Episode 2 of the RISE Podcast explores how Detroit’s history, shaped by Black migration, industrial boom, deindustrialization, and grassroots activism, laid the groundwork for techno. It highlights techno as a sonic response to social change, blending geography, innovation, and Afrofuturist visions to reflect Black resilience and aspiration in a transforming city.
Host: Julian Chambliss. Featured Voices: Reynaldo Anderson, Ytasha Womack, Thomas Sugrue, Erik Steinskog, Ingrid LaFleur, Stacey “Hotwaxx” Hale, Omar Meftah, Andrew Charles Edman, John Collins.
Presented by WKAR Public Media in partnership with MSU Museum at Michigan State University.
Supported in part by MSU Federal Credit Union.
Includes:
Juan Atkins - Techno City, 2010.
Electrifying Mojo, Midnight Funk Association, 2011.
Julian C. Chambliss and Tobias C Van Veen, “Interview of Afrofuturist Sound Scholar Tobias C. Van Veen,” Michigan State University Library, G. Robert Vincent Voice Library Collection: Voices of the Black Imaginary, June 2021.
Julian C. Chambliss, “Interview of Erik Steinskog of the University of Copenhagen,” Michigan State University Library, G. Robert Vincent Voice Library Collection: Voices of the Black Imaginary, October 24, 2020.
Transcript
Welcome to Rise Detroit's Machine Music. A new podcast made possible through the generous support of the MSU Federal Credit Union. Frequently called the most cosmopolitan city of the Midwest. Detroit today stands at the threshold of a bright new future, one rich with the promise of fulfillment. That 1960 promotional fell telling the story of Detroit for a probable bid for the 1968 Olympic Games captures a narrative of the city that has long been part of its identity.
Detroit is a city of the future, and that makes a story of techno not that strange. When you think about it, what's the best plan? What's the fastest plan? What's the fastest plan? My name is Julian Chambliss, a professor of English, Berryman Curator History at the MSU Museum. I'm the lead curator for Techno The Rise of Detroit Machine Music, A new exhibition about techno from the MSU Museum.
Welcome to episode two, the City and the Sound.
In the first episode of this podcast, we talked about sound and its unique relationship to place. This is a central element to understanding techno. It's a unique sound that is up for futurists, but part of its uniqueness is connected to the black experience and a particular place. Detroit, in a way, this is not a shock.
Americans have a really strong identification between sound and place across a number of genre of music. But in the case ofAfro future sound, I think we need to consider some elements of Sonic geography. The sound is also linked to geography because the sound tells a story in terms of where it came from, it's resonance and how it travels.
That is Afrofuturist theorist, Dr.Reynaldo Anderson, when I first started researching him as Afrofuturism. The abundance of academic writing that existed was really more about techno and not house. Ytasha Womack, author of Afrofuturism, the World of Black Science, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, and a new book, the Afrofuturist Evolution, creative Path to Self-Discovery.
We zero in on a particular place and listen to the sound.It's offered us a way to understand the black experience. In the case of Detroit, the sound of techno is about black people strongly towards the future. I think it's because techno was so industrial. It reflected sort of the transitions that were taking place in Detroit.
As we heard about in the first episode, the speculative practice, heart of Afrofuturism has a history we can connect to place with that truth in mind, it's important to think about the choice, history, and the culture connected to it that provided the circumstances that opened the door to a particular sound, that is techno.
Hundreds of thousands of people migrated to Detroit from all over the world. Black folks migrated to Detroit from the South, seeking opportunity in this rapidly growing motor metropolis. That is Thomas Sugrue, a Silver Professor, a social and cultural analysis in history at NYU. An author of the seminal book, the Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post-War Detroit.
Detroit was in many respects, the quintessential city of 20th century America, maybe the 20th century world, because it was the center of the auto industry, which was a novel technology that seemed to be launching cities and people into a new future of mobility and connectivity. When Detroit was booming because of the auto industry, it became a magnet for black migrants seeking economic opportunity, especially after civil rights activists and unionists began to open up parts of the factories to black workers.
Detroit had arguably the nation's largest unionized black working-class. A population that was able to achieve economic advances that gave them buying power and open up all sorts of possibilities for new cultural creativity, especially in music.
As the auto history changed, the perspective on Detroit shifted, Detroit began undergoing a profound transformation in the middle of the 20th century, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. This was the heyday of the auto industry and its power and might. At the same time, the auto industry was pioneering automation.
It was using machines to replace human labor, especially folks who were doing labor at the bottom of the ladder in the auto industry. The auto industry is decentralizing. It's moving to other parts of metropolitan Detroit, to suburban areas, to green fields, and increasingly to rural areas in the upper Midwest and later to the South, and other parts of the United States, even other countries, lower wage workers, lower costs, lower taxes, weaker unionization, and many of the places that the auto industry is moving to are places with small black populations moving to small towns in the upper Midwest, for example.
And so black folks bore the burden of the deindustrialization of Detroit's auto industry because their jobs were. At the bottom of the, of, of the ladder, or as folks said, the last to be hired and the first to be fired when the auto industry undergoes transformations.
The national story of Detroit is shaped by the consequences of the industrialization. Yet that view is not the entire story.
There's another side to Detroit in the 1960s. Detroit is fast on its way to being the largest majority black city in the United States. So at the same time that folks are frustrated, they're hopeful. Detroit is a center of decades of grassroots black activism around civil rights and racial equality.
And in 1960s, it's one of the nation's centers of the Black Power Movement of black folks looking onto the changing terrain of the city and seeing it once. All the problems.But on the other hand, seeing opportunities, it's going to become a black city, a city that can be reinvented, a city where we can imagine a different future, a future of black power, of black control of black representation in politics, unprecedented in predominantly white cities, or even in Detroit, 10 or 20 years earlier.
So, it's a city that's a paradox in the 1960s, both of, discrimination and deprivation and de-industrialization, but also of growing black power, greater representation and a sense of possibility. We can imagine a different future.
Throughout history for African Americans, people of African descent in the US, sound or music and so on, has been an extremely important part of the cultural archive.
This is Erik Steinskog. We need to think of sound as, as archival material as well, not only archives as something written. And I really like that commitment to sound as a historical archive.If sound is an archive, a tort sound is definitely connected to innovation.On the one hand, the history of music and Detroit is connected to innovation. And, most Americans know Detroit because of Motown.
From the very beginning of the story of techno, the people who have made techno pretty clear that it's not copying Motown, that it is something unique into itself.Detroit’s history is connected to innovation, from cars to music, people around the world identify the city. With the transformation driven by theStimuli, the youth who would create techno were coming of age and a era where speculation about the future was not as clear as had been in the past.
The music they created reflected their understanding of a changing world. One where technology, culture, and society have vastly different pathways to follow. If you just listen to techno and you knew nothing about Detroit. You know, the music itself sounds like, wow, this isa, a factory town. That was Ytasha Womack talking about techno and alluding to something that be came very clear as we were preparing and researching for this exhibition.
Throughout the process, whenever we mentioned to people they wanted to do an exhibition about techno, it became very clear that there were many sort of sonic geographies in Detroit that offered glimpses into culture, community, and meaning. These geographies were descriptive and iterative. One space would be telling one part of the story.Another place would be telling another part of the story, but they're all part of the Detroit story.
Motown was the music of the assembly line. The great cultural historian. Suzanne Smith wrote a book called Dancing in the Streets about Motown and Black Detroit in the post-war years. The automobile, uh, symbol of people making it, especially of black people. The assembly line had its own beat, its own rhythm that infuses music in that period. There's a customer base for Motown music folks turning on their car radios and listening to the songs and the beats of Motown as they're driving.
While the people who created techno aren't necessarily mimicking Motown.They definitely live in a post Motown cultural landscape, one where innovation and the machine are not foreign concepts. They're a part of the tapestry of the place that they live, and this is something that makes perfect sense for opening the door. Listen toIngrid LaFleur talk a little bit about this.
That to me is what Afrofuturism is really, really about.Black people experimenting within a certain container and then having to really push the walls of that container out. And I think of the techno pioneers in terms of what they produced in the eighties. And it seemed to, our sound and the future always seemed to respond to our reaction to the environments where we lived, in particular, urban environments.
That was Reynaldo Anderson. He calls attention to an important point. Techno is a response to the condition black youth found themselves in at a particular moment as a generation living in the aftermath of civil rights activism in the 1960s and the effects of the de-industrialization that followed.
They're building on the pattern of future speculation driven by black culture. They are seeking inspiration, who were vibrant radio culture that celebrates music locally and globally. Mojo was our radio leader. That was Stacey "Hotwaxx” Hale, legendary DJ from Detroit, talking about the inspiration to open the door to techno in the city.
Welcome to the Midnight FunkAssociation, the International Midnight Funk Association with thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of members all over the metro. The International Midnight Folk Association.Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, and the world for the next hour. Absolutely the Livest music on the planet Earth be heard. Where the members of the Midnight Funk Association, please rise. If you would like to become a member of the Midnight Funk Association, now you may stand. If you are in water, make waves. If you're driving or riding, get ready to dance in your seats. Get ready to honk your horns. Get ready to flash your lights. You, you, you, you and you. If you're standing close to your porch light. Turn it on for the next hour. Show solidarity with the MFA.
Mojo is electrified.The radio DJ from WGPR, who starting in 1977 had a radio program that was definitional to the musical community in Detroit, his Midnight Funk Association was a venue to expose Detroit residents to awesome music. Along side figures like Electrifying Mojo there were a number of DJ operating in the city, in this pivotal period of the 1970s bridging the gap between the Motown experience and emerging musical trends of the decade. One pivotal figure was Ken Collier who bridged the gap between soul, disco, and house that gave ride to techno.
Here, Stacey Hale talks about the impact of Collier, of the musical impact of culture on the city.
Was the pioneer here in Detroit and played a major role in introducing techno, he was at the hill, all of us would go to him as we did with Mojo with our different sounds, and it would be up to people like him and myself to play it to expose it to the public.
The culture does celebrated Electrifying Mojo persists in Detroit. The DJ's role as a culture means a critical part of the city's ethos.
You got more DJs in this city per capita than you do mechanics and stuff. There's not enough people, you know, like everybody, and their cousin is a DJ that is Omar Meftah.
I am a DJ, producer, and music publisher based here in Detroit.
As a contemporary figure in Detroit music, Meftah talks about the ways that the community continues to produce music driven by creativity as unique to the city.
Not just a dj, but musician. Half of them don't even release their music or posture themself as a musician or a producer. They just grew up with it. It was part of their everyday ritual. Going from Motown, to the new dance show in the eighties, Jeff Mills was doing the DJing. He was called The Wizard, and then you had the Electrifying Mojo but never died. A lot of people think Detroit fell off in the nineties and two thousands' cause you know, the economy and stuff. But if you think about it, Prince wouldn't have ever become Prince if it wasn't for Detroit. They say theElectrifying Mojo was the person who broke his music on the radio and that changed his whole life. And even Giles Peterson told me that he was the one that ranTalkingLoud records inLondon, and he was the one that signed incognito. When I met him, he was here like a year ago and I played a party with him. He told me, honestly, I haven't been to Detroit in 20 years. And I can say Detroit single-handedly was what saved my whole career. He was like, I put out the incognito record and we didn't realize that most of these record sales were right here in Detroit. He made it a point to come to the stadium event, I think had to have been at Palace in Arbor Hills or something. He said when he came here, he had no idea what to expect. It was just like stadium and he was like, holy shit. I don’t know. I don't know if it's something in the water. I don't know if it's just the geographical location. I don't know what it is, but there's something very special and unique.
For Andrew Charles Edmond, Ace, the first sound culture that I can see of practice is a perfect reason for why you get techno in the coming as techno.
I see as. Uh, a collusion of very disparate ideas. There's mainly the disco that came out of New York with the Paradise Garage Sun combined with Yellow Magic Orchestra, people that were really into since, since Sizers. Roger Troutman from Zap. There's a lot going on at that time, and that was all around this period where technology had taken the drum set to a new level.
I like to think of techno and hip hop as brother and sister. Their first songs that pushed our form into the mainstream consciousness were both taken from Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk has all CI as one of the founding influences for techno in Detroit. That German electronic band formed in Dusseldorf in 1970 with Maude as an innovator and pioneering electronic music.
The other pathway that's often cited is parliament. Parliament would be first before Kraftwerk because Detroit is known for funk. George Clinton has been its and will always be the ruler of starting that movement. So techno builds of the influences of groups like KCraftWorksor a brand like Yellow Magic Orchestra, a Japanese electronic band formed in Tokyo in 1978.
It also builds on the innovation of someone like George Clinton. All of these influences are also a part of a kind of conversation taking place between the music in Detroit and other sounds that are developing in Sister Cities like Chicago. And that sound is house. When House was developed, I, I don't even think it had the title.
It was just somebody had the bright idea to put a press a track with just a beat. Just some drums just do, do, do, do. Jesse Saunders did that. In developing the techno exhibition, one of the narratives that emerged from all our conversations was the importance of Chicago house music as a kind of parallel mirror to what was happening in Detroit.
Many of the early techno DJs and producers in Detroit were also involved in the house music scene and the sounds and techniques of house influenced their vision of creating a unique Detroit sound. Stacey Hale, just like on this process, oh, this is house music. This was just something kind of cool to happen, so then people receiving it like myself going, oh my God, I have a record to have a break at the end.
The beginning. I can use this record to transfer to get to the other songs. That's how I looked at it. Like, oh, you know, my God, how cool is this? And then electronic put to it even more so making the different sounds and representing Detroit.'cause you think of machinery because of the big three. If you've ever been in into any factory or anything, or even just singing on television, it's a continuous sound.
Even if it's pressing, it's like, and which comes from the assembly line and you take that and you tweak it. And those are the things that how house and the techno was born with the exchange of ideas and the push to make something different. At the core of this moment, the club scene in the city of Detroit serve as a pervy ground for the evolution of the sow.
The Detroiters heard new mixes on the radio and attended clubs that celebrated that new sow in the city. The music was here. It was a huge rage, rage scene in these warehouses and abandoned buildings, or even the train station people break into the train station and get these huge, these rave parties.
The scene was big here for Detroit. They were raised everywhere. It was mixed. It was everybody, maybe more white than black, but. It was so to everybody. Then a lot of the DJs who were traveling at the time all played those part here in Detroit.
Creating Detroit and reacting to its circumstances, techno should be taught of as another example of how black cultural practice reacted to the modern as Womack explains.
Tell the, to people a lot and thinking about Afrofuturism, I always say I was Afrofuturist and didn't know I was an Afrofuturist. And it's because all these elements were just all around you if you were immersed in Black culture. If you weren't immersed in Black culture, yes, it would completely go over your head. But if at some point you were really immersed in it and you were in these communities, then you ran across all this stuff, even if you didn't make all the connections, if someone brings it up, you're like, oh yeah, you know, so , it's in the air, it's in the environment., and then Detroit had just a cross section of a lot of people, ,a lot of people inDetroit, ,family wise, they were descendants of the Great Migration, a lot from Alabama, maybe Mississippi, and then you have this impact of Motown.
And all this aspiration that came from being able to work in the car industry, , so you have this whole art scene going on, , that is adjacent to Motown, , and, even the fashion that we associate with Detroit at certain points in time, it's always about an aspiration, but for some reason we've had to make this hard argument about us as a culture, having a natural relationship to wanting to go to space or. Enjoying space themed materials and seeing a relationship between, I don't know, listening to the Dales and still liking, ,films about Martians. Like, you can do both.
Techno became a global musical conversation and told the story of black culture and a black city. Continuing with changing technological and political realities is a music deeply embedded in a vision inspired by the reality.
Of a better future built on Detroit's history being a black space with black people. Striving forward. In the next episode, we'll examine the machines and the music. What were they and how did the black youth create their unique sound? If you're interested in learning more about the history of Detroit, check out the origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Gru.
If you want to learn more about the complex musical legacy in Detroit. Check out the Archive of the American BlackDrove hosted by Michigan State University. Online at www.ajmatrix.msu.edu. Browse musical roots and branches, or search for figures like Electrifying Mojo. Sun, Rob, and more.
This podcast is presented by WKAR in collaboration with the MSU Museum. Thanks for listening.
