Anthony "Shake" Shakir - "All we did was put a black face on it"

zhao

there are no accidents
and just for argument's sake:

DJ Bone rails against commercialisation of a sound he loves, he's dissing the silly trance shit that was all over German MTV in the 90s. He doesn't say a word about race in your quote.

i never mentioned race, but here is another quote from Bones:

SmSh: So, in other interviews you talk a lot about international DJs�� DJs from Europe, wherever, biting on the early Detroit Techno sound and repackaging it. Is that something you still see happening today in a major way?

DJ Bone: Yeah, major way. They might not want to admit it. Well, they piggyback and as soon as they felt they were at the pinnacle, they drop it -- drop the association. Everyone was describing their shit, ��it��s Detroit-esque��, it��s ��Detroit-lite��, it��s ��Detroit-inspired��. But as soon as they got to the point where they thought they were the shit, then they dropped it: ��I��m my own person, I like to sound different...��

Bullshit.

That��s the same motherfucker who was coming to Detroit and taking notes, watching people, know what I mean? Fuck that.

And it might come across as harsh when I say it but it��s been like that...

SmSh: Have you heard of Motor City Drum Ensemble?

DJ Bone: Yes.

SmSh: I think it��s like a dude from Stuttgart but he��s got the 70��s afro-chic packaging..

DJ Bone: Oh yeah... I��m really upset with that. On the record, I was so upset when I met Terry Lee Brown Jr. Have you heard of him?

SmSh: No.

DJ Bone: He was doing house music. I think he��s out of Germany, I don��t know, somewhere in Europe. His logo is this black guy, right, with big lips and a short little afro... it wasn��t a caricature that offended me, it was just somebody that looked kinda soulful, and everybody who bought his record thought that the picture was him.

That��s him, you know. I met him in London and I just went off. They introduced me and it was some tall white guy from Germany.

SmSh: Looking like one of the dudes in Kraftwerk?

DJ Bone: So, straight up, I was like why the fuck do you have this black guy on your records -- they couldn��t believe I said that -- but that��s just wrong...

SmSh: What did he say?

DJ Bone: He said that he didn��t want to be judged on what he looked like, ��it��s about the music��, whatever... yeah, but then put the music out there, don��t put a fake-ass face out there. Go ahead and be faceless.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
and i'm not saying that Shake has a bone to pick (sorry couldn't resist) with Bone, but that is the kind of attitude he seems to be reacting against.
 

bob effect

somnambulist
I met DJ Bone once. According to him, every single form of dance music ever other than house is ripping off Detroit techno, because they did everything first.
 

Krasner

Well-known member
I don't want to get into extended quote wars or elongate an already well worn debate but Chez Damier has some interesting thoughts on the history of Chicago House:

But I often find myself questioning people's experience [of that period]. Although I don't claim to be an expert I can literally say that I've witnessed quite a bit. And when I say witnessed I don't mean hearsay, I mean that I was actually there. I hear some stories and some people's interpretation of it and I think, "That's all wrong."

People seldom mention Herb Kent who, to me, was the father of it all. He was the one that could play disco at the same time as the B-52s and totally educate me—I didn't know who the B-52s were [before that]—who can give you punk rock and disco and Italo all in the same breath. These were the people that changed my life. [But people] want to say, "It came from this kind of underground black gay club," which is not a problem—and I'm not taking anything away from that—but there was always something parallel happening. And when I went to the white gay clubs that were promoting the British invasion: The Thompson Twins, the whole Sheffield sound as well as Italo [disco]. And these other urban kids were also experiencing that, but they were combining it with disco and [putting] their interpretation on it. So I get so confused when I get into the whole [history of it].

The point being that influence and musical heritage is a complex multifaceted thing. Attaching primacy or cause to a particular influence (whether it be Soul/Disco or Euro-Synth) is always to grossly simplify.
 

ether

Well-known member
Shake is the man. He's one of the only detroit guys who sounds properly humble as well as being totally into the tunes on a ridiculous level. Any interview I've read he always sounds bang on.

true, he never seems to have a chip on his shoulder, you can understand how some of his Detroit peers feel marginalized geographically because of Detroits social problems and under-appreciated musically (certainly within the states) but you get the impression that people like omar s. mad mike etc. are really, well... pissed off.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
I don't want to get into extended quote wars or elongate an already well worn debate but Chez Damier has some interesting thoughts on the history of Chicago House:

The point being that influence and musical heritage is a complex multifaceted thing. Attaching primacy or cause to a particular influence (whether it be Soul/Disco or Euro-Synth) is always to grossly simplify.

i agree to an extent, and that extent stops at absolute relativism.

where did disco and Italo and British invasion and The Thompson Twins and the whole Sheffield sound come from in the first place?
 

massrock

Well-known member
where Europe would like to feel like it invented important stuff while through out history major technological and other inventions have been made else where and brought there.
Like from Japan.

That's not a facetious point. You talk about the 'structure' coming from disco or funk or whatever but, and this is not a diss of techno, and not saying this is always the case or all there is to it, but a lot of the time the 'structure' of techno is derived from jamming on a loop with elements being tweaked, effected and brought in and out. It's a natural consequence of the way these machines work, of expressing something through allowing the machines to express themselves, so to speak. That to me is what techno is - as big as any other influence on techno is the way sequencers, drum machines and synths works when you connect them up and play them for what they are. It's machine music, techno. Most western music is in 4/4. Most sequencers default to 4/4, 120 bpm. Fruity loops defaults to 140 - was big with grime producers, but which way round was the influence? When you make a 1/2/4 bar loop in a sequencer at around 120-150bpm and let it loop, which again is often the default, play with the knobs and the faders on your mixer, you will have something that sounds like techno. Other than that, anything goes, just feel that machine funk. There's no rules about what 'phrasing' or which chords to use, at all. One thing that became popular was parallel chords, that's also very much a 'nuum thing. But why was that? Apart from the fact that it sounds 'futuristic' and 'alien', it was because it's a natural consequence of using samplers, if you sample a chord and play it up and down the keyboard you get parallel chords and weird key shifts.

In short, it's the fucken machines.

zhao said:
but although a prominent element, techno is about more than the 4/4 beat. like i said, there are the basslines, the keys, the phrasing and the track structure to consider. and in these respects it is directly descendent of disco, and funk, and earlier African American forms.
 
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PeteUM

It's all grist
In definite agreement with the anti-reductionist and pro "it's music!" sentiments in this thread but I'm glad the machines have been mentioned. Was it in that Monolake interview in The Wire a few months back where he talked about the perfect elegant simplicity of the circuit diagram of the 808 designed by an anonymous engineer?
 

grizzleb

Well-known member
In definite agreement with the anti-reductionist and pro "it's music!" sentiments in this thread but I'm glad the machines have been mentioned. Was it in that Monolake interview in The Wire a few months back where he talked about the perfect elegant simplicity of the circuit diagram of the 808 designed by an anonymous engineer?
Yeah it was. I think the 'let the machines do the work' element of electronic music is heavily underplayed.
 

luka

Well-known member
yeah more attention needs to be paid to the machines. i dont think thats remotely joyless. its sort of just obvious.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
fair point about the machines, massrock.

but if there is a single most direct precedent for Detroit Techno, more than any other style, it would be Chicago House.

and if you consider Techno as an extension of House (which was itself an extension of Disco)... if you consider Techno as the next phase in the continual process of abstracting, streamlining, and stripping down of 20th century American dance music, then it is not so difficult to see the cultural lineage.

Techno is House with the influence of Synth pop, of Belgian New-Beat, of YMO, etc. but no matter how electronic and mechanical it became, and no matter how much the process of reduction brought the music to its raw essence, it does not mean the cultural ties it has with its roots can be severed.

no matter how alien the forms have become, its "soul" remains intact.
 

Martin Dust

Techno Zen Master
It's not very clear what you are referring to or what that's supposed to mean. Wrong things? Joyless?

Here's a visual

poking_a_dead_goat_with_a_stick.jpg
 

zhao

there are no accidents
when there are people who insist that it is wrong to care about something, who get angry that something is talked about, it's probably a good idea to care and talk about it.
 

Martin Dust

Techno Zen Master
when there are people who insist that it is wrong to care about something, who get angry that something is talked about, it's probably a good idea to care and talk about it.

I'm not angry at all, pretty chilled, it's just so boring and done to death, rinsed I believe.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
I'm not angry at all, pretty chilled, it's just so boring and done to death, rinsed I believe.

well no one is forcing you to read the thread.

and maybe not you but there are certainly a few who get pretty upset about the issues that i bring up:


ZHAO: conspiracy or reality?

Does he really exist, or is he merely a script, combining all the best of pompous message-board rubbish, generated to anger and frustrate us?

As Zhao's spokesperson Id just like to say that he admits he's full of shit and that he wants to sincerely apologise to Dissensus for his silly threads.

when people get this angry, it usually means there is something worth looking into.
 

vimothy

yurp
zhao,

droid was pretty obviously not angry there. But he was, in his own idiosyncratic way, actually making a substantive point (in the context of the thread) and you seem to have misunderstood this.
 
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FairiesWearBoots

Well-known member
Zhao you are hilarious, you sound like some hip hop fans I have met, white guys (who wish they were black) going on about their people's struggle:rolleyes: your argument seems to reduce to the fact that EVERYTHING stems from Africa, and no-one seems to disagree with you on that?
 
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