Techno Music: A Spirited Defense
by Steve Mizrach
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Techno music, in my experience, has always formed a sort of invisible dividing line between me and my friends at parties and other occasions. It seems to be one of those things that people either love — "rave" about, in effect — or absolutely hate. Unlike, say country music, there isn’t a middle ground where people will listen to it without really having a preference for it. When you play techno, some people head for the dance floor, and others head for the door. There are many subcultures organized around music, such as goths and punks, but none is perhaps so hated (by some people, anyway) as "ravers". I always hear people complaining about those ‘kids’ who go to raves. Well, I’m no old man, but I’m 28, and nothing stimulates me more than hearing those beats, even if most of the people I see at clubs these days look like they’re 15, going on 12 (with their lollipops and pacifiers in their mouth, teddy-bear knapsacks and Pippy-longstocking pigtails, and "Spice Girls" glitter on their faces).
Most of the criticisms of techno music I’ve heard fall into three categories — it’s too repetitive, it lacks any real ‘musicianship,’ and it’s too "cheesy." The sad thing is that there’s a lot of techno music that indeed fits the bill in all cases. However, there’s plenty of popular music in other genres (such as punk, metal, ska, and the new ‘swing’) that can be found equally guilty of such flaws. And there’s some truly great techno (especially trance, jungle, and triphop) that transcends all of these criticisms. When people say techno music is too repetitive, I wonder how much dance music — or pop ballads in general — from the Top 40 they’ve listened to lately. Fine, the lyrics may come from real singers rather than samples or wailing ‘divas,’ but most pop songs out there basically consist of a chorus of 1-3 lines repeated seven or eight times, with anywhere from 1-4 original refrains wrapped around it. Pop music of all kinds is repetitive, but hell, it has been since the jazz era. Like good jazz, some techno music combines basic repetition of rhythms and samples with ongoing improvisations. A good DJ will always build on the basic template of a song with creative mixes and modulations.
One time I heard some guy moan at a party where some techno music was being played: "They keep repeating the same lines over and over again." I scratched my head. Had he listened to a Beatles song lately? In some cases, certain kinds of techno songs (especially industrial music) use repetition to the point of mindless monotony. However, in many cases, I think this is a deliberate device to call attention to the facts of life in an industrial (or post-industrial paper-shuffling) society — most of what we do in everyday life is also repetitive. I think in some cases repetition in techno music is used in exactly the opposite way it is in everyday life — not to numb us into sleep but to jar us awake into the way that we have allowed the routinization of all aspects of our life, including our leisure (an argument that goes back to the Situationists.) We tolerate so much mindless "Muzak" everywhere we go — whether it’s in elevators, dentist offices, department stores, or our workplaces — that, in effect, the grating and harsh repetition of industrial-techno sort of works as a kind of (badly needed) "mental floss."
Another related aesthetic issue here is the idea that music, in order to be good, must give us pleasure. (A great deal of techno music does, especially the ecstatic pleasure of dance-movement, but some of the best techno music does not.) This idea has been rejected in so many other areas of the art world that I cannot understand why it still drives our sonic consciousness. It is this awful idea that continues to generate billions of multinational dollars for the Michael Boltons, Spice Girls, and Hansons of this world. But people who really appreciate music know that music also exists to challenge and confront people — in the way that punk musicians often tried to do (many punk bands often considered a concert a success if the fans would try and beat them up after the show), that some gangsta rappers strive to achieve (when they’re not just ‘dissin’ on "bitches and’ hos"), and today’s gifted industrial artists also seek to attain. Yes, hyper-repetition makes people uncomfortable. But in some cases, that is the point. It’s only by irritating the oyster that you produce the pearl.
In other cases, such as in trance techno, repetition is used in a different way — to produce a shift in states of consciousness. Every major world culture has realized that rhythm is the key to "sonic driving" of the brainwave state, and thus has used repetitive drumming and dancing to induce trance states. Many ravers have realized that you don’t need "Special okay" or "X" to get into that state — if you let the music envelop your mind, you can get their on your own, without any drugs. The repetitive beats literally seize your body, heart, and mind, turning you into a virtual ‘marionette,’ uniting your motions with everyone else in the dance crowd, forming, as Doug Rushkoff once noted, a self-organizing fractal. (I have wanted, one day, to put a video camera on the ceiling at a rave and get time-compressed shots of people dancing that night so as to see this process on the macro level he is talking about.) Listening to techno music when no one is dancing to it might make you think it is boring and repetitive. But when you’re around hundreds of people sharing the same groove and vibe, you are suddenly immersed in Levy-Bruhl’s participation mystique , tapped into the collective consciousness. Many people who say they ‘hate’ rave music have, quite simply, not tried it. And no one would judge other aesthetic products that way.
As for the accusation that techno musicians lack any real ‘musicianship,’ well I consider this just the latest form of ‘naïve organicism.’ The people who say this will usually declare that instruments made of brass, wood, ivory, and string are real instruments, whereas drum machines, synthesizers, MIDI keyboards, sequencers, and turntables are not. The simple fact is that although electronic instruments do automate some elements of the musical process, no good DJ simply lets his instruments run on "autopilot." They are always tweaking, adjusting, tuning, just like any other musician. Composition for electronic music, whether electroacoustic or simply synthetic, is just as time-consuming and creative a process as writing for any other type of instrument. And performance requires just as much real-time effort — even though it might involve skills that people consider more ‘technical’ than ‘artistic’. I find it ironic that many music instructors say anybody can write music, and than revert to elitism when they recoil from horror that electronic tools finally allow, yes, anybody , to write music.
The use of sampling is often said to be contrary to creativity, and many musical artists actually consider it to be theft. This is complete nonsense. All musicians know that they constantly are borrowing styles and vocal techniques from each other — it’s an incestuous business. As long as it doesn’t involve the direct lifting of lyrics or whole riffs, we call that "influence." But I think the music business has yet to catch on to the idea that other postmodern areas of the visual-art world, and some segments of the software industry, have — imitation is the most sincere form of flattery; creativity is appropriation with modification and improvement. It does require what some might call artistic ‘genius’ to find the right sample, modulate it to match the rest of your composition, and insert it into the other elements of your song. Turning old pop songs into techno music is old hat; but building new lyrical constructions out of those songs, inverting their meaning for new situations, and changing them into something new is true art.
One guy at a party once told me he hated techno music because like other forms of automation, it was putting people (in this case, musical artists in the "industry") out of business. I thought this was ridiculous. People seem to think that all techno music consists of is plugging equipment into a PC, running a pre-written program, and leaving for several hours. The simple fact is that no one would listen to that for very long. Techno music still requires plenty of human intervention to create and perform — the machines are simply the equipment that enables it. Fine, maybe it can be whipped up by one person instead of a duo or the ‘pop four’ (drummer, singer, bass guitarist, lead guitarist) arrangement for creating so much rock music. But in essence this doesn’t really create unemployment because as people recognize, given practice and effort, anyone can do it themselves. Anyone who wants to continue making the music can go out and do it — there’s no shortage of venues. This is not because techno artists lack talent or skill — but I believe techno music is the first form of music which has begun to prove the old adage of the ethnomusicologists — "anyone can make music" — correct.
Why will people travel for hundreds of miles, sometimes even cross oceans, to listen to certain techno DJs? It is because of their artistry . Other kinds of musicians work with pre-existing templates for performances — we call them musical ‘scores’ after all — and yet we recognize that no two performances are ever exactly alike, and any good musician will try and meet his audience and adapt to the environment of the performance. Likewise with any good DJ — and their fans know it. How long can anybody listen to one of those automated player pianos or a music box? If techno music didn’t involve some degree of human involvement and musical artistry, it wouldn’t have a fan base. Some musical critics have said that the finest in music (which they usually consider to be something written by a dead white European guy during the Baroque era) touches the deepest parts of our emotion and spirit. Well, then surely some ambient music, such as that of Banco de Gaia and System 7, is the finest in music. People confuse means with ends; technology is the means for creating techno music, but the end is to reach the human spirit.
So: as to the criticism of techno music being "cheesy." What can I say? In many cases, today’s techno is guilty as charged. As with any genre (the powers that be have dubbed it ‘electronica,’ whatever the hell that is) that seems to have been opened up to public attention (by having its own MTV segment and section in Billboard magazine), it seems to have drawn to it some people who create it not out of love for the music but out of a desire for the dollars of people who lack taste (and there are plenty of them out there.) I frankly can’t relate to techno songs about women’s "booties," because I think that the music is on a whole different plane from that kind of misogynist attitude, but they seem to be out there. And although the sampling of the occasional electronic device (pager chirps, klaxons, modem screech, video game noise) is an interesting element, there are some techno songs that overuse these effects to the point of nausea. At one point, Pac-Man noises were cute and innovative, but people need to move on to something new.
Another element in the "cheese" factor are rave promoters who seem to care more about separating kids from their money than in creating festivals of great music. I remember the days of outdoor raves that were free, or at least more reasonably priced than your average rock concert. But today they’re almost all indoors, at some dilapidated old skate rink no one else is using. As if charging an arm and a leg to get in, and then charging you ridiculously high prices for glowsticks, sodas, candy, and rave paraphenelia, were not bad enough, these idiots feel justified in charging you an additional "fee" to get back in if you leave for whatever reason. I couldn’t believe it when this happened to me recently at an Orlando rave. I had a handstamp — I thought that meant you got back in free… and then the woman at the door asked me for another five dollars just for the ‘privilege’ of being readmitted to something I had already paid for. Boy, was I ticked. I mean, come on, do they expect people to dance for eight hours till dawn without leaving once to get some fresh air or get something from their car?
Don’t get me wrong — some of the new raves are a lot better than the old ones held in some warehouse in a bombed-out neighborhood when you were constantly waiting for police to come and shut down the "unauthorized" party. The new promoters are also more vigilant about keeping drugs out of the ‘scene,’ although probably mostly so they can cover their ass effectively. And at last they seem to have found people who actually know how to run the lasers, smoke machines, video projectors, and other equipment that make raves an interesting synaesthetic experience. They are also shrewd marketers who have realized that relying on word of mouth for promotions isn’t enough — for a diverse crowd, you want to use flyers, the Internet, music store posters, and so forth. This has had good and bad results, in that raves are starting to draw a larger audience from a broader background. However, the very people who are being drawn in, ironically, seem to be totally unaware of the rave ethos of unity, diversity, and acceptance… and thus think it is OK to make people who dress differently or have different lifestyles unwelcome!
The simple fact is this: there are many techno songs that are so shallow it’s painful to listen to them. The best techno music is about something different than just "making booty calls," however. It calls attention to the evolving nature of our technological society, to the unrealized potential of human beings to expand our consciousness, to the global melange of cultures that is our planet. Although people look at techno music as mostly something to dance to, some of the best techno music should be listened to — and reflected on. Some clubs have ‘chill rooms’ for listening to trance-ambient music this way, but there’s plenty of reflective music in the other styles. There are techno songs whose call to protest is as sharp and shrill as any folk tune by Pete Seeger; whose ability to get you into higher states of mind is stronger than any psychedelic rock; whose fidelity to the underlying beauty of the world’s music is as devoted as anything in the "world beat" aisle; and whose power to hold a harsh lens to the contradictions of society is as fervent as that of any gangsta rap. These are anything but "cheese."
The art music world is finally beginning to open up to acceptance of electro-acoustic music, although it’s still deeply skeptical of anything that’s fully synthetic (electronically generated, as opposed to recorded and modulated.) Through the work of groups like Cabaret Voltaire, there has been a good deal of "cross-pollination" between electronic art and popular music. The simple fact is this: as with any musical genre, there are artists, and then there are people only out to make cheap crass imitations that sell, appealing to the least common denominator. Few people would judge other kinds of popular music based on their worst and weakest links, but many people seem confident in condemning techno music just because some "cheese makers" have decided to get in on the party and troll for dollars. If you’ve never given techno a chance, sit down and give it the benefit of your fully tuned in, open mind. Look for the best in the genre, not the worst. You might just change your attitude about it.
