| -----Original Message----- | From: Lester Kenyatta Spence [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2001 5:43 PM | | Hm. Although I don't think it is an accident that what we think of as | "techno" comes out of Detroit for the reasons you mentioned, | I actually think hip-hop might be the first post-industrial music...and | that techno is the first to actually REPRESENT itself as post-industrial. | Do you see the distinction?
Yes, I see what you mean, and it makes sense... | But hiphop is the first music to violate those forms...and it | was produced | by some of the first casualties of the industrial | era--"colored" (black | american, black carribbean, latino, some white) men and women who were | unable to get jobs in the plants during the seventies. It | took a low-tech | approach with high tech tools and created a sound that was a | pastiche of | bits and pieces of previous work. And in juxtaposition to | the megaband, | all that was needed was "two turntables and a mic." Note how | the scale | becomes more human...in pointed juxtaposition to the industrial trend. And I guess that a characteristic of post-industrial music is an industrial level of *energy* suddenly being directed into sound rather than into mass production - something that hip-hop and techno share, in my opinion. You get the sense of there being an industrial infrastructure either lying dormant or in decay; while a lot of rock'n'roll always sounded like "work, work, work" music (and having worked in factories playing MOR radio stations all day, I've always associated rock music with the process of industrial production), both hip-hop and techno sound like, "well, here's all this machinery and industrialised sectors of the city, but it's not doing anything, just slowly decaying, and here's what that decay sounds like...". Perhaps techno takes it a bit further into "...and here's what these machines *should* be doing!" - hence actually representing itself as post-industrial music in a way that hip-hop doesn't? You are completely right about the actual scale though - with hip-hop and techno, the scale is much more human, which is interesting as both genres seem to have a wider "scope" than rock'n'roll. Rock'n'roll tends to talk about human situations, but the scale is vast; while hip-hop and techno talk about wider or more abstract things while paradoxically working on a much more human scale in terms of how the music is made, performed and distributed. | Now the themes are definitely NOT post-industrial...but I | think the music | itself was as far as the social factors leading up to its creation. Although it's possible to maybe point to some early hip-hop tracks that actually were distinctly post-industrial - "The Message", "Ray-gun-omics"? But you're right, the themes generally aren't post-industrial. Techno's avoidance of explicit themes is possibly one of the most post-industrial aspects of the music, in a way - what do you think? | (i forwarded this to a friend of mine who recently wrote a book called | BEETHOVEN'S ANVIL which deals with music and culture broadly | considered.) Has this book been published? I'm very interested in that sort of thing and would make an effort to pick it up if I could find it anywhere... Brendan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
