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Comment by throwit1q2e3r | Hacker News Reader

> This was the era when in the US Eminem had lines like "nobody listens to techno"

That was a diss line about Moby, a "techno" artist who achieved mainstream US popularity around that time. Eminem wasn't trying to accurately depict the state of electronic music in the US, he was being salty.

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I know, but precisely : referring to Moby as "techno" says everything on how clued up about electronic music the average US listener or artist was at the time :)

Moby may have ended up with chart success and his tracks on car adverts, but he most did produce plenty of music in the same realm as the artists in the article. Maybe a bit more stompy and with a more varied structure than the clinical X-101 stuff, but it would be unfair to not call it techno. Whether or not Eminem was aware of his early work I couldn't say.

- 1994 Horses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ice5Nw6ltfY

- 1995 Desperate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHdu9UwXqGc

- 1992 Drop a Beat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WywzWjZATKA

- 1991 UHF3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21TjeBcA1cI

- 1991 Voodoo Child (Poor in New York Mix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WywzWjZATKA

but if the line had no basis in reality, he would just sound like an idiot, so ...

He also claimed Dr Dre was locked up in his basement in another lyric, so I'm not sure truthfulness was top of his priority list.

Clearly being facetious there

By my own memory as a teenager growing up in the rave scene, electronic music was weird and unapproachable to pretty much everyone. Big Beat like The Crystal Method and Prodigy had made some waves, and of course there was Moby, but outside of my raver friends and a brief attempt to get eurodance (like Alice Deejay) on Top 40 radio by the local media conglomerates, "techno" was pretty niche.

I mean, in the early 2000s I saw Paul Oakenfold -- twice -- at small clubs, and it was easy to get into the front. I would write requests in big letters on my phone and see if I could get the DJ to play them. (Tiesto wasn't as approachable but that asshole would crank the speakers up well past their distortion point)

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