Hacker News Reader

Comment by _bohm | Hacker News Reader

For someone who seems to have been around the scene for quite a while, you come off as woefully uneducated on the history of electronic music.

Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it.

The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was born out of mixing UK Hardcore with Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall/Dub music.

Footwork, Club, Bounce, Industrial, House, Electro, to name a few, are all styles that were prevalent on dancefloors in the US during the time you characterize it as "all about stale rehashes of guitar-based genres". All of these styles are woven into the DNA of the new underground generation. Nobody "owns" electronic music, and the scene is so much better when people stop claiming that anyone does.

View on HN

> For someone who seems to have been around the scene for quite a while, you come off as woefully uneducated on the history of electronic music.

I suppose that's one way of saying you have a different perspective from mine.

>Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it. >The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was born out of mixing UK Hardcore with Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall/Dub music.

I've addressed most of your points in another comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26981256

A lot of the genres that Ishkur despises are every bit as European homegrown as Motown is African-American to the bones.

> Nobody "owns" electronic music, and the scene is so much better when people stop claiming that anyone does.

Sure, but that's a bit like saying Silicon Valley doesn't own the Internet. It's technically true but SV is still (or was until very recently) a mecca, ground zero for all things Internet.

There is such a thing for music genres as well, and a good indicator of that is the extent to which that genre has bubbled up into mainstream pop music charts.

I'm happy to acknowledge that there are many subgenres of electronic music, including some of my favorites, which truly were grown and blossomed in Europe.

I took issue with your original comment because of the claim that electronic music is basically an ethnically white, European phenomenon. The SV->Europe comparison would be apt here if Europe were indeed _the_ mecca for all electronic music. This is obviously false unless you ignore huge swaths of the history or massively constrain your definition of what constitutes electronic music.

If you use the charts to measure what's happening at the underground/local level of any place, you're never going to get a good picture. Based on the charts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_number-one_ai...) it would appear that Europeans seldom listened to music written by Europeans in the 90s!

Definitely. The influence of the reggae/dub music experiments of the 70s on both rap and EDM is underrated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com