WOEBOT

or did you mean its "discreet" take on race?

seriously. i'm curious.

in the early nineties techno was pretty much colourblind. you'd never really find people eulogising detroit techno because it was black music. that came much later with UR, who when they started out really embraced the faceless qualities of techno. much later, with kodwo eshun's recontextualising of greg tate's ideas detroit techno was (brilliantly) re-written as a black music in the tradition of ra and clinton.

when i interviewed derrick may back in 1993, in the light of my african movie which was i guess one of those early self-conscious recontextualisations, and derrick insisted that techno wasn't racist, and i suppose i wasn't really paying attention. the point was that race was irrellevant.

nowadays of course, blackness is a big part of most techno but it isnt really a part of dubstep is it? i mean i know dmz are black dudes, but i don't know about the rest of the people. discreet innit.

kirk de giorgio, who i like and respect very much, has always contended that techno emerged from the traditions of black music.

however, and i'm sure we could argue about it all night, i've always thought the point was that it strived originally to reach beyond race- the very reason he's always been welcome within techno.

Actually, I was kinda taken by this: "...I half admit I expected someone to detourn my remarks, spin them into a Zombiest manifesto...", as it's far closer to my heart.

It's something that I've been thinking/wondering about for a while, but lack the time to expand on: the analogies between cinematic zombies and skunked-out, twilight alpha-state half-life paranoia (Urban 'Dread') and it's non-drugged daily jobsworth drudgery equivalent; DMZ's "Horror Show"; the skull/bone/voodoo motif's on Skull Disco releases, etc = modern urban life ("The (existential) Horror! The (existential) Horror!")

There's some great imagery/motifs lining up for examination, but people have instead started talking a lot more about how 'life-affirming' the 'mystical' side of the music is (I'm not arguing), whereas maybe I also like being scared.

Maybe a strand of urban music is starting to emerge into the day-light here (not sure why)...maybe de-zombifying and 'feminising' itself, making itself more available prior to commodification to a mainstream/coffee-table student audience. (Now that would be scary...)

i'm not sure that the two things - techno's roots in "black music" and its strivings for a post-racial (or at least non-racist) view of the world - are necessarily exclusive or contradictory. i suppose that's one of the brilliant things about eshun's (et al.'s) "recontextualization": by aligning techno with afro-futurists such as ra and clinton, they cast it as both grounded in the modern (anglo-/american) experience of race and racism as well as a vision of transcendental redemption. so, yeah, if we hear techno (and house) as emerging from electro-funk and disco - two forms as messily "black" as any others - then, sure, we can hear a not-so-discreet blackness in what might otherwise signify the posthuman, never mind postracial.

re: dubstep, i guess i always heard the embrace of dub signifiers as foregrounding a kind of sonic blackness as well, despite that these sounds have long passed into modern musical ubiquity. i suppose i don't know enough about the london context to say so, but i imagine that embracing the sounds of jamaica - as happened in jungle - certainly marks a music as "black" (and i keep using quotes here simply to note that this label is itself a product of racialist discourse). but maybe i'm just listening too hard and it is more discreet (and less discrete) than i think.

thanks for the thoughts, though. that's a fascinating reading of techno's (re)constructed history (via eshun via tate!). i suppose it'll take a bit more distance to see how this all bears out.

>but i imagine that embracing the sounds of jamaica - as happened in jungle - certainly marks a music as "black"

well, hardly! using reggae samples is nothing but a racial smokescreen?!? i mean 90% of those reggae samples will be deployed by white folk........

deployed by white folk, yes, but to what ends?

i mean, the clash deployed reggae signifiers, too, and we might hear such as something of a political statement.

i'm not saying that appropriations of sonic signifiers of blackness can't happen in such a way that they sidestep all racial politics and, in essence, affirm a normative whiteness and racist power structure, but i wouldn't want to lose sight of the trangressive potential of such musical articulations. i think it just means that critics and audiences and artists need to exercise more vigilance over which 'uses' we understand to be vanguard vs. rearguard.

i suppose i'm taking a much more prosaic angle than you wayne. for me (middle-class whitey) black music is black music.

there are regions in which the racial distinction is (pleasingly, progressively) blurred: ardkore, acid etc most often in what we used to call "dance music". but then again there are musics which for all intents and purposes i'd regard as black music: reggae, ragga, soul, jazz, hip-hop, and most crucially in this context grime. grime, despite the presence of characters like dogzilla and danny weed was always black music. that meant i believe that although it glowed with attraction to a certain brand of privelleged hipster, was going to struggle to reach across racial boundaries. grime, i believe, made a big thing about it blackness.

dubstep on the other hand, kind of like Jungle, maybe more like early Techno, made light of its racialisiation. it's partly because it's a voiceless, instrumental music- much less "in yer face" about itself that it has this twilight quality.

i'm not saying "dubstep"+slightly formless racial identity=bad (i think you might think i am). actually i'm saying something much more mercenary and capitalist-minded, that's that there isn't such a pungent racial quality to "dubstep" (reggae samples, especially dub-era samples just don't illicit the discomfort i think you're attributing to them) and that i believe my grease the rails to its success. and i hope dubstep is successful- who cares if i find it a bit boring?

i hear you, man. indeed, sometimes i worry about dubstep becoming the d'n'b to grime's jungle: a cleaned-up bastard cousin, less willing to face race. i'm not sure it's going there though.

at any rate, i have to confess that i'm militantly complex about this very messy thing that we call "black music." i think that talk about music does a lot to further racial ideologies, so i try to be careful and precise about the way i use such terms. my thinking on this has been indelibly shaped by ron radano, whose lying up a nation is a must-read, if a challenging one.

here's a primer.

Good post Matt.

Funny seeing you talk (pejoratively) about it being zombie music cos that's one of the things dubstep MCs shout out about, well Pokes does anyway.

Re: race - yes it has lots in common with jungle and techno. There are lots of black dubstep producers, around half and half I think. The DMZ audience on Friday, while being rammed with newcomers (a good thing as it turned out), was about one third black.

So you're right, demonstrably it has a black audience, but has no trouble attracting a white audience too.

Oh, and there's increasing evidence of vocals on dubstep records, something I'm really looking forward to. (I've just done a dubstep version of Ain't No Sunshine to push this idea a bit.)