Assembling a Black Counter Culture

by DeForrest Brown

In this critical history, DeForrest Brown, Jr "makes techno Black again" by tracing the music's origins in Detroit and beyond

In Assembling a Black Counter Culture, writer and musician DeForrest Brown, Jr, provides a history and critical analysis of techno and adjacent electronic music such as house and electro, showing how the genre has been shaped over time by a Black American musical sensibility.

Brown revisits Detroit's 1980s techno scene to highlight pioneering groups like the Belleville Three before jumping into the origins of today's international club floor to draw important connections between industrialized labor systems and cultural production. Among the other musicians discussed are Underground Resistance (Mad Mike Banks, Cornelius Harris), Drexciya, Juan Atkins (Cybotron, Model 500), Derrick May, Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Detroit Escalator Co. (Neil Ollivierra), DJ Stingray/Urban Tribe, Eddie Fowlkies, Terrence Dixon (Population One) and Carl Craig.

With references to Theodore Roszak's Making of a Counter Culture, writings by African American autoworker and political activist James Boggs, and the "techno rebels" of Alvin Toffler's Third Wave, Brown approaches techno's unique history from a Black theoretical perspective in an effort to evade and subvert the racist and classist status quo in the mainstream musical-historical record. The result is a compelling case to "make techno Black again."

DeForrest Brown, Jr is a New York-based theorist, journalist and curator. He produces digital audio and extended media as Speaker Music and is a representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign.

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction, Theory, Race

432 pages, Paperback

Published December 7, 2021

Reviews

[Lorenzo Munzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this one

I think techno is one of the strongest cultural assets that we can have, and it’s still almost completely disregarded from official institutions or higher artistic spheres. This book sheds light on a culture that has so much potential, and has already proven its potential.

At its core, techno is about the machine engulfing the human condition, and human expression, and the 'trick' is to battle with the machine, letting it keep some ground while forcing it to submit to your human will. Curiously, if it doesn't also sound organic, it dies, must be able to hear the human behind it.

[Nicholas DeMasi · Rating 3 out of 5]

An incredible compendium of research collected and commented on in semi-chronological order, DeForrest Brown Jr's techno tome operates more as an extended summary of source material rather than a novel conception of media theory. Bits of history fly by at rapid pace and with seemingly little connection from one section (and sometimes even sentence) to the next, but while the book's coherency can be called into question, it's exhaustiveness cannot. Brown traverses 40+ years of Detroit techno at a level of detail that I feel confident saying has never been seen before and which I doubt will be seen again for some time. His reverence and enthusiasm are the book's primary draws as he cheekily stitches together bits of music and metadata into a loose theoretical tapestry that gives a shared sense of significance to the scene's various figures and their output. He's at his most effective as a researcher when unearthing the connections between Detroit's technological innovators and Europe's now-dominant hardcore continuum, an oddly exact reification of the flow of information and resources in the colonial world system. This book isn't for everyone, it wasn't even for me at times, but if you can make it through you'll be rewarded with a newfound love and appreciation for perhaps the most innovative musical movement of the past half century.

[melancholinary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed this book, though to be honest there are information that, for me, feel rather forced in, as if the narrative structure loosens a little and the material is there simply to pad out the pages (I skipped some pages). Even so, I greatly appreciate the way DeForrest Brown Jr. addresses the crucial elements of each Detroit techno release—elements that have played a major part in the evolution of both the music and its concepts—namely a fiction-driven approach (which he explicitly extends from Kodwo Eshun’s work several decades earlier). The detailed, comprehensive discussion of Underground Resistance and Drexciya is the book’s highlight; I found myself genuinely in awe of Gerald Donald’s approach to making music and building concepts, and of how he fuses the two into a form of sonic fiction that is not only political but also visionary. Musically, I haven’t always kept up with Detroit techno’s developments, but this book sent me back to listen again, and I was struck by how the technology of the time could be bent and reworked to yield textures and sounds that, in turn, enabled a dynamic fictional approach. Another thing I took from the book is that techno amplifies the closeness of humans and technology—or their fusion—given that it was born in a place like Detroit: a motor city, a factory city, a city of the assembly line.

[Butch Lazorchak · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was stoked about a history of Detroit techno, and in the absence of anything else this will have to do. There is lots of good information here but it's buried under an overlong text. I'd say there actually is a good book here if a quality editor can be found and roughly 200 pages removed.

[LaShana Claude]

Detroit-Berlin AXIS

-The Reagan Revolution
US
China
Screen Writer's Guild
Second World War
US Air Force
Jewish
Nazism
individual economic freedom

[Juliana B · Rating 4 out of 5]

DENSE and amazingly researched

[Dylan Bookiams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly researched, a bit disorganised at times. Would've been better to have more female perspectives. Worth it just for the tracklist at the end

[Sarah Fogel · Rating 4 out of 5]

terrific! really important contribution. not the best organized, but extremely worth reading. 4.5 stars