On Fri, 24 Oct 2003, marc christensen wrote: > The canonical history holds that it was indeed out of the marketing > of the Ten Records Techno comp that the term "techno" first came to > be used to describe the 313 sound and differentiate it more > concretely from the sounds of Chicago's scene. But there's more than > one example of May in particular mentioning that he doesn't like > techno as a term. "Techno" was clearly Juan's afterthought, and it > suited Rushton and the marketing campaign just fine.
I think the canonical history is actually wrong on this point. Take the phrase "techno's here to stay" in "Future." Now that term could mean damn near anything within the context of that song...but given that I had conversations with my partners (in Detroit) before '87 about "techno" music, I'm arguing that the term was applied to what we now think of as techno before it was used as a marketing slogan. > Up until '88, "techno" did not exist in Detroit. I disagree. But I do agree that there were a number of other names used to describe both house and detroit's music (whether it was house, detroit house, or prep music, or progressive). > If we can give up just a touch of our collective 313-centricity, just > for an instant, and ask seriously what House/Techno would have been > without the terms to stabilize them, I think the relatively > provisional and even kind of arbitrary limits of the genres become > clearer. Sure Chicago & Detroit had rather different sounds, but the > sounds within each city's scene were also wildly divergent. The question though is, for purely categorical purposes is the variance within each city as great as the variance between the cities? I have to think really hard about this one. > "House" today rarely sounds as broad, or experimental, as it did when it > was local, and stood as a local practice. Thinking off the top of my head in Chicago you had three different streams. The stuff that relied heavily on sampling (house nation, jack your body, farley farley, etc.), the stuff that relied heavily on vocals (you used to love me, you ain't really house, etc.), and the stuff that relied heavily on bass lines (no way back instrumental, acid trax). This stuff was very different than anything else we'd heard...but it really wasn't "broad" the way we'd think of broad now. In fact I'd argue that house now is much broader than it was when it was a nascent art form. There are a number of reasons for this. There are more artists working within the genre, they are spread over the world rather than concentrated within one city, there is both international diversity and racial diversity in the artists (and consumers), and there is more technical sophistication. > The earliest tracks (and > mixing practices) of the belleville three, plus d-wynn, mills, > baxter, fawlkes, and *all* the other folks who were already > well-established by '87-'88, were also very different, > track-by-track, from each other.(1) There was a *lot* of musical > experimentation going down at the time, in both cities. They were different enough that you could tell when Model 500 was responsible for a track as opposed to Fowlkes. But they weren't so different that you couldn't hear them as opposed to chicago tracks and not be able to say where the tracks came from. lks
