DeForrest Brown Jr. started his research on American Techno Music around 2009/10. He recently co-developed a project called Make Techno Black Again, where he celebrates the genre’s origins. Throughout the class, DeForrest explained the context of his project and shadowed the history of black people on techno music. He used the city of Detroit as a case of study that could be applied to the rest of the United States:
Detroit is a Settler colonial Industrial Capitalist State run on human labour exclusively and uses the land itself as a resource to fuel itself. (…) You can’t separate Detroit Techno from the rest of Detroit Music. The music from this city is century-long continuous thought that was disrupted by various points by white supremacist violence. He later jumps to a chart designed by the collectors and techno duo Drexciya, consisting of James Stinson and Gerald Donald, made in 1997 for their upcoming album The Quest, where they explain the relationship between the primitive slave market in the XVII century to modern and cultural aspects of techno music. DeForrest explains how and when Detroit was founded: in the American territory expansion (a period recognized for many wars inside the existing country or its borders, such as the Mexican American War or even the American Civil War) gold in the now Californian State. That same gold was the firestarter to build the New World in the USA, being Detroit one of the cities built in that era, becoming one of the most industrious cities to ever exist. Following his research, the American Civil War was a matter of slaveocracy, where the north and south were fighting to maintain slavery. According to DeForrest Brown, Abraham Lincoln was not fully planning to free the slaves and make black people as equal as white American because there were quotes where the same clarified the need for a separate living between the two (blacks and blacks whites). This might not be something relevant to techno music yet, but it’s a slow build-up into the conditions under which a 19-year-old black kid in the middle of a city that’s crumbling under the weight of its own bloated excess and arrogance.
The second image on the graph provided by Drexciya shows the migration, from the south to the north, of black people in the ’30s and ’40s due to white supremacist violence. He uses the example of Sun Ra music, which is a response from the place he was from – he moved from Alabama to New York. He also refers to the Bombingham incident in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Ku Klux Klan bombed a church, making 4 girls dead. I should say that my aunt, the daughter of my Great Grandfather, was supposed to be the fifth young girl in this bombing, but that day just so happened to move to Detroit that morning. That’s my personal connection to Detroit – understanding why black ended up North. These types of violent white supremacists manifestations happened in many other industrialize ecosystems where both blacks and whites couldn’t live together, which inducted a series of riots at the end of the ’60s, after the death of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, to protest against these adversities.
According to Alvin Toffler’s perspective of western society, the ’80s was essentially a part of the Information Era. The Detroit High Tec Music appeared, being it a response to the city’s history in the modern days.
Make Techno Black Again also reflects on how black culture was kept being stolen from them and appropriated by white Americans throughout history and how that has to do with European colonialism and systemic music industries. What colonialism are many white men who start businesses without having concrete rules and conversations about distributing what they’re calling products? It’s not even about techno, it’s literally about stopping colonialism, and our weapon of choice, for now, is music and counterculture, said Brown Jr to HoneySuckle magazine.