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Comment by jamal-kumar | Hacker News Reader

Techno was started in Detroit by black people and there's a great amount of evidence for this [1]

House the same I believe in Chicago, love that acid. Note the audience is mostly black [2]

These people are having way more fun than any of us will ever hope to

I think what needs to be pointed out more than anything is that back in these times the scene around electronic music was a radical racial integrator. You had skinheads, rastas, and football hooligan ultras all partying with each other instead of fighting. I mean I think we all know how that worked (It involved a certain lubricant) but I still think that people are missing the point with this shit these days so hard

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aUAqboAvQM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qnIcb7sPLg

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Techno was started in Düsseldorf by Kraftwerk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWUiLJnEYJI

People found this very inspiring and created their own variants.

The Detroit variant came along.

The Chicago variant came along.

The UK variant came along.

But it all goes back to Kraftwerk.

I think they're the originators in a lot of ways for sure. They deserve their credit

Other comment in this whole shit that didn't get downvoted to oblivion gets into better detail

Americans still deserve credit for making it danceable

> I think what needs to be pointed out more than anything is that back in these times the scene around electronic music was a radical racial integrator. You had skinheads, rastas, and football hooligan ultras all partying with each other instead of fighting.

If techno was started in detroit, then in terms of origin stories, the above quote is completely disconnected. Yes, you had skinheads, rastas and football hooligan ultras all partying with each other, but that in the England, in the 90s, mostly after ecstasy arrived.

By all accounts ecstasy was reasonably widespread in the UK club scene by 1982 when Soft Cell's Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing was released. And the UK "summer of love" was 1987, Shoom opened in 1987, etc. You're not wrong that connecting the origin of techno to the UK club and rave scene diminishes the importance of Detroit, but the rave scene was well and truly massive before the 90s.

Wikipedia:

> Although primarily referring to the summer of 1988 it lasted into the summer of 1989, when electronic dance music and the prevalence of the drug MDMA fuelled an explosion in youth culture culminating in mass free parties and the era of the rave.

I was at clubs in London (both as a punter and as DJ) in 1980-83, and ecstasy, if a thing at all, was not widely available or used. Its use ballooned later than that.

And it was 1994 before the UK government attempted to ban raves by banning a certain kind of music. I left the UK in 1989, and felt very disconnected from the rave scene that was happening at that time, but it is definitely my impression that it did not blow up into a truly massive scale till after 1990, though it was certainly alive and well at the end of the 80s.

how are two very fun clips on youtube proof of this? It just proves they liked it.

Do I really need to start busting out the clips with 1986 timestamps on them?

you will need ones from the 70s to prove anything

Are we really getting into the roots of all music on that level because we could get pretty deep

>Techno was started in Detroit by black people

If it involves freeform rhythmic dancing based on drums, black people probably invented it. It's a simple heuristic that hasn't steered me wrong yet. Any claim of non-rhythmic people that cant dance inventing a genre of dance music should immediately raise suspicion.

> If it involves freeform rhythmic dancing based on drums, black people probably invented it.

This is racist and harmful rhetoric. There exist a plethora of cultures and music has been independently developed and is core to them all as their humanity. Please do honest research before making racially motivated statements.

>This is racist and harmful rhetoric.

It's not racist or harmful to state the historical fact that sub-tropical people have a long and strong relationship with drums that is unrivaled elsewhere on the planet.

Populations that exhibit no natural ability to move to drum based music could not invent drum based dance music genres except through derivation in which case its not invention, just mimicry.

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