These days American pop culture is extricably tied to urban music – hip hop, R&B and soul – but it wasn’t always that way. When hip hop – or rap – broke through in the early 80s, rock industry types dismissed it as a fad. They reckoned it would never last. One of hip hop’s pioneering DJs, Grandmaster Flash savoured an international smash with The Message in 1982. MC Melle Mel delivered the pointed lyrics. Today The Message is a definitive hip hop joint that everyone knows. However, Flash was DJing, hip hop style, in 1974. It took Flash almost a decade to unleash a record – and a hit. Hip-hop was born out of struggle. A struggle to be heard. People didn’t understand – for years. Flash searched his soul. Would they ever get it? The most the New Yorker hoped was that hip hop might reach neighbouring states. Three decades on, it’s an international phenomenon.

The reverse happened with Detroit techno. The music’s African-American innovators – Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson – established themselves locally as DJs and disseminated records early in their careers. The records, underground favourites in Detroit, crossed the Atlantic. They blew up in the UK. Inevitably, techno’s ‘First Wave’ left Detroit to pursue opportunities in Europe, mobilising a generation of European DJ/producers in the process, but the scene at home – which had been centred around The Music Institute club – temporarily lost momentum.

The popularity of Saunderson’s techno-pop Inner City (Big Fun, Good Life) signalled techno’s commercial apex, while, in Detroit, the uncompromising – never ‘militant’ – Underground Resistance, formed by “Mad” Mike Banks and Jeff Mills, pulled it back underground.  In the 90s electronic music came to be equated with Europe in the US. It was marketed as ‘electronica’. Commercial exports like Underworld, The Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim reformulated Chicago house and Detroit techno. The media hailed a New Yorker – onetime punk rocker Moby – as the ‘King of Techno’. Detroit’s trendsetters remained virtually invisible. It was disheartening. They had instigated a movement to rival that of the Motown era. No one wanted to know.

Since 2000’s inaugural Detroit Electronic Music Festival, techno has found a wider audience in the US. The first of the free three-day events attracted over a million. It represented a homecoming for the music’s auteurs. Last year the Detroit Historical Museum opened Techno: Detroit’s Gift To The World – an exhibition tracing the advance of techno from the streets of Detroit into a global force.

The festival may have been surrounded by politics, with the Detroit media turning it into a techno soap opera, but the point is it has survived – and flourished. This weekend Detroit will mark the festival’s fifth anniversary.  In 2003 Derrick May assumed control of the DEMF, after the controversial sacking of Carl Craig two years before, and renamed it Movement.  If anything, in 2004 the conflicts have become a thing of the past. May has set up a new company, Transmat Events, an extension of his seminal techno label, to produce the world-class event.”We got some great support this year from a lot of people who just wanna see it continue, ‘cause they know this thing is huge for the community,” he says.

According to Detroit’s Motormouth magazine, Pop Culture Media’s Carol Marvin, whose relationship with the electronic fraternity was tenuous even before she fired Craig, is now channelling her energies into Motor City Muscle – a festival devoted to rock ‘n’ roll, automobiles and Mid-Western grunge, sweat and macho. The internal struggles have hardly affected the international turn-out. There has been an Australian presence at the electronic music festival every year. At the end of the day, the heads care only for the music. In 2003 international tourists weren’t put off by the terrorist threat, SARS hysteria, or downturn in travel.

Under May’s auspices, Movement has returned to the Detroit-centricism of the first DEMF. In 2003 his team managed to stage the fest with just three months’ lead time – and no corporate sponsorship, let alone financial support from the embattled City of Detroit. May had the backing of Detroit’s hip mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick – known as “America’s hip hop mayor” – but, though Movement benefits the local economy, the city itself is broke.  In fact, May invested his own finances into the festival. He even borrowed money from his family. The festival staffers worked for free. The DJs forfeited their fees. Incredibly, May unified a scene. In 2004 he is building on this collective legacy.

Again May has been compelled to work in a difficult environment – the US economy is suffering because of the current conflict in Iraq – yet he’s confident that the fest will be another triumph.  Above all, May has been inspired by his new role of cultural entrepreneur.  “I’ve got plans. My plans consist of trying to save the world from bad music, and I’ll do whatever that takes – that means putting on a festival or setting up an events management company, taking the festival around the world, or attempting to do soundtrack productions or make albums, or DJ on the DJ tours. I’m interested. I’m up for it. I got the energy. I got the life. I got the balls for it.”

Last weekend onetime Melbourne promoter Richard Maher hosted a ‘pre-party’ in New York to launch Movement 2004 with May spinning alongside his ‘Cosmic Twin’ Francois K plus Stacey Pullen. This year’s Movement line-up is just as credible. Icons like Danny Krivit – co-founder of NY’s Body & SOUL – will DJ. New York’s Osunlade – an ordained priest of Ifa who manifests deep Afro-house – will perform a live set. Los Angeles’ Marques Wyatt will bring a West Coast house vibe to Detroit. Atlanta’s Kai Alce, who recently issued a record via Moodymann’s Mahogani, will DJ. And Wellington’s neo-jazz ensemble Fat Freddy’s Drop – buddies of DJ Recloose – will play.  In 2004 the festival’s cutting-edge Underground stage will present some of the Dutch electronic figures who have been influenced by Detroit. Next May wants to tour Movement internationally.

“The festival is supposed to be an extension of music and of education and of fashion and of our knowledge and of our inspiration and inspirees,” he says. “The Dutch have probably been the most inspired outside of the Japanese and the English to give us the opportunity to play, come to their country, cultivate Detroit techno music, and I think that has definitely been a real supporting effort in the development of a lot of the young Detroit artists.”  Now the Dutch Ministry of Culture has put forward an effort to bring [Dutch] artists to Detroit to play at a festival and they’re gonna support a stage and make it happen. That’s amazing! That’s fucking amazing. How can we say no? Because now we’ve got interest from the Japanese, the Germans, the English and the French to do the same thing next year. So now the festival truly becomes an international festival. No other festival can take claim to something like that.”

Then there is the Motor City contingent. Detroit’s neo-soul star Amp Fiddler – a contender for the hottest ‘new’ artist of the past year – will perform with his band. (He premiered his current show at Movement 03.) Sean Deason, famous for The Shit, will play live. DJs Rolando, Stacey Pullen and Kenny Larkin will return to the fest. Rolando – who reinvented Detroit techno with Jaguar – will DJ at the finale (Jeff Mills headlined Movement 03). May himself has declined to play Movement. “I’m really not interested in playing as long as I’m involved in it,” he says simply.

This year there is a Movement CD package – as well as a DVD – to commemorate the event. May was integral to the three-CD Movement set, which encompasses previously unreleased tracks from Aril Brikha, Stacey Pullen and The Three Chairs’ Marcellus Pittman. Japan’s Cisco Records has exclusive distribution rights to the Transmat issue.
Working on the festival initially meant that May put Transmat on indefinite hold as it became a defacto events company but, over time, the legendary label has been reinvigorated.  “For a while it really fucked us up, but it’s made the label stronger because now we concentrate not on all the irrelevant shit, we just concentrate on what we know is powerful, what moves, and what will be effective. All the other stuff we sit to the side. All the other hopeless romantic shit, we sit to the side.”

Of late Transmat has issued no less than three ‘artist’ albums – including one by Australia’s Microworld, whose 1999 club record Signals is a classic.  But, for Detroit techno, the struggle is not over. Even now, the music is not accepted in its homeland. It’s not supported by commercial radio. It’s not exposed.  It doesn’t help when Eminem, hip hop’s biggest star, and a Detroiter, disses ‘techno’ to get at Moby. Ironically, Eminem has played his part, albeit indirectly, in the rebirth of techno in the US. The rapper has placed Detroit back in the national spotlight. The movie 8 Mile, filmed in Detroit, has ensured that the Motor City is ‘cool’ again. Of course, outside the US, Detroit has been cool ever since the advent of techno. The international success of 8 Mile has reinforced cultural fantasies of Detroit as the Ghettropolis, a poetically industrial town with a creative soul.

You can take techno out of Detroit, but you can’t take Detroit out of techno…  As with hip hop, Detroit techno evolved as more of a movement – or lifestyle – than a sound. Intrigued by cult radio DJ The Electrifying Mojo, and his diverse music selections, a group of Belleville High students – May, Atkins and Saunderson – created a synthesis of Motown, funk, disco, house and electro, effectively pouring soul into the machines. They sampled the term ‘techno’ from Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. The trio conceived a futuristic manifesto – a counterpoint to their Detroit surrounds.

And so Detroit techno has always been more than just dance music. From the outset, its impulse was rebellious. Techno resisted America’s cultural stereotypes. It challenged the traditional narratives of American history that positioned ‘Blackness’ outside history, science and technology in a metaphorical ghetto. Techno asserted new possibilities for those on the margins of capitalism. Techno’s postmodern renegades started their own independent labels, worked under aliases, and didn’t show their faces on the artwork. The idea was to disguise their ethnicity. The emphasis was on the music, not the artists. They generated their own myths – call it counter-cultural marketing – with the most powerful of these myths being that techno should promote a radical utopianism and plurality when it had surfaced from the segregated environs of a post-industrial American city.

Strangely, in Europe techno became the foundation of rave culture – ‘PLUR’, peace, love, understanding, respect. In the US, hip hop captured the popular imagination. Still, Detroit techno was more about the skyscraper than the street – it was too confounding for the masses.  In 2004 Detroit’s electronic community is looking forward. The city has given rise to a fertile house movement.   Amp Fiddler is the city’s Renaissance man, his music traversing soul, R&B, funk, hip hop and house.   In the meantime, Detroit techno is permeating mainstream pop in the States. The Neptunes’ Chad Hugo used to collect techno records (he apparently sported a Plus 8 cap). You can hear it in his beats. OutKast’s Andre 3000 has stated that nowadays he is into electronic music more than hip hop. May is not closed to hip hop. Madlib will perform at Movement 04 with Peanut Butter Wolf and J Dilla (aka Jay Dee). Derrick would love to have D12.

The American recognises that if ‘urban’ means ‘of the city’, then it’s time to embrace Detroit techno as part of the same spectrum of urban music as hip hop, R&B and soul.
And May understands that as the electronic influence expands, the underground stands to benefit. His mission is to convince America’s urban – Black – media of the need to reclaim house and techno. “We gotta open people’s eyes, we just can’t continue to work with the people who already have their eyes open.”

Movement 04 happens in Detroit this weekend. For more info, visit www.movementfestival.com.