Monday, January 28, 2002, 1:25:13 PM, you wrote: DV> Any good tips on educating "trance kiddies" (or anyone with a seeminly DV> limited or superficial taste in electronic music) about the broader DV> world of techno and electronic must, without coming across as a pompous DV> asshole? I'm sure most of you have encountered the situation, and its DV> difficult not to start into how much the people they listen to suck and why.
I took a candy raver to dinner the other night, and I mentioned some new tracks I had done that she hadn't heard. "Are they trance?" "No, more techno." "Oh, so like Frankie Bones kinda stuff? Didn't he start techno?" (its a good thing I didn't have food in my mouth right then) Its tough to describe what techno actually is without appearing to attack other genres, but what seems to work for me is to word it like this: Techno usually has three simultaneous components that make it distinct from other electronic dance music: funk, futurism, and feeling. "Funk" means that instead of being rigidly-structured like trance, techno doesn't have a consistent pattern of builds and breaks. Even a lot of your "looped bangers" are more shuffly and stuttery than the majority of trance records. Trance is futuristic, and sometimes it has genuine feeling, but its usually not funky. "Futurism" is as much a conceptual quality as it is a textural one. Even in Carl Craig's jazzier works, there is always a hint of the machine, of the robot, of tomorrow. George Clinton used synthesizers to great extent, but funky as Parliament can be (hot damn), its not particularly futuristic, and therefore not techno. "Feeling" is perhaps the same thing that some call "soul". Its genuine emotion. Techno can weep and sing at the same time. Music that exists only as a danceable groove, even if its a funky, futuristic groove, probably isn't techno. On the other hand, there is music such as happy hardcore that is certainly emotional, but its moods are exaggerated so much as to form a caricature of emotion instead of conveying honest feeling. Funk+futurism+feeling=techno. Of course, its not a perfect equation, because it will also give you jungle sometimes, and there are exceptions to it within techno as well . . but without sitting someone down and force feeding them the classics, its the best I've been able to come up with. More often than not, I find that if you tell a trance kid about how techno was started in the midwest in the eighties by some black guys, you'll rock their world enough that they'll take an interest and maybe ask to borrow some records. Of course, you might want to just give them a CDR so that they aren't tempted to trade your rare LPs for pills . . . ------ Brian "balistic" Prince http://www.bprince.com - art and techno --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
