Some African-American techno pioneers in Detroit feel overlooked today – in a world dominated by Instagram neo-trance fitness girls and sponsored nepo kids throwing cakes at ravers in stadiums using lame premixed playback – or Beyonce claiming the entire house/LGBT+/club culture on her latest album.
Sure, techno gave the decaying motor city a much-needed energy and identity fix, and Berlin’s techno scene transformed the city and gained Unesco status, but I will still claim that techno is global folk music, with a much more complex back story.
Clearly, the Detroit veterans are tired of the idiots making money dancing in their footsteps… it sobvious that Detroit techno comes from Detroit – but does TECHNO come from Detroit? 
To Talk about race-related origins in a music genre based on sampling is absurd. What about “I Feel Love” Donna Summer & Giorgio Moroder’s prototype hit? To claim techno as originated frem a specific race or city is historical revisionism…and gatekeeping.
Techno is not mine, techno does not belong to a certain segment, or is the product of Japanese drum machines – techno is more than the sum of its parts – techno is ours – in bodies and brains shaken when techno is played in a room. Techno is an experience that momentarily suspends time and space, and thus geography. Some will argue that it can also suspend race, gender, and class for a second…a sonic utopia!
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Some would argue that techno is not the music of the future anymore: some argue that there are rules in techno now – it’s almost a nostalgic genre – nostalgia for a lost vision of the future, now reduced to soul-less, overcompressed e-arobic dance tools.
It also feels nostalgic to talk about the origins and location of an ever-evolving internet-based global electronic music genre. Isn’t techno just in the head and body of the dancer and listener, us – across continents and races?
Sure, Africa’s funk is important for techno – Kraftwerk is inspired by James Brown’s rhythm section, adding almost romantic European melodies on top – and sound design tools that were only available through technology previously only available in conservatories and expensive electronic music studios. Detroit is inspired by the resulting early elegant romantic synthpop, sci-fi, and European conceptual industrial music.
But now some purists claim the party officially starts with Cybotron’s “Alleys of Your Mind” from 1981, which sold 15,000 copies, and A Number Of Names’ “Sharevari”. House finds its nascent form with ‘On & On’ by Jesse Saunders & Vince Lawrence in 1983. But before that, in 1979, Casio merged the calculator and synth:
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I can just, off the top of my head, mention a lot of things that are techno – even before Detroit-techno: cheap Japanese and American music technology, German avant-garde and tape manipulation, Indian drone music, Eno’s ambient, Lee Scratch Perrys dubs, Zapp, Yello, James Brown’s funk, disco, Afrobeat, found sounds from film and media, Belgian New Beat, Italo disco, Giorgio Moroder, Electro, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Flash’s “Adventures of the Wheels of Steel” & Steinski, Pink Floyd, Kraut, Industrial, Suicide and DJ megamix culture. Bernie Worrel’s synths, Sweet’s “Fox on the Run” intro, Who’s “Baba O’Rieley” intro, Pink Floyd’s “On the Run,” Pierre Schaeffer’s tape manipulations from 1942 and onwards, cassette tape pause buttons, Fuzzy, Herbie Hancock’s fuzak, original tribal music and a lot of soundtracks – I can go on…here’s my personal – strongly generalizing early techno history told in music:
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