the origins of techno

It’s well known that techno music grew out of funk. If you listen to the earliest Juan Atkins recordings, you can easily hear it. Atkins in around 1983 sounds like funk on a skipping record player, repeating the same bars over and over again.

A couple of years ago, I suddenly felt like dipping back into the 1970’s and listening to KC and the Sunshine Band, and I found that there’s a lot more musical merit in it than I had remembered.

The vocals actually aren’t that bad, in the toneless sort of KC and the Sunshine and the Band way. But try listening to this and ignoring the vocals, and you’ll hear bits of the DNA of techno music, which in our time is well on its way to supplanting rock and roll as the chief music of the young. (And I’d prefer it that way, personally, though that puts me in the minority in my own generation. I should have been born in about 1988 rather than 1968.)