Globalization and black roots, white fruits
Theo Parrish of 3Chairs at DEMF07
In a one-question interview with moodmat this week, Theo Parrish offers a heavy, if reductive, look at the music industry color balance. Although some readers will no doubt take issue at the super-simplified picture he paints of American pop (what, no brown people?) his fundamental idea is worth grabbing onto for a moment:
“The curtain that supposedly hides [the underrepresentation of African-Americans in dance music] is the bullshit illusion that dance music has no race, no gender, that it’s about the celebration of some sort of utopian concept.” - Theo Parrish, moodmat, 14 July 2008.
Trainspotting DJ Google for the origin of the phrase “black roots, white fruit”, I found this quote from Derrick May that appears to support the thesis that the genre’s founders were not in pursuit of colorblindness,
“‘[W]hen I play and look out at the [white] kids in the clubs, I hate it,’ May says with pained expression. ‘It’s horrible! There’s a dream we had, a focus we had, a perspective we put on this. We said, ‘Okay, this is a black art form, this is coming from Detroit.’ He grimaces again and adds, ‘To see what it’s become, it’s heartbreaking.’” — Derrick May, Miami New Times, 21 September 2000.
Adjusting for crotchety-ness and general orthodoxy, May is clearly speaking to the Black history of techno - lost to most young people outside of the music. (I blew some minds last year talking to high school students of color when we dug around Wikipedia for the history of techno.)
The consternation that Theo’s interview raised among some readers reminded me of the challenges that Australian techno fans, mnmlssgs made against the Detroit techno origin myth last month. Some of the same arguments seen there reappear from another corner of the techno globe, in this blog post by Ronan from Dublin,
“Race matters everywhere, and there are racial matters everywhere. But I don’t hear many people arguing otherwise. In fact I’m imagining some hippy-dippy 90s strawman when I hear it suggested that white people eulogise about how race doesn’t matter in dance music. I’ve never heard this argument expanded on much.” — Ronan, House is a Feeling, 15 July 2008.
Ronan sees a peace+love straw man and Parrish sees a conveniently colorblind utopianism. Regardless of form, a spectre exists and confounds the techno watchmen. Where is it coming from? And what is giving it life?
The somewhat painful comment section to Ronan’s post lead me to starting thinking about how various local notions of White and Black conflict inside of globalized techno. Both are critical components to the popular techno narrative - an afrofuturist take on Blackness the magical ingredient that brought Detroit techno to life; escaping Whiteness the inspiration for several evolutionary leaps along the ‘ardcore continuum - both quite strongly rooted in the youth culture and history of the US (and, to some extent, England).
Ronan’s discomfort and displeasure at Theo’s comments belie a resentment at the conception of Whites as me-too colonizers in techno. The same resentment surfaces on mnmlssg as various commenters contrast an alleged stylistic stagnation in the Detroit homeland with wild innovation overseas. It’s a double-bind, they assert, White people love and dominate techno yet they are forever relegated to secondary status. Why? Because some old dudes in Detroit stubbornly insist that it is Black music?
Much maligned as the mascot of trance, arguably the whitebread of techno subgenres, Paul van Dyk suffered critically (though not financially) as a result of this hierarchy during his turn of the century reign. Jetlagged back in 2000, he let his frustration loose within earshot of a journalist,
“I am so tired of hearing that my music is only for white people,
“It’s just complete arrogance for Derrick May to say these things. Just because I have nondistorted kick drums and clear elements instead of dirty sounds in my music doesn’t make it ‘white.’ It doesn’t mean it’s not soulful and from the heart.” — Black Roots, White Fruit, Brett Sokol, Miami New Times, 21 September 2000.
I wonder if the history of slavery and racism in the U.S. is sufficiently different from the experiences of people in Europe / Australia that it is causing cultural translation errors among the wide world of techno. Notions of Blackness and - especially relevant to this case - Whiteness are strongly informed by community histories and individual lived experiences. My hunch is that these notions are quite different in the colonized versus the colonizing nations.
With that in mind, I have to read Ronan’s identification as “white person” differently. As an “expatriated Irishman”, the implications of his whitepersonhood carry different meanings from what I have learned growing up in the Northeastern US. Theo writes that “[people] in the western world [have] slavery as a backdrop to everything they do” but that backdrop must take different forms around the (cough) West. Thus, despite shared pigment and ethnicity, Ronan ain’t the White I’ve come to know.
Of course, all of this hand-wringing may be for naught as the younger generation couldn’t care less about genreification.
Exibit A:
Wiz Khalifa - “Say Yeah”, 2008
Exhibit B:
Ricky Blaze - “To The Beat”
Haters? Instigators? Cut cut dem off.
June 20th, 2010 at 13:41:54 (PDT -04:00)
oh yeah! black music is the best.”;”
June 20th, 2010 at 19:57:49 (PDT -04:00)
oh yeah! black music is the best.”;: