I'm reading 'Energy Flash' by Simon Reynolds published by Picador (1998). In this book and more specific in chapter eight entitled 'The Future Sound Of Detroit' I read some 'interesting' viewpoints for discussion. Here's the entire last part of the chapter:
KEEPING THE FAITH Jeff Mills belongs to a tradition of black scholar-musicians and autodidacts: Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Derrick May, DJ Spooky. Instead of inspiring thoughtless, sweaty fun, Mills believes dance music should be the vehicle for lofty intellectualism and weighty-verging-on-ponderous concepts. Let me be very very clear, he says, with the barest hint of annoyance. Underground Resistance wasnt militant, nor was it angry... Im not angry now... The music that I make now has absolutely nothing to do with colour. It has nothing to do with man/woman, East/West, up/down, but more [to do with] the mind. The mind has no colour... Theres this perception that if youre black and you make music, then you must be angry. Or you must be deep. Or you must be out to get money and women. Or you must be high when you made that record. Its one of the four. And the media does a really good job of staying within those four categories. But in these cases, its neither of those. To which you might respond, whats left? If you remove race, class, gender, sexuality, the body and the craving for intoxication from the picture, what exactly remains to fuel the music? Just the pure play of ideation. The result is music that appeals to a disinterested and disembodied consciousness. The formalism of minimal techno has some parallels with minimalism in the pictorial arts and in avant-classical composition; both have been critiqued as spiritualized evasions of political reality, as attempts to transcend the messy and profane realm of History and Materiality in the quest for the timeless and territorially unbounded. If the musical legacy of Derrick May and Jeff Mills is largely unimpeachable, the mentality they have fathered throughout the world of 'serious' techno is, I Believe, a largely pernicious influence. This anti-Dionysian mindset favours elegance over energy, serenity over passion, restraint over abandon. It's a value system shared by Detroit purists both within the Motor City and across the globe. In Detroit itself, artists like Alan Oldham, Stacey Pullen/Silent Phase, Kenny Larkin, Dan Curtin, Claude Young, Jay Denham, Marc Kinchen, Terence Dixon and John Beltran, uphold the tradition. Many of these producers were corralled on to a 1996 double CD compiled by Edie 'Flashin" Fowlkes, which he titled True People as a stinging rebuke to the rest of the world for daring to tamper with the Detroit blueprint. Detroit is living in denial. Techno has long since slipped out of its custodianship, the evolution-through-mutation of music has thrown up such mongrels as bleep-and-bass, Belgian hardcore, jungle, trance and gabba, all of which owe as much to other cities (the Bronx; Kingston, Jamaica; Dusseldorf; Sheffield; London; Chicago) as they do to Detroit. The ancestral lineage of Detroit has been contaminated by 'alien' genes; the music's been 'bastardized'. But lest we forget, illegitimate heirs tend to lead more interesting lives. If anything, the idea and ideal of Detroit is even stronger outside the city, thanks to British Detroit-purists. Leading lights in the realm of neo-Detroit abstract dance include the British labels Soma, Ferox, Ifach and Peacefrog, and producers like Peter Ford, Dave angel, Neil Landstrum, Funk DVoid, Ian OBrien (who titled a track Mad Mike Disease as a nod to the endemic influence of the UR/Red Planet maestro), The Surgeon, Russ Gabriel, Luke Slater, Adam Beyer and Mark Broom (whose alter ego Midnight Funk Association is named after the Electrifyin Mojos legendary Detroit radio show). It is a world where people talk not of labels but imprints, and funk is spelt phunk to give it an air of, er, phuturism. One of the most vocal of the Detroit-acolytes is tech-jazz artist Kirk deGiorgio. From early efforts like Dance Intellect to his late nineties As One output, deGiorgio has dedicated himself to the notion that Detroit techno is the successor to the synth-oriented jazz-funk of fusioneers like Herbie Hancock and George Duke. I never saw techno as anything else but a continuation of black music, he told Muzik magazine in 1997. I didnt think of it as any new kind of music. It was just that the technology and the sounds were different. This neo-conservative attitude the self-effacing notion that white musicians like deGiorgio himself have nothing to add to black music; the idea that music never really undergoes revolutions reminds me of nothing so much as the British blues-bore purists of the late sixties and early seventies. Actually, given that Detroit techno was a response to European electro-pop, we should really reverse the analogy: Atkins, May and Saunderson are equivalent to Clapton, Beck and Page, virtuoso players worshipped for their purist fidelity to the original music (Kraftwerk for the Belleville Three, Muddy Waters for the ex-Yardbirds). The hip-hop influences (breakbeats and samples) that revolutionized British rave music are studiously shunned by the Detroit purists, who believe synthesizers are more musical than computers. There is literally no future in this traditionalist approach; the notion that the music of Derrick May (or Carl Craig, or Jeff Mills) represents the Way, the Light and the Truth is no more helpful than the early seventies belief that Clapton Is God. This is not to say that Detroit techno has nothing more to offer electronic music. For instance, Kevin Saunderson (the most impurist of the Belleville Three he even put out great hardcore tracks in 1992 like Umptempo and Mental Techno, using the alter-ego Tronikhouse) has inspired some exciting records, like Dave Clarkes Red series. In the wake of UR outfit Drexciya, the Detroit area has also seen an upsurge of electro-influenced music-artists like Ectomorph, Aux 88 and Dopplereffekt, labels like Interdimensional Transmissions and Direct Beat. Returning to Detroit technos early eighties roots as a distant cousin of New York electro, these producers have thrillingly revived Kraftwerks glacial Germanic geometry and rigid drum machine beats, but breaking with Detroits overly refined aura they also add a booty-shaking boom influenced by Miami bass musics lewd low frequency oscillations. Meanwhile, in Europe, the Tresor-affiliated labels Basic Channel and Chain Reaction have brilliantly pursued their vision of tech-house abstraction through a million shades of lustrous grey. But for the most part, European neo-Detroit techno-phunk is music that feels anal and inhibited, crippled by its fear of heterodoxy. Its radicalism is defined by its refusals, by what it denies itself overt tunefulness, explicit emotion, vulgar exuberance, breakbeats, intoxication. Detroit-purism was born of the impulse to de-crass-ify techno and restore it to its pre-rave sobriety and subtlety. A cruel irony, then, that Colin Favers long-running Abstrakt Dance show on KISS FM was terminated in the spring of 1997, in order to make room for happy hardcore, the cheesy-and-cheerful sound of rave fundamentalism at its most defiantly Ed up.
