i've bee saying this for ages, on this forum too, meeting with considerable objection. Thanks to David Toop for saying it during his recent lectures, and Tony Herrington for following up in the pages of The Wire:
techno didn't emerge from tabula rasa, and Kraftwerk should be seen as firmly WITHIN a lineage of electronic music innovators, who all paved the way toward the techno music of today, and NOT the game-changing sole inventors as they have been made out to be.
Reasserting the roots of Kraftwerk’s sound in African-American R&B and jazz reveals how the soul of electronic dance music is being throttled by the dead hand of the culture industry. By Tony Herrington.
To address the common negative responses i have seen over and over:
"Everyone knows this"
it shouldn't be controversial, and it should be obvious. But speaking from personal experience, the resistance is overwhelming when ever it is brought up. And not regular joes off the street, these are music journalists and academics. Just look at the comments under The Wire article. These are not morons... even smart enough to try to invoke "post colonialism" to justify their denialist position. So i disagree, that "history will sort itself out", and believe it is important to fight for versions of narratives which closer approximate truth.
"Kraftwerk themselves said they wanted to get away from the blues scale and did not want to sound American"
This needs to be seen in the context of an earlier statement documented in Wolfgang Flür's book, that they listened to tons of James Brown and were trying to emulate that and other Black-American artists in their music. The entire Kraftwerk project should be understood as recreating Afro-American pop music in a different way; or, robots playing Funk and Motown.
"Techno didn't come from the ghettos. Those detroit guys were all Euro-philes."
While the Detroit guys might have had stylistic aspirations, and took aesthetic ideas from Europe, and may have wanted to appear slick and posh, surrounding themselves with minimalist furnishings, it is unlikely that these were anything other than affectations. And regardless of the actual economic background of Derrick May and his friends (pretty sure poor), it is certain that they grew up immersed in the culture of the underclass, which shaped their music much more than any other other factor.
"But Kraftwerk revolutionized music!"
"music has always been about a marriage of cultures, with much cross pollination."
No doubt, but it is sad when such statements are used to preserve a status quo of fabricated myths which massively, routinely, systematically, marginalizes the primary pollinators, and deifies a secondary one as the all important inventor of new worlds. Statements like this basically mean: "The roots of techno are so numerous and complex, with so many different strands... why don't we just keep it simple, and stay with the currently widely accepted narrative, and just say that it's a predominantly white European thing."
"Well, all modern rhythmic music have African roots, so what is all this fuss about?"
This is simultaneously paying verbiage to an all encompassing abstract "African Essence", and refusing to give due credit to real, in the flesh, contemporary Afro-American innovators. What is being said here is that "EVERYTHING and EVERYONE came from Africa. Africa is everywhere, like the air we breathe, thus it exists and it doesn't exist, and there is not much need to trace lineage"
____________________
all these responses equal a desire to preserve the status quo, which paints an image of Kraftwerk having invented techno out of nothing. "everyone invented everything, everything is African (meaningless statement), so what is the use of trying to discern influences? Why re-think history? Lets just leave the narrative as it is, perfectly Eurocentric and White supremacist the way everyone finds comfortable.
techno didn't emerge from tabula rasa, and Kraftwerk should be seen as firmly WITHIN a lineage of electronic music innovators, who all paved the way toward the techno music of today, and NOT the game-changing sole inventors as they have been made out to be.
"African-American contribution to Kraftwerk’s sound has been routinely sidelined by three decades of rhetoric proclaiming them der Patenonkels of techno and electro."
Reasserting the roots of Kraftwerk’s sound in African-American R&B and jazz reveals how the soul of electronic dance music is being throttled by the dead hand of the culture industry. By Tony Herrington.
To address the common negative responses i have seen over and over:
"Everyone knows this"
it shouldn't be controversial, and it should be obvious. But speaking from personal experience, the resistance is overwhelming when ever it is brought up. And not regular joes off the street, these are music journalists and academics. Just look at the comments under The Wire article. These are not morons... even smart enough to try to invoke "post colonialism" to justify their denialist position. So i disagree, that "history will sort itself out", and believe it is important to fight for versions of narratives which closer approximate truth.
"Kraftwerk themselves said they wanted to get away from the blues scale and did not want to sound American"
This needs to be seen in the context of an earlier statement documented in Wolfgang Flür's book, that they listened to tons of James Brown and were trying to emulate that and other Black-American artists in their music. The entire Kraftwerk project should be understood as recreating Afro-American pop music in a different way; or, robots playing Funk and Motown.
"Techno didn't come from the ghettos. Those detroit guys were all Euro-philes."
While the Detroit guys might have had stylistic aspirations, and took aesthetic ideas from Europe, and may have wanted to appear slick and posh, surrounding themselves with minimalist furnishings, it is unlikely that these were anything other than affectations. And regardless of the actual economic background of Derrick May and his friends (pretty sure poor), it is certain that they grew up immersed in the culture of the underclass, which shaped their music much more than any other other factor.
"But Kraftwerk revolutionized music!"
David Toop on facebook: You say that Kraftwerk was the first group to propose a complete transformation of music and lay a whole philosophical groundwork to it. That ignores Sun Ra, to give one example. It also works from hindsight. Kraftwerk seem a lot more important in this moment than they did in the 1970s, precisely because of their own mythopoiea and the distortions of history.
"music has always been about a marriage of cultures, with much cross pollination."
No doubt, but it is sad when such statements are used to preserve a status quo of fabricated myths which massively, routinely, systematically, marginalizes the primary pollinators, and deifies a secondary one as the all important inventor of new worlds. Statements like this basically mean: "The roots of techno are so numerous and complex, with so many different strands... why don't we just keep it simple, and stay with the currently widely accepted narrative, and just say that it's a predominantly white European thing."
"Well, all modern rhythmic music have African roots, so what is all this fuss about?"
This is simultaneously paying verbiage to an all encompassing abstract "African Essence", and refusing to give due credit to real, in the flesh, contemporary Afro-American innovators. What is being said here is that "EVERYTHING and EVERYONE came from Africa. Africa is everywhere, like the air we breathe, thus it exists and it doesn't exist, and there is not much need to trace lineage"
____________________
all these responses equal a desire to preserve the status quo, which paints an image of Kraftwerk having invented techno out of nothing. "everyone invented everything, everything is African (meaningless statement), so what is the use of trying to discern influences? Why re-think history? Lets just leave the narrative as it is, perfectly Eurocentric and White supremacist the way everyone finds comfortable.
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