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Comment by mickeyp | Hacker News Reader

Yeesh. "Those darn 40+-something millennials and their differing tastes!"

Rock 'died' because it's been around for 50 years; were the favourite of boomers who ensured it always had air-time; and now they're out to pasture and other music styles reign. My dad was a pro drummer in the 70s and hated everything that wasn't rock or metal. He was incapable of appreciating anything else. Or so he said.

As a kid of the 90s, I could never quite find music that fit me. Sure, I liked some rock and roll, pop, and so on --- but when I was first introduced to techno (Antiloop - Believe, to be specific) at a LAN party I knew I'd found my home: techno and then trance.

But good luck finding Antiloop or the nascent trance on MTV or commercial radio in the 90s. The people who ran those things didn't like it, know about it, listen to it, or felt it had commercial value. So I had to learn about it from randos at a LAN party.

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Rock was on the way out in the early 80s, when millennials were barely being born...because disco won.

The 80s were the rise of synthpop, House music (which started from DJs sampling disco a cappellas and mixing them with TR-909 drums and Korg M1 keyboards), Techno and Italo Disco. From there, we got the next evolution, in the form of Eurodance/Eurobeat/Hi-NRG, and Electronic Dance Music as a genre was born. Notably, they all still largely lean in on the foundational traits of Disco: four on the floor drum beats, off-beat bass, heavy focus on syncopation to create groove, chord stabs, etc..

The 80s were also the rise of hip hop and rap, which also grew out of the same DJ culture. If a song doesn't have a four on the floor beat, it's more likely to have a hip hop beat than a rock "backbeat." (e.g. boom bam boom boom bam, like "Rump Shaker" by Wreckx-N-Effect)

I really don't think so. Punk had exploded after the Summer of Hate and in its wake we got Talking Heads, The B-52's, and Blondie at CBGB's. In parallel we have early Joy Division in Manchester which is going to inspire U2 to eventually become the biggest band in the world for the next 20 or something years. Martin Hannett is going to be a key figure in the development of EDM with his use of samplers and, "using the studio as an instrument." Check out the beginning of, "Transmission." He'll later go on to produce The Happy Mondays who are, "the" seminal Manchester dance group in the early 90's in lieu of an army of Stone Roses fans throwing lemons at me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7D5heNRUy0

If you look at how Johnny Rotten was listening to Neu! and X-Ray Spex (as well as The Monkees and Herman Hermits) and what Bowie was doing after he moved to Berlin with Iggy Pop it's not outlandish to say that Electronic Music wouldn't have existed without being preempted by Punk, Glam, and the emergent, "not progressive" guitar music of the 1970's especially in how it paralleled the development of Krautrock. Disco didn't evolve into EDM; Disco gave DJ Kool Herc a set of turntables to invent Hip Hop with. Techno literally came out of, "a certain guy who might be called Gerald" listening to Kraftwerk; Afrika Bammbatta's, "Planet Rock" samples Kraftwerk directly.

"I'm the operator with mine pocket calculator."

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

> Disco didn't evolve into EDM

I don't see how you can possibly claim that.

Disco led directly to house, and Italo-disco was hugely influential to techno. US electro developed at the same time as some key Italo tracks like "Robot is Systematic" (1982) and "Spacer Woman" (1983). Italo-disco was played on underground radio in Detroit and Chicago, and is often credited as a core influence. Or just look to Detroit proto-techno track "Share Vari" (1981) which was considered to be Italo-disco in style at the time of its release.

"On and On" (recorded 1983, released 84) is often considered the first Chicago house record, and it was literally a direct attempt to reproduce a disco record using a drum machine and synths.

This isn't to undermine Kraftwerk, which was obviously an enormous direct influence on these producers as well, but my point is they're far from the only influence. Giorgio Moroder should receive the same amount of credit for starters, along with other electronic disco legends such as Marc Cerrone.

My feeling is that without gluing all this music together with emergent gay club culture that the similarities are superficial. House is obviously a take-off of what Disco is trying to achieve on the dance floor but so is Parliament and James Brown ins 70's. We might as well say, "electronic music comes from black music in America" but that can't be right because of Kraftwerk and Delia Derbyshire. It wouldn't be wrong to say that George Harrison is a pioneer because of the Electronic Sound record but it all feels a bit like those blog posts that claim that Ringo Starr invented Breakbeat.

I don't think you're wrong I just think there's a, "more right position." I'm open to a plurality of views. It may be the, "real story" has to be a, "multiple perspectives thing." I'm just taken to the idea my perspective is the best.

Superficial? House is literally the same four-on-the-floor beat originally created in Philly by Earl Young of The Trammps.

Countless early house and techno legends say they listened to disco, sampled disco, made covers of disco songs, played disco in their DJ sets. Some key producers directly overlapped between the synth-heavy forms of disco (Italo-disco, High-NRG, Mutant Disco) and electronic dance music - for example Shep Pettibone, François K, and Material, to name just a few.

I guess believe whatever you want, but everyone else listens to what the people who created electronic dance music actually said and did which puts disco as a direct core ancestor.

Kraftwerk was definitely important, but you're missing Frankie Knuckles and Black Box...

House (from The Warehouse) is as core to EDM as techno (more Kraftwerk), and they were literally remixing disco as well as using disco musical facets. And House and Techno's lines blurred a lot in Europe.

Canonical rock n' roll in the minds of, "the initiated" might include groups like Kraftwerk and Neu! which laid the foundation for most forms of electronic music. It definitely includes the mother of all electronic music Delia Derbyshire (ask Peter Kember!) You might know her from the original Doctor Who theme music. Dig the link below for the arguably the first EDM song ever made. Keep in mind this is pre-synths-- it's all tape manipulation like The Beatles would end up copying on, "Strawberry Fields Forever."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwQIgGQLOQ8

I like all, "genres" and types of music but there's a certain high level of quality that exists in a continuum of music going back a long time. It's hard to define in a formal way. It's there in John Coltrane. It lives sophomorically in The Velvet Underground, Herman's Hermits, and the other, "Bubblegum" groups as well as the Fuzz-Psych-Garage bands that live in the Nuggets compilations like ? And The Mysterians. It's played on Rickenbacker guitars. It has a fuzz pedal and it knows how to use it. It lived on John Peel's radio program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62XRy-jFCm8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQdo8efJtSs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ToJ2mmlkiE

A special one for you the techno fan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zndpi8tNZyQ

Cheerio.

EDIT: Worth noting I'm 34 so don't give me the Grandpa treatment.

In Europe MTV played Trance and Techno in the late 90s/early 2000, but only at night. They even had a music video for Jeff Mills - The Bells.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KevUFO2moZI

> Antiloop

"In my mind" ... what a throwback.

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