Wow ... I wasn't trying to read all that into the definitions. Just
putting the fragile nature of such terms in perspective, now that a
decade's gone by. "Techno" = "Detroit Techno" only holding for two
years (88-90) seems like so little time now.
-d
At 11:43 PM -0500 10/19/01, Kent williams wrote:
On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Dan Sicko wrote:
>>Trance in its roots was a marketing tool to identify techno with melody
That's a real shame that the definition of "techno" had degraded that
quickly in the early 90s, don't you think?
Well real Detroit techno was over before it started in some respects.
Kind of like the Velvet Underground -- by the time anyone paid attention
it was long since gone. Later on it was seminal in influencing a later
generation. The people nowadays that call what they do techno, and more
particular Detroit techno are influenced and informed by the originators,
but Techno stopped being 'TECHNO' when it spread beyond a very exclusive
scene that only really involved a few hundred people in and around
Detroit.
Which isn't to say that good music in the dance idiom stopped in 1990 --
it's just not the same thing. There's a global dance culture that has
as much to do with fashion and pills as it does with music, and thousands
of people producing music on every continent, each with their own agenda.
About trance: I've seen a couple of trance DJs that I really liked, and
it was because they have taste and seek out interesting things outside the
mainstream. The real problem with trance is the same problem with things
like filter house, drum and bass, and two step: Specific, limited
production tricks and rhythms, that a producer should use once or twice
and then try something new, become codified and serve as the basis of a
thousand slight variations, all inferior to the original. That there's
a market for all that cheap repetition says something about the utilitarian
nature of dance music -- DJs always want something new and slamming, but
it can't be so new they lose their audience.
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