DeForrest Brown Jr > Quotes

“which became an epicenter for the music and nightlife of the city. Battle's record store and label would be the starting force of the “Detroit sound,” and a catalyst for the transmutation of Amiri Baraka's “blues continuum” into sellable documents of Black industrial culture,”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“futures in the declining city, trudging along in the wake of Motown's departure and transitioning away from the populist tunes that emerged from Gordy's stab at cybernated soul. More intimate and underground music developed, making use of turntables to play and blend disco, soul, and funk songs into a thread of continuous music composed in the moment and for the dancefloor.32 Before Detroit's collapse, live rhythm and soul groups played in four-piece units that over time grew into full-on ensembles; the sound morphed into disco and funk. Those morphologies of soulful harmonics and blues tonalities, when recorded, mastered, and pressed to vinyl, offered new usages for”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“brought back by their masters. Still, in Congo Square sessions were said to have included many African songs that were supposedly banned by the whites for being part of the vodum or voodoo rites. The slaves also danced French quadrilles and sang patois ditties in addition to the more African chants that they shouted above the ‘great drums.’” Ibid., 72. 82 “A”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“18 “Cybotron coincided with the birth of a sound known as ‘electro,’ presumably a shortening of ‘electronic funk.’ Electro was one of the great dance music developments of the early 1980s that was neither a derivation nor an extension of disco. Instead, it was a ‘switched-on’ funk variant, exaggerating the electronic sounds that Midwestern groups like Parliament-Funkadelic had perfected in the studio and brought onstage. Most critics point to New York, however, for the genre's watershed moment.” Dan Sicko, Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk [1999] (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 45.”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“Garage's business and technology model: Long even built the club's speakers as prototypes for club environments in order to invigorate the New York City club scene.”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“Kraftwerk's “Numbers” for Baker as an example of how they envisioned their new single would sound. They wanted to be the first Black electronic music group.69”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“101 Ibid., xiii. 102 Nelson George, Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“sessions of pre-techno soul music that lasted from the late afternoon until the break of dawn. “You have to understand, in the Black community, you had to mix disco and funk,” Howard states. “You couldn't just put on Gloria Gaynor's ‘I Will Survive’ and not do ‘Brick House’ by Commodores.” 34 Delano Smith, a DJ who turned to producing in the mid-’90s, was at the heart of Detroit's progressive scene as part of the Soundwave crew, with Carl Martin and Avon McDaniel of the social club Next Phase. “I think we were all inspired by disco music. A lot of the radio stations completely changed their format and played disco music day and night,” Smith said, observing the music industry's transition from professional”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“The Gap Band—a group made up of brothers Charlie, Ronnie, and Robert Wilson—released their sixth album of ensemble funk music, The Gap Band IV, on May 17, 1982; it peaked at number 1 on the Billboard Black Albums chart and 14 on the Pop Albums chart. Named after the acronym for streets in their hometown (Greenwood, Archer, and Pine) that were bombed by a white mob who were given weapons and airplanes by local police during the 1921 Tulsa race massacre,76 the band's second single, “You Dropped a Bomb on Me,” landed in August 1982, earning the number 2 spot on the Billboard Black Singles while also transmitting a lost history of racial”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“distorted in metallic sludge sluggishly warns at the beginning of the album 1999 (1982) and its titular radio single. Draped over the cyber-sexual percussive synths and guitar licks are lyrics that translate fears of communal death due to the quickening pace of technological growth: “I was dreamin’ when I wrote this / Forgive me if”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“Five's “The Message” broadcast the lyrics: “Don't push me ‘cause I'm close to the edge / I'm tryin’ not to lose my head / It's like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder how I keep from going under”—a disillusioned comment on the visible onset of urban decay befalling Black communities in America under President Ronald Reagan's economic policies.73 Afrika Bambaataa followed “Planet Rock” with a new song called “Looking for the Perfect Beat,” just in time for the release of their full length, Planet Rock: The Album (1986). Taylor reminisced:”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“When the electric age began to be felt during and after the First World War, the world of Negro jazz welled up to conquer the white. Jazz was a Negro product because it is directly related to speech rhythm rather than to any printed page or score.”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“Nation hosted community events with Bronx youth, organizing local music and dance movements into a single cohort that, over time, produced the formative language of hip hop, encompassing everything from beat-making to emceeing (MCing)—acting as the “master of ceremonies” following the West African griot practice of rhythmically telling stories and sharing oral traditions over drum beats. The success of “Planet Rock” was a slow burn; first received as a type of funk music, it could slip onto the radio at a time when mainstream stations were convinced that the entire genre of hip hop was a fad that would soon pass. The release landed the same summer as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“anyone who exposed their vulnerability.” John Jeffries, “Toward a Redefinition of the Urban: The Collision of Culture,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press 1992), 161. 107 Baraka,”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“after going the first time, I couldn't wait to go back the second and third times, pretty much any time I had the opportunity. It was an enlightening experience. I mean, the place was all gay, or 90 percent gay, and before then, I didn't know anything about that kind of sexuality. But seeing the way that people danced at the Garage, and experiencing that love of the music they had… that was something. Me and my cousin, we'd just be in our own worlds, in our own little areas, dancing away.’ That world was created by Levan, and Saunderson sees his nights at the Garage as early lessons in the control a DJ can have over a crowd. ‘At that point, just hearing mixing was something new to me,’ he admits, ‘but even then I could tell that Larry was very good at those transitions. He might play one record for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, maybe an hour, and he would make it exciting. Like”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“Funk's liberation of Black music through psychedelic Afrofuturist explorations of mental and emotional states in the post-Civil Rights era,15 The Electrifying Mojo instrumentalized the airwaves to design sonic fictions as an overlay to the everyday lives and urban blues of the beginning of the Information Age. He remarked in a 1995 interview on the TV show Black Journal16 that he “just wanted to be a voice on the radio, a face in the crowd, a figment of the imagination. … When you elevate [a persona] too high on a pedestal, you remove yourself from the earshot of what regular people have to say and how they feel, and sometimes that makes it impossible to relate on a relative level.” 17”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“Contrary to popular belief, Negroes are the only substantial minority group in America who have a culture to guard and protect. The small, but crucial retentions of African tradition, the slavery experience, the post-slavery history of oppression, the reemergence of the non-white world, and America's refusal until recently to allow integration—all have combined, for better or for worse, to give the Negro a different reality, a different culture with which to master that reality, and a unique perspective by incongruity on American society that may be this nation's outstanding and redeeming virtue.” 3 –”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“keyboards.” 69 Guided by Detroit session musician David Lee Spradley, Clinton was able to assemble an electronic funk sound that could parallel, if not lapse, the next-generation developments of Cybotron's “Alleys of Your Mind” and Afrika Bambaataa's “Planet Rock.”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“111 “When Saunderson was in his later teens. he decided that he wasn't going to let his time in what was then the nightlife capital of the world go to waste. In the late ’70s, the New York City area was awash in groundbreaking selectors, and he experienced some of the all-time best: David Mancuso at the Loft, Tony Humphries at Zanzibar and, especially, Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage. ‘One day, my cousin said, ‘Come on, we're going out to the Paradise Garage,’’ Saunderson recalls. ‘I didn't know anything about it, but”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“bands to amateur selectors. “Not many of us [teenagers] knew how to beat match very well back then; some caught on and some didn't. I think I was one of the fortunate ones that caught on early.” 35 Smith points to a young DJ named Ken Collier as one of the more prominent figures of the progressive music scene; Collier's DJ group with Renaldo White and Morris Mitchell, True Disco, favored disco over funk, creating an aesthetic and conceptual split in focus in Detroit's musical development at the beginning of the MTV era.36 “There was no mixing”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“Marked with a decidedly chrome finish, the song is a sonic fiction about being born and raised in a city designed for technical workers; this resonated with listeners around the world who were also hoping to rethink their urban surroundings and leap into the future.29 “We hope you enjoy your stay,” Davis warns with a breathy vocal, “you'll never want to go away.” “Techno”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “[The party scene] brought the crowds together momentarily. It was a brief mix. I don't think it lasted more than a year before violence came in,” Johnson recalled, “and it came in fast. When you try to expand the boundaries, when you mix volatile situations, you're going to have violence that destroys the party scene every time. The”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“prior. In 1982, George Clinton, a former Motown songwriter and engineer,68 signed a record deal with Capitol Records for his first solo album, Computer Games, backed by the Parliament-Funkadelic band. Plagued by legal and financial troubles due to copyright and royalty agreements, Clinton was eager to experiment in the studio with plans to chart his own contribution to the future-music arms race. “The psychedelia in Atkins's music came through his love of George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic, which he had seen perform a number of times while growing up,” journalist Dan Sicko explains. “In fact, Aaron Atkins believes that his brother picked up his guitar less”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“first generation. They were America's first post-soul kids.” 62 This era after the Civil Rights Movement, just before the Information Age that birthed the possibility of techno, sowed the seeds of a redefinition of the expression of postindustrial, postmodern youth, in the face of a future foreclosed by the failing economy and collapsing urban infrastructure. “DJ Kool Herc essentially created hip-hop in the 70s crack-burdened New York with a broken record player which kept skipping and playing the same portion of a record over and over again,” writes English journalist Johny Pitts of the genre:”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“could stretch electronic emotions into an upgraded vision of soul music, queued to the collapsing industrial-turned-digital age. Taking a stance against using the latest gear on the market, May dove into acquiring and connecting”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“The very foundations of hip-hop are rooted in the cultivation of creativity within strict constraints, and the traditionally inflexible musical rules—a 4/4 beat at around 96 bpm often with no live instruments or formal musical training, just a sample of music replaying over and over—mimic the constraints of the Black experience in a poor area where a life has to be made without local amenities, jobs, healthcare or hope. Lyricists spat themselves free, weaving intricate, multisyllabic rhyme schemes and evocative stories, often imbued with revenge fantasies (rappers aren't”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“then, Atkins had been unaware of canonical examples of synthesizer music beyond Bernie Worrell, and this encouraged him to pursue and refine his specific idea of techno music. He told Trask that he respected the musical contributions of Kraftwerk, Devo, etc.—“but they weren't funky.” 20 The sense-”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“19 “The decision to include culture and art in the U.S. Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the C.I.A. was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the C.I.A. pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.” Frances Stonor Saunders, “Modern Art Was CIA ‘Weapon,’” Independent, June 14, 2013,”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“So, too, did Motown begin its exit from the city that gave it its name, a mission accomplished in 1972 when its headquarters officially moved from Detroit to Los Angeles. As with the auto industry, Motown left many workers behind, including the Funk Brothers. Most of the Motown records of this period, including Stevie Wonder's classics Music of My Mind, Talking Book, and Innervisions, featured freelance studio musicians recording at outsourced facilities in New York or LA (in addition to Wonder's multi-instrumental talents). The exception”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“altering extra musical effects of funk music—the point at which sounds seem to shift beyond perceptibility, levitate, and protrude from the speakers—were more interesting to Atkins: “I felt that if I could take that type of music and add a funky element to it then it would be a smash. We did that, but we just didn't get recognized. Soul Sonic Force came along and beat us to it.” 21 In 1981, Cybotron established their own label, Deep Space, and produced the track “Alleys of Your Mind,” which combined synthesized bass lines played in the style of Parliament's Bernie Worrell with Kraftwerk's investments in the future of audio technology.”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture