterize his whole career, Kevin Saunderson could also turn out tracks as light and upful as Inner City’s ‘Big Fun’ and ‘Good Life’ – to date, Detroit techno’s biggest hits. ‘Big Fun’ was spawned almost accidentally out of the collaborative symbiosis that characterized Detroit’s incestuous and interdependent scene. James Pennington – soon to release tracks for Transmat under the name Suburban Knight – made a bassline round at Kevin’s apartment, left it on tape, and went to work. ‘Kevin said, “Let me use this, man,”’ remembers Eddie Fowlkes, ‘James said, “Okay, just put my name on it.” Next thing you know, you got Inner City.’ With Art Forest co-writing, Chicago-based diva Paris Grey singing the melody, and Juan Atkins mixing the track down, the result was ‘Big Fun’.
‘It was real tight,’ reminisces Fowlkes fondly of this golden age of Detroit. ‘Everyone was helping each other out, there was no egos, and nobody could compete with Juan because he had already done stuff [as Cybotron] and knew where he wanted to go. We were just like kids following the Pied Piper.’
The Detroit-Chicago Alliance
Detroit techno came to the world’s attention indirectly, as an adjunct to Chicago’s house scene. When British A & R scouts came to Chicago to investigate house in 1986 – 7, they discovered that many of the top-selling tracks were actually from Detroit. ‘We would sell ten to fifteen thousand records in Chicago alone,’ says Juan Atkins. ‘We were selling more records in Chicago than even Chicago artists. We kind of went hand in hand with the house movement. To a certain degree, I think we helped start that thing. ’Cos we were the first ones making records. Jesse Saunders came out with that record [“On and On”] maybe two or three weeks after we had “No UFOs” out, and he was the first guy in Chicago who was making tracks.
‘Chicago was one of a couple of cities in America where disco never died,’ Atkins continues. ‘The DJs kept playing it on radio and the clubs. And since there were no new disco records coming through they were looking to fill the gap with whatever they could find.’ This meant Euro synth-pop, Italian ‘progressive’ and, eventually, the early Detroit tracks. The Belleville Three quickly got to know everybody in the Chicago scene. And they started to make the four hour drive to Chicago every weekend to hear the Hot Mix Five – Farley Jackmaster Funk, Steve Silk Hurley, Ralphi Rosario, Mickey Oliver, and Kenny Jammin’ Jason – spin on local radio station WBMX. ‘It seemed like they had mixes going on all day on the radio,’ remembers Kevin Saunderson. ‘Me and Derrick would drive to Chicago every weekend just to hear the mix shows and be a part of the scene, see what’s going on and get new records. It was an inspiration for us. Especially once we started making records, you couldn’t keep us out of Chicago.’
Bar the odd session that May would do for Electrifyin’ Mojo, you couldn’t hear mixing on the radio in Detroit. Despite its Europhile tendencies, Detroit was always more of a funk city than a disco town. This difference came through in the music: the rhythm programming in Detroit techno was more syncopated, had more of a groove to it. House had a metronomic, four-to-the-floor beat, what Eddie Fowlkes calls ‘a straight straight foot’ – a reference to ‘Farley’s Foot’, the mechanical kick drum that Chicago DJs like Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk and Frankie Knuckles would superimpose over their disco mixes. Chicago house tended to feature diva vocals, disco-style; Detroit tracks were almost always instrumentals. The final big difference was that Detroit techno, while arty and upwardly mobile, was a straight black scene. Chicago house was a gay black scene.
Disco’s Revenge
‘Disco music is a disease. I call it Disco Dystrophy. The people victimized by this killer disease walk around like zombies. We must do everything possible to stop the spread of this plague.’
– DJ Steve Dahl, 1979
‘I don’t know that I have any objection to dancing, I just don’t do it. Sort of like sucking other men’s dicks. I don’t feel that there is anything wrong with it, but it doesn’t appeal to me.’
– Chicago rocker and technophobe Steve Albini,
speaking in Reactor #8.0, 1993
Sucking, of course, was always the accusation levelled at disco. At the height of ‘disco sucks’ fever in 1979, Chicago’s Comiskey Park baseball stadium was the site for a ‘Disco Demolition Derby’, which was organized by Detroit DJ Steve Dahl, and took place halfway through a double-header between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. But when the 100,000 plus records were dynamited, discophobic mobs rampaged on to the field; the rioting, post-explosion debris and damage to the pitch resulted in the game being forfeited to the Tigers.
The ‘Disco Sucks’ phenomenon recalls the Nazi book burnings, or the exhibitions of Degenerate Art. Modern day spectacles of kulturkampf like Comiskey were impelled by a similar disgust: the belief that disco was rootless, inauthentic, decadent, a betrayal of the virile principles of the true American volk music, rock ’n’ roll. Hence T-Shirts like ‘Death Before Disco’, hence organizations like DREAD (Detroit Rockers Engaged In The Abolition of Disco) and Dahl’s own ‘Insane Coho Lips Antidisco Army’.
Discophobia wasn’t just limited to white rockers, though; many blacks despised it as a soul-less, mechanistic travesty of da funk. And so the sleeve of Funkadelic’s 1979 album Uncle Jam Wants You bore the slogan ‘it’s the rescue dance music “from the blahs” band’. Funkateer critic Greg Tate coined the term ‘DisCOINTELPRO’ – a pun on the FBI’s campaign to infiltrate black radical organizations like the Panthers – to denigrate disco as ‘a form of record industry sabotage . . . [which] destroyed the self-supporting black band movement out of which P-Funk . . . grew.’ In 1987, Public Enemy’s Chuck D articulated hip hop’s antipathy to house, disco’s descendant, telling me: ‘it’s sophisticated, anti-black, anti-feel, the most ARTIFICIAL shit I ever heard. It represents the gay scene, it’s separating blacks from their past and their culture, it’s upwardly mobile.’
Chicago house music was born of a double exclusion, then: not just black, but gay and black. Its refusal, its cultural dissidence, took the form of embracing a music that the majority culture deemed dead and buried. House didn’t just resurrect disco, it mutated the form, intensifying the very aspects of the music that most offended white rockers and black funkateers: the machinic repetition, the synthetic and electronic textures, the rootlessness, the ‘depraved’ hypersexuality and ‘decadent’ druggy hedonism. Stylistically, house assembled itself from disregarded and degraded pop-culture detritus that the mainstream considered passé, disposable, un-American: the proto-disco of the Salsoul and Philadelphia International labels, English synthpop, and Moroder’s Eurodisco.
If Dusseldorf was the ultimate source for Detroit techno, you could perhaps argue that the prehistory of house begins in Munich. Here it was that Giorgio Moroder invented Eurodisco. Setting up Say Yes Productions with British guitarist Pete Bellote, Moroder recruited Donna Summer, then singing in rock musicals like Hair and Godspell
, and transformed her into a disco ice queen. Moroder can claim three innovations that laid the foundations for house. First, the dramatically extended megamix: 1975’s seventeen minute long orgasmotronic epic ‘Love To Love You Baby’. Second, the four-to-the-floor disco pulse rhythm: Moroder used a drum machine to simplify funk rhythms to make it easier for whites to dance. Third, and perhaps most crucial, was Moroder’s creation of purely electronic dance music. One of his earliest songs – ‘Son of My Father’, a 1972 UK Number One for Chicory Tip – was one of the very first synth-pop hits. But it was Donna Summer’s 1977 global smash ‘I Feel Love’ that was the real revolution. Constructed almost entirely out of synthesized sounds, ‘I Feel Love’ had no verse or chorus laid out in advance; Summer improvised her gaseous, eroto-mystic vocals over Moroder and Bellote’s grid-like juggernaut of percussive pulses and clockwork clicks. The result, at once pornotopian and curiously unbodied, was acid house and trance techno avant la lettre.
In the absence of fresh disco product, Chicago DJs had to rework the existing material into new shapes. House – a term that originally referred to the kind of music you’d hear at The Warehouse, a gay nightclub in Chicago – was born not as a distinct genre but as an approach to making ‘dead’ music come alive, by cut ’n’ mix, segue, montage, and other DJ tricks. Just as the term disco derived from the discotheque (a place where you heard recorded music, not live performances), so house began as a disc-jockey culture. In fact, it was an imported DJ culture, transplanted from New York by Frankie Knuckles, who DJ-ed at The Warehouse from 1979 until 1983.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 5
