Renegades of Electronic Funk: Revisiting Dan Sicko’s Techno Rebels

That techno was born and created in Detroit is a fact most in dance and electronic music take for granted, but at the end of the 1990s, techno’s worldwide success had began to eclipse its actual origins. So much so that author, music critic, scholar, lecturer, journalist, founder of digital music mag Reverb, and champion of the city of Detroit Dan Sicko was moved to write this detailed history of techno, which placed back Detroit at the very heart of the story. As Bill Brewster says in his forward to the revised 2010 edition, Techno Rebels “…wrested techno’s history from its European pillagers and handed the history back to his rightful owner: Detroit, the Motor City.”

Sicko, who passed away in 2011, first published Techno Rebels in 1999, and it covers the musical, social and cultural influences that drove the birth, incubation, development and then worldwide dissemination of techno. It’s a story of a city-wide collective dream, a cultural reaction to the unique set and setting of Detroit, a city whose post-industrial entropy make it somewhere that Sicko says that with every passing day seemed less likely to spawn anything like techno ever again.

For me, Techno Rebels’ great strength is Sicko’s ability to delve deep into the detail and minutiae of techno’s birth while simultaneously covering broader cultural and social influences, all while keeping it accessible and manageable. There’s plenty of rich information about key Detroit institutions like the Submerge distribution network, or the Music Institute, but Sicko also keeps the reader aware of micro details like whether a particular track featured a digital or analog synth too. And while it might sound a little crass, one of the reasons this book is so successful is that it’s relatively short: Sicko’s prose is so efficient and economical that he squeezes maximum information into each page, none of the many deviations and side notes feel unnecessary, everything here serves the greater purpose.

Techno Rebels “…wrested techno’s history from its European pillagers and handed the history back to his rightful owner: Detroit, the Motor City.”

So he begins with a comprehensive account of the musical and social origins of techno, at the very start of the 1980s, detailing Detroit’s high school social club parties. In a city where much of the infrastructure was crumbling, young people had to take an active role in finding “something to do,” and these self-organised events were not only hugely popular at the time but the music played at them was a key element in how techno ended up sounding. Detroit’s black youth were expanding their musical tastes, away from the traditional R’n’B/soul/funk music of their parents and embracing a new clean, synthetic and upwardly mobile musical aesthetic, and the sound track of Detroit’s early ’80s social club/high school parties included Italo disco, Eurodisco, Hi-NRG and Synthpop.

“The young techno rebels thought they had found R&B’s polar opposite,” Sicko writes in the first chapter, “when in fact they were just hearing American soul music through unfamiliar filters.” He makes clear the links between this music, which he refers to as the “electronic upgrade of traditional disco” and aspects of techno, including its futuristic feel, its continued use of the disco 4/4 drum rhythm, and its replacement of traditional instruments with synthesisers and traditional song structures with “tracks,” also pointing out that a few influential producers under different names were responsible for dozens of the biggest Italo tracks, and that same faceless anonymity also could be felt in techno too. All of which was both super-interesting and largely unknown to me when I first read it over two decades ago.

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LOVE IS THE MESSAGE: This was originally published in 5 Mag Issue #216 featuring Andy Compton of the Rurals on 50 albums and 25 years of Peng, Ralph Session cover mix, Chicago’s Noble Square Records’ deep house love affair and more. Become a member for $2/month and get every issue in your inbox right away!

Techno Rebels proceeds to document the emergence of techno’s first recording artists via interviews with the pretty much all the central figures including the “Belleville Three,” Rik Davis, Anthony Shakir, Charles “Electrifying Mojo” Johnson, Jeff Mills etc., and lesser known names like DJ John Collins who first hired Mills to DJ at Cheeks nightclub on Detroit’s Eight Mile Road. The majority of the book is taken up with a detailed and largely chronological account of the ’80s germination and then the ’90s unfurling of the genre. The transformative impact of techno on the UK rave scene, and indeed UK rave’s impact on Detroit techno is given plenty of attention, and the same chapter also contains techno’s genre name origin story via Neil Rushton’s 1988 Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit compilation. Sicko then moves on to cover what he calls “a fierce musical reassertion and a new generation of world beaters” — the ‘second wave’ of Carl Craig, Octave One, Mike Banks and Underground Resistance, along with Richie Hawtin’s Plus 8 label and Berlin’s Tresor and Basic Channel.

The final section of the book attempts an overview of techno’s broader worldwide influence and development. Obviously this is a huge area, and there was never really going to be enough space, even when it was first written in 1999, and even with later author updates and revisions, to cover this subject with the same degree of attention to detail as the rest of the book. So instead, while the final chapters’ relatively brief references to, for example, UK drum & bass and US post rock as genres that evolved out of techno are interesting, they feel a little shallow and underdeveloped compared to the content of the previous chapters. But that shouldn’t detract from just what a well researched, well informed and highly readable book this is. It was an important work at the time, placing Detroit and the work of Black Detroit artists back at the very centre of the creation of one of 20th century America’s most important cultural innovations, and it remains a great piece of research, as well as a great piece of writing.

With his clear passion for the music and the city driving the whole thing, Sicko struck the ideal balance between in-depth fan-level research and his broader themes. I’ve certainly not read a better account of the various influences that contributed to the creation of techno, or a more through account of its early development.

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