‘robot dance’, globally popularized by Michael Jackson) during the early 1980s,
which left its mark on early forms of techno. Also in the early 1980s, in one of
Chicago’s areas of deserted warehouse spaces, a black Latino gay club called the
Warehouse lent its name to the musical selections of its resident DJ, Frankie
Knuckles; this was music from ‘the house’—in other words, house music. In the UK,
sound-system parties utilized disused industrial storage and factory spaces. At the
very end of that decade, similar events, much larger in scale attracting thousands,
gained the tag of ‘rave’ in the UK; these were increasingly organized in the
countryside, signifying an urban disappearance from intensifying surveillance by
police and press, enabled by ICT and fuelled by moral panic (Collin 1997).
Subsequently one could find similar uses of empty warehouses elsewhere (San
Francisco, Melbourne, Sydney, Bangkok, Lisbon, Berlin) and, increasingly during
the 1990s, of non-urban spaces (Australian bush, Israeli desert or Japanese
mountains for its urban ‘refugees’, and Thai islands, Peruvian mountains or Goan
beaches for global urban tourists). At the same time, the UK’s super-clubs developed
during the mid-1990s as a result of the overwhelming success of this type of dance
gathering. Since the middle of that decade, such clubs, like Ministry of Sound based
in London, have attempted to gain a share of a potential global market.
Detroit techno was a combination of European and African-American futurisms;
as Derrick May famously put it: ‘It’s like George Clinton and Kraftwerk are stuck in
an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company’ (Barr 2000: vii). In
Germany, back in the 1970s, Kraftwerk’s ‘Man-Machine’ music had brought the
electronic avant-garde, including its machine-aesthetic heritage, into the popular
domain with tracks like Trans Europe Express’ (1977). Meanwhile, in the same era
USA funk music articulated changes in industry and in black civil rights politics;
funk made sense of the identity crisis experienced by black male blue-collar workers
as they lost jobs in the failing manufacturing industry in the 1970s economic
downturn (Ward 1998). An intense sense of rootlessness found expression in ‘the
discontinuum of AfroDiasporic Futurism’ (Eshun 1998:–003). In the case of
George Clinton’s Detroit-based spaced-out funk, Afro-centric imagery of Egypt’s
pyramid gods was combined with the idea that the black man came from outer
space (Toop 1995). Hereby the Afro hair-do signified black pride, in a
countercultural let-your-hair-grow manner, as well as the psychedelic antennae that
reached out into the universe.
More convulsive psychedelic sentiments were tried out in excessively raw form in
early to mid-1980s Chicago, again in a mostly African-American context. In
competition with Frankie Knuckles’ smooth gay-friendly sessions, DJ Ron Hardy
was well known for his legendary drug-fuelled marathon DJ sessions, playing a
mixture of edgy danceable electronic weirdness, including industrial punk funk from
the USA and Europe. These sessions enabled, in 1987, the birth of acid house, a
deconstructed post-human form of house music. The best example is Phuture’s
seminal track Acid Trax’ (1987), with its unanchored incessant psychedelic or ‘acid’
squelchy bass sequence placed on top of a relentless 4/4 bass heavy beat. It was a simple
concept, a wonderful example of how creative moments can occur when one ignores
50 SACRIFICIAL CYBORG AND COMMUNAL SOUL