Edit: Of course, what differentiates electro from Techno is the same thing that differntiates NYC from Detroit!! [/I]
Please not this again. A definition of techno that makes it
all about what detroit put into it it, also makes it one of the smallest, least innovative and most boring and inhibited genres of music that have ever existed. Detroit is just another piece of the puzzle that lead to the 90s explosion of electronic dance music (what I'd call "techno"), and not even the most important one. I think Simon Reynolds said it best:
"The thing about Detroit's centrality is that it was only constructed after the event. At the time, it was considered an adjunct to and subset of Chicago house. You only had people going on about Detroit as this lost origin and founding set of principles when hardcore took over in 91-92. It was a defensive, reactive, and literally reactionary myth. The fact is that without Detroit, the whole rave thing would have happened much the same way because it was really build on acid house, deep house, and then the Italian piano tunes. Without Chicago, nothing would have happened. If there had only ever been Detroit techno... there'd be no rave scene. There'd just be this network of small, hipster scenes in various cities around the world. Probably not even that."
As I've said here before, EBM was just as important a part of it all as detroit. In germany (and other parts of continental europe) there was, during the eighties, a dance scene built around it called "techno", and that evolved into the european rave scene when acid arrived. Why is this less important than a detroit scene that only became trendy much later, when snobs needed some authentic root music to believe in?
Oh, and the Dan Sicko book is an offensively one-sided take on techno: Techno IS detroit, and Sicko has nothing to offer than the myth.