BLOG 04/06/2020
The Jan Diaries — Black Music
This entry was going to be about something else. Jan Kinčl had 31 May in mind — the sixtieth birthday of Larry Heard, the Chicago house legend whose early records drew the blueprint the whole genre still works from — and then a message from Mike Banks arrived, and the week in the United States made the planned column impossible to write. What came out instead is the most political text in the series.
What the piece covers
The argument starts with Underground Resistance, which Banks founded in the early nineties in Detroit with Jeff Mills and Robert Hood as a label and a collective set against the mainstream. Kinčl reads the titles as a body of writing: Riot, Nation 2 Nation, Message To The Majors, The Turning Point, Revolution For Change. They described the socio-economic reality of Reagan-era America for a Detroit generation whose early childhood held the 12th Street riot, and thirty years on they read as current — which is exactly the unnerving part. From a small, monocultural country, he notes, the systemic problems written into America’s DNA are close to impossible to grasp, so he limits himself to the part of the story he can honestly speak about.
That part is whitewashing. Hair straightened with dangerous chemicals, cultural idioms sanded down until they fit a Western perception, and Elvis Presley sold as the king of rock’n’roll while what he actually offered was a diluted, more commercially palatable version of blues from the American South. Adaptation sometimes goes so far, Kinčl writes, that a later iteration of a genre loses contact with the original feeling entirely — he hears a worrying amount of unlistenable contemporary techno that comes off badly against the genre’s first decade, and points at Derrick May’s Icon as a reference. The correction follows: with all due respect to Kraftwerk in Düsseldorf, electronic dance music in its modern form came out of marginalised Black communities in Detroit and Chicago, with New York joining quickly. Even the idea of continuous playback without gaps between records comes from Jamaican soundsystem culture, the same population that pushed reggae towards dub — and dub is the ancestor of the remix, without which disco would never have hit the way it does.
The part that stayed
Twenty years earlier Laurent Garnier had already compressed all of this into a sentence on Last Tribute From The 20th Century, naming New York, Detroit and Chicago as cities full of soul, vision and inspiration. Kinčl closes on the same note he opens with: the culture is open and inclusive, everyone is welcome and dance is a universal language, but knowing the facts is an obligation, so that when the subject comes up somebody can point in the right direction. “Techno i house glazba je black music, a Elvis Presley nije izvorni kralj rock’n’rolla” — techno and house are Black music, and Elvis was not the original king of rock’n’roll.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Four minutes.