What Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music[0] has to say on Electro: > There are whole libraries full of books about how white music culture is just a safe and bo

What Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music[0] has to say on Electro: > There are whole libraries full of books about how white music culture is just a safe and boring pastiche of black music culture. From Jazz to Blues to Rock n Roll to Funk and to a lesser extent even Hip Hop, white America's greatest musical innovations have all been sheepishly stolen from the black man, often without any credit or compensation. > Rarely is it mentioned that cultural appropriation works both ways, that on a select few occasions the black man has also stolen -- and expanded upon -- the innovations of square-ass stuffy-headed white dorks. Electro is one of those genres. And those square-ass stuffy-headed white dorks were Kraftwerk. (he also asks important questions like "If Bambaataa is the focal point for the immortalization of Kraftwerk and the existence of Electro, would we be having this discussion if he sampled YMO instead?") and on Techno: > Affluent middle class black youth living in the peaceful Detroit suburb of Belleville Michigan in the late 70s, raised by the scions of the automative industry. They had money to spend and parties to attend but rather than identify with the harsh street sounds of Rap coming out of New York, they looked instead toward mainland Europe to emulate the latest trends in fashion and music. [...] > Detroit Techno was never more than a regional genre and it never blew up like House, Garage or Rap. That is, until 1988 when this generic mean-nothing uneventful compilation [Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit] made it overseas [...] If they called it Poopyfart, today we would all be waxing nostalgic about the oldskool Detroit Poopyfart sound of the Belleville Trio. > The Detroit Techno dudes who grew up idolizing European synthesizer music were now idolized in Europe. This spawned a number of Techno subgenres across the ocean, all of them interesting for various reasons that have nothing to do with Detroit. [...] But it was the word 'Techno' that blew up and not the actual sound, and for this reason Detroit felt somewhat ashamed to associate their city with marked-up prancing goofball euroshite [...] > With time comes restitution. Detroit took the word back with a big-ass music festival, an exhibit in the Detroit Historical Museum (right beside the Motown exhibit) [...] Things have come full circle. Techno is once again the embodiment of Detroit. [0]: https://music.ishkur.com/ https://music.ishkur.com/