Soundtracksforthem

photo credit: photojunkie

This city is in total devastation. It is going through the biggest change in its history. Detroit is passing through its third wave, a social dynamic which nobody outside this city can understand. Factories are closing, kids are shooting eachother just for fun. The whole order has broken down. If our music is a soundtrack to that, I hope it makes people understand what kind of disintegration we’re dealing with. (Techno artist Derrick May on his home town, as cited in Garratt, 1998, p. 53)

Part one | Part two | Part three

Chicago in the late 1970’s. Regulars of the now-defunct Warehouse still remember Frankie Knuckles and the train. The legendary musician would play “Sounds of A Vanishing Era,” (an album which featured the recorded sounds of locomotives) controlling the distribution of sound so that it would start from the back of the room and progressively gain momentum until it roared from the speakers at the front.
There is more than a little poetry in the anecdote. The Warehouse’s cold and dilapidated surroundings are described by Knuckles as:

… a three storey building which sits in the Western part of the Loop. Now the Loop in Chicago is the main downtown area and the western part is more like an industrial loft area and at the time it was pretty desolate and there was really not that much around there, so it was like the perfect place for anyone who wanted to take a loft and . . . build a night club then it was a perfect place to do it. Now it, it’s like prime you know, it’s like prime real estate now, I mean there are major high rises over there and all those lofts have been turned into appartments, but, the building itself was a three storey building, it was about nine thousand square feet. (as cited in Rhietveld, 1997, p. 127)

The image of Knuckles using one of the defining sounds of the industrial era in a neighborhood which was testament to the massive industrial restructuring and relocating which characterised the sixties and seventies is an important one. In the hollow shell of an industrial age, Knuckles and his cohorts searched for a form of culture that still spoke to them, which addressed their lives in a meaningful fashion. As a musician, Knuckles was one of a group of artists spread through cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore, who strove to gain control over instruments of cultural production.
In cities where technology, amongst other things, had succeeded in uprooting previously stable forms of existence such as that of the automobile industry worker, we find an example of the first sustained stirrings of technology used as a form of cultural liberation and escape. Trapped but in the structural remains of this flighty mode of social organization, Derrick May says:

You can only dream what the rest of the world is like. And you want to find yourself getting out of there. And you want to put yourself in a position where whatever you think about , whatever you feel, you want to believe that it’s going to help you get out of that city. (interview in the film Modulations)

“That city,” which could be any of the aforementioned ones (May again speaks of Detroit), involved serious racial, sexual, and class-based discrimination. Marginalized in the precarious life of their daytime, places like the Warehouse were spaces in which new social relations could be constituted.
The story of house and techno must perforce begin with the demise of a previous popular cultural form. Disco, which had offered a transitory care-free space for marginalized gay, Puerto Rican and black working class youths during the seventies, had begun to suffer its incorporation into what Williams would define as “dominant practices” by the end of the decade. Garratt describes the process:

Codified, commercialized, disco began to stagnate. Middle-of-the-road crooner Andy Williams made a disco record. Middle-aged middle America hummed along to a tune like Salsoul Orchestra ‘You’re Just The Right Size’ without dreaming what it implied, and the US Navy almost adopted the Village People’s ‘In The Navy’ for a recruitment campaign until it’s camp subtext was explained. Reduced to a formula and severed from its black soul roots, the music was considered production-line fodder, mechanical and soulless. (Garratt, p. 21)

While disco began to fall out of favour with the marginalized groups which had fostered its early development, the desire for a different music which was still capable of creating the same sense of community remained. Different production techniques began to be explored in more depth, ones that would significantly shape the form of popular electronic music to come.
Many popular historical books on electronic music claim that when Frankie Knuckles arrived in Chicago for the opening of the Warehouse in 1977, disc jockeys were something of a rarity, with juke boxes being favoured instead. As the supply of disco records began to dry up, Knuckles used the knowledge of his friend Erasmo Riviera (who was going to engineering school at the time) and began toying with reel-to-reel tape player. The two would take old Salsoul and Philly disco records, adding new beats and sound effects for the crowd at the Warehouse.
This shift in production technique was happening in other urban centres as well:

Larry Levan may have been getting most of the attention for it in New York, but another friend, David Todd, was doing similar things at a gay club called the Catacombs in Philadelphia, and there were others in Detroit and Washington DC. As for Knuckles, ‘I wasn’t doing anything at that point that other DJ’s weren’t doing elsewhere.’ (Garratt p. 38)

Newer technology was about to arrive on the scene however which was to become an integral part of the production process. In 1980 Technics released their 1200 turntables featuring better pitch control (the feature allowing the speed at which records are played to be sped up or slowed down) than any previous model. Garratt claims the feature was most likely included to enable Karaoke singers to keep in tune with the instrumental version of songs, but when dj’s got ahold of them they were put to different use. Records could be sped up or slowed down and, with the help of a mixer, their beats (in the case of disco or house the steady, pulsating beat oft-described as “four on the floor”) to be perfectly matched, allowing for one song to slide into the other without interruption. Even bigger changes, however, were on the way.

Self-Sufficiency in Cultural Production? The Roland TB 909 Comes to Town

The 909 was the first drum machine we made with sampled sounds. We actually had digital samples but they were very rudimentary samples they do not sound incredibly great but they became the standard. I mean you can’t listen to a house track without hearing the 909 drum kit in it. It’s just the standard. (Jim Norman of the Roland Music Corporation, interview in Modulations)

Norman tells us this with a huge grin, and for good reason. In 1979, Roland Music Corporation was part of a an industry’s move to push its tendrils even further out into a market of consumers which had only recently begun to be tapped. Initially with machines such as the TB 303, and subsequently with the TR 808 and TR 909, their aim was to create a steady rhythmical accompinament for people playing the guitar.
As we can see, the production concept of creating an electronic instrument with a definite subsection of consumers in mind (a process of which the Hammond organ was the first flicker) has come to full fruition. In this case however, the plans were initially unsuccessful. Roland’s drum kits never caught on with the more privileged subsection of consumers they were aimed at, and became more cheaply available on the second hand market. Michael Miguel of Rogue Music captures the process accurately:

OK, this is the 303. When it originally first came out, the 303 was in the $700 price range. It was trying to mimic acoustic instruments, but it didn’t. Now the 303 lost its value and that’s why a lot of these guys from, in Chicago, in Detroit and Germany can pick up these things in the used market for $50 to $20 . . . that’s it. (Modulations)

The machines changed the face of electronic music. Disco had dried up but suddenly there were tools to enable a new musical form, stripped down of its organic elements like the large orchestras, a form of music which Hillegonda Rhietveld refers to as “electronic disco.” (p. 124) In late 1983 Jesse Saunders, one of Chicago house music’s early figures, had his record box stolen, and with them his signature song. Using an 808, a 303 and a small Korg synthesizer, he remade it, lifting the samples it had used from other songs (Lipp Inc’s “Funkytown” and Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls”).
Released in 1984, the record sold well, setting off the wheel of circulation in motion around it:

Larry Sherman, a businessman who owned the city’s only pressing plant and who had made a good living supplying many of Chicago’s Juke boxes with new records until DJ culture took over, saw the quantities Jesse Saunders was pressing and quickly set up his own Trax label to release similar material. (Garratt, p. 44)

The means to produce electronic music were beginning to be available to the denizens of the gutted Rust Belt. Marshall Jefferson, who was heavily influenced by his visits to the Music Box (the club Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles’ played at after the Warehouse), saved up for the necessary equipment working a graveyard shift at the local post office. He produced his first record within days of having the equipment, in which the 808 was heavily present.

By the time Frankie Knuckles left the Warehouse in 1982, this budding form of music was spreading throughout the limited circuits of cultural distribution. Mixes were beginning to crop up on a few radio stations, and mixed tapes would be copied over hundreds of times as they were passed from hand to hand. The kind of sound was what people had been hearing at the Warehouse, and soon became “‘house” music.

Chicago’s soulful form of music was in full evolution, bringing on board gospel-trained singers who bellowed out lyrics which spoke of freedom, dancing, and making love. The experimentation with this newly accessible technology continued however, enabling the first varietal splits in popular electronic music. Until then, the Roland 303 had been used in an unintended manner, but the process was to be extended further. The legend goes that Marshall Jefferson and DJ Pierre were getting drunk and fiddling with the drum machine. The resonant filter knobs included by Roland were intended to alter the tones of the bass, but DJ Pierre twisted them rapidly to produce a squelching sound “which seemed to emanate from another dimension.” They taped the sound and played it at the Music Box to a bewildered crowd. By the fourth time they played the song that night, those who frequented the club had embraced this tangibly different musical form, and the dancefloor was packed.

This first offshoot from house music provides us with an excellent link with how popular electronic music was unfolding in the other city we are focusing on. Not too many kilometers away, a more bleakly critical version of the music was being forged in Detroit. The material spaces and forces in which the new form of culture was being created are even more obviously enmeshed in the process here. Driven by the clearly mutating reality they saw developing in the decaying urban core which surrounded them, early techno musicians strove to create a soundtrack with which to express this.

Derrick May and Aaron Atkins’ mothers worked hard to escape inner city Detroit and move forty-five minutes away to the middle class suburb of Belleville. Being the only two formerly inner-city kids in their class they naturally formed a friendship which led to Derrick meeting Aaron’s older brother, Juan. Juan was fascinated by the shift he perceived in his surroundings. Having taken a Future Studies course in the same high school, he was introduced to the ideas of Alvin Toffler, who in his own way was explaining the historical shift (or as he calls it, the “third wave”) through his popular post-industrial framework. The finer details of this strand of theory needn’t be explored. What concerns us is the need to understand their changing material conditions, how the musicians saw themselves as a part of this change, and how this was intentionally infused into the music. Juan Atkins heard the German band Kraftwerk and knew that this was the direction he wanted music to go:

I just froze in my tracks. Everything was so clean and precise, so robotic. That’s what blew me away. Because I had no access to that kind of sequencer technology, I didn’t even know it existed. There weren’t any at that time that were affordable for a regular musician. (as cited in Garratt, p. 56)

The technology, when it became available, was seen as an instrument of liberation through which the change evident in their surroundings could be expressed. Atkins’ “Night Drive Thru Babylon” was meant to be a soundtrack for a drive though the streets of inner-city Detroit. He sums up his relationship with city’s history of popular cultural production in this manner:

Berry Gordy built the Motown sound on the same principles as the conveyor belt system at Ford’s. Today, their plants don’t work that way – they use robots and computers to make the cars. I’m probably more interested in Ford’s robots than Berry Gordy’s music.

Differently from the essentially optimistic tone of Alvin Toffler’s analysis, techno came out sounding tellingly darker and harder. Its defining sounds are more pounding, “sparse, kinetic funk with drums like thunderbolts, yet mournful and deeply romantic, as if the machines were whispering a lament about what it was like to be young and black in post-industrial America.” (Collin & Godfrey, p. 24)

The Political Economy of Early House and Techno: Or What Enables and Constrains the Creation of a Popular Cultural Form

“Examining how musical forms are shaped by social forces is important, because it brings into focus how significantly technology and economics contribute to the development of cultural forms.” Tricia Rose

I started off the essay with a question by the French theorist Jacques Attali, who wondered which path we were to take “through the immense forest of noise with which history presents us.” The descendant of a line of theorists preoccupied by the conditions in which culture was produced and the resulting form of that culture, Attali charted an interesting course through this marvellous forest, one on which we might take some time to reflect.
In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Attali traces the relationship between music and the conditions in which it was produced from the very dawn of human existence to the present. What he finds in his depiction of the three stages music has gone through (sacrificial ritual, representation, repetition) and the tentative outline of where it might be headed (composition). Throughout the work, the essence of the relationship he depicts is one of foreshadowing. In his own words, the task he sets himself out is that of:

. . . establishing relations between the history of people and the dynamics of the economy on the one hand, and the history of ordering noise in codes on the other; predicting the evolution of one by the forms of the other; combining economics and aesthetics; demonstrating that music is prophetic and that social organization echoes it. (p. 5)

Attali’s work is a crucial stepping stone in the critical understanding of music as a cultural form and more specifically in the political economy of a cultural form. His depiction of a relationship between different locations in the circuit of cultural production remains problematic however. What I hope to have depicted is a picture of cultural production in which the form (popular electronic music), while occasionally happening despite (what cultural studies theorists would have us focus on) or in advance of (what Attali claims) often happens because of determinate conditions which are both political and economic. While of course music cannot and should not only be boiled down to this, I hope to have made a good enough case for what political economy can offer by way of insights into cultural forms.
Bringing it back to our selected case studies, while nobody can explain why DJ Pierre first produced that “unearthly” sound out of a Roland 808 drum machine, it is undeniable that people of his social class had to wait for the better part of a century before they had the possibility to do the knob tweaking. Similarly, it is no accident or coincidence that techno and house began to develop as a cultural form in urban centres such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. These urban centres, these spaces, had been vacated by the stealth of an economic system which had discovered that it needed to move to maintain or pursue advantageous configurations of production. The link between these living conditions and the very human need for gratification and release which was played out in these desolate spaces is one which could not be stronger or more obvious.

Political conditions were essential in the articulation of these cultural forms as well. As Garratt and Collin & Godfrey discuss, those who frequented these spaces were united by a sense of powerlessness against the dominant groups and practices of the day. Not only was the Warehouse a place where black and Puerto Rican, male and female homosexuals could go to escape the drudgery of their surroundings, but it was a place where they could find power in a sense of community.

The story of popular electronic music is very much a story of control. Electronic music culture today is still marked by the elevation of control over technology as a sign of achievement and prowess. Turntable artists who scratch and mix different sounds creating something completely different are asserting their control over technology, their ability to make it speak our language and perform to our specifications.
If we take a historical look at why this is so, this distinctive trait makes a lot of sense, literally fitting in to the structural practices in which it began. Frankie Knuckles’ train was a terrifying thing to hear rocketing towards you in the darkness of a dimmed club, but him playing it represents the domination of an industrial sound by control over new musical technologies.

At the same time however, there is a vital reason why control over technology takes on such an important quality in these budding cultures. The argument that I have attempted to put forth throughout the paper is that this is so precisely because this subsection of people always found themselves having to react to technology. Rather than learning how to make their instruments – which they might have done hundreds of years ago – this generation of musicians needed to learn how to use instruments which arrived to them through the channels of the market. It was fortunate indeed that the moment those channels finally opened, there was a simultaneous opening of urban space within which the form of culture could develop and be shared.

Of course popular electronic music represents the inventiveness and the resistance to dominant practices of an oppressed group. But the process that unfolds is also a story of more flexible corporations and the commodification of cultural production. To explore popular cultural forms means more than celebrating them without asking questions. It means to ask more questions, and better ones all the time. Beyond this, it is important to remember that the onject of study, like life, is in perennially moving, changing, and adapting. The reason our study stops short of examining the veritable explosion this kind of music has experienced in the last decade is that different but familiar processes have come to the fore.

Popular electronic music, as Attali might say, is moving from being defined as “noise” towards achieving a position in which power bequeaths upon it the status of music. Car, clothes, and software companies have with increasing frequency featured the many current strains of popular electronic music in their advertising campaigns. It is here where, despite its idiosynchracies, Attali’s work is so important:

All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality. It is what links a power centre to its subjects, and thus, more generally, it is an attribute of power in all its forms. Therefore, any theory of of power today must include a theory of noise and its endowment with form. Among birds a tool for marking territorial boundaries, noise is inscribed from the start within the panoply of power. Equivalent to the articulation of a space, it indicates the limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard within, how to survive by drawing one’s sustenance from it. And since noise is a source of power, power has always listened to it with fascination. (p. 6)

The second half of this essay, the part of this essay that is missing, would tell a different story. It would speak of the music’s increasing subsumption within the structures of the recording industry, of the discovery of a popular form ripe for commodification. Nowadays, artists sell millions of copies of their records, top disc jockeys receive thousands of dollars per session and are flown around the world to play in the most popular clubs. It appears as if the great pendulum of power is swinging back towards the structures.
At its birth, popular electronic music made do with the spaces and openings left by structures. The form came about due to a specific set of contingencies, themselves inextricably related to the vagaries of late twentieth century capitalism. Making these connections, and suggesting that they are vitally important to understand, is what a renewed political economy can offer to the study of popular cultural forms.