I don't want to keep responding to every message in this
thread, merely because it's so time-consuming, but I felt that your
reply merited a response.
Quite simply, I disagree with you. Everything we do is
political, whether we consider it to be or not. Even your decision to
listen to techno and your preference that it stay apolitical is itself
a political choice. I'm not going to tell you that you must run out
and start actively seeking more political music, but I would ask that
you consider the politics that went into the making of what you're
listening to. And I'm not advocating that techno artists become
radicals and start stomping around screaming political agendas. It
would be nice, however, if they recognized the political dimension of
what they're doing.
For an interesting discussion of the parallels between punk
and techno, you need look no further than Trance Europe Express 1.
Many of the initial crop of European (and American) techno artists
started out in the punk scene, and brought a lot of that energy to
techno with them. And there are a lot of techno artists that have
gotten an awful lot of mileage out of the same two or three synth
patches, without spending much time developing what they're doing.
I want to see techno keep evolving -- the rapidity of that
evolution is part of what fascinates me so much about techno in the
first place. But I'd also like to see it lose a little bit of the
innocent naive patina that surrounds it (and, more often, rave
culture) and see it become grounded in a more unified philosophical
stance. But in the meantime, I'll happily keep spinning my Acid
Junkies and Dance Mania records.
yrz,
ozymandias
ozymandias G desiderata AKA Forrest L Norvell AKA DJ AladdinSane
GCS/CW/DJ d- H++ s++:-- !g p1 !au a- w+++ v+++ C++(---) U?++++(----)$
P--- L 3 E++ N++ K++ W---(-----) M++ V-- -po+ Y++>+++ t@ 5-
jx R-- G'' !tv b+++ D++ B-- e++ u*(**) h-- f++ r++ n++ x+(*)