January 27, 2014
I stood there, hunched over a turntable and a Moog
synthesizer soaking in the skeptical and intrigued stares in my eleventh grade
English class. As a group research assignment, our task was to choose an art
form, and then teach a lesson for an entire class period. Liz, Dalila and I
decided the best topic was to demystify the art of electronic music, for our
classmates and ourselves.
It was the early spring of 2006 in Metro Detroit, a
time when the windows of high school hoopties finally roll down, billowing
smoke and unleashing blasts of Kid Rock and Eminem in the parking lot. The
radio in my hoopty was stuck on AM. We sang Journey and Styx in choir. We
played John Williams in band. In drama club we rehearsed to perform the
sexless, edgeless, kiddie version of Grease. The only relief I got from this
noise nonsense was crate digging through my parent’s collection of vinyl, since
I was too cheap to buy music downloads, and too prewd to pirate it.
That was where electronic music started for me,
between the stiff and flaky sleeves of DEVO and Depeche Mode, between the
Theremin frequencies of the Beatles and Beach Boys, between the hair line of
Brian Eno and the bass line of the Talking Heads. What I didn’t know was that
these relics were part of the foundation of electronic music. What I did know
is that I liked it a lot more than Foreplay Longtime and Lose Yourself.
When Mr C, our English teacher who was the
emotional doppelganger of Bob Dylan, made the announcement about the project,
Liz and Dalila and I immediately agreed to be a team, silently, shooting
acknowledging glances across the classroom. We had the rest of the class to
hold a charette and pick a topic. Whatever ideas we first flirted with for project
ideas couldn’t stand up to the quixotic, alluring suggestion I put forward:
electronic music. Not just techno, that was too narrow, we decided. We would,
in the course of 45 minutes, uncover the history of electronic sound in popular
culture. It was so full of new territory, yet somehow already farmiliar. It was
2006, and it was two weeks from the Detroit Electronic Music Festival.
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