The godfather of techno saw potential in sounds, and the midterms shift culture

Hey, I'm Zian from CUES Tom Power. Before Dull Flungrin was a huge action star, before he starred in Rocky IV, he was a Swedish engineering student with a Black Belt and Karate, and an excellent jawline. And that captured the attention of the iconic singer and model Grace Jones. So listen how he showed up to class at MIT. Yeah, I had a big 1200 Yamaha motorcycle and Grace dressed up in leather and I drove off to MIT and the professors fell off their chair. Here Dull Flungrin on CUES Tom Power, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Look, the story of the week is a US midterm elections and they have huge political consequences, of course, but those results also have very big cultural implications. They challenge our ideas of the South that challenge the inevitability of AI. The midterms have rewritten some really big cultural narratives. I'm Emma Lamine Abdul-Mahmoud and this is commotion. I'll listen her counties here. David Dennis Jr's here. Hello to both of you. Hey, hey, happy to be back. If you guys would not mind, please indulge me because I think the best place for us to start is with this right here. We told y'all the South got something to say. So next time we talk, listen. David, the rallying cry from outcast. The South got something to say is not a new one. The South had a lot to say on Tuesday night after those results. You're in Atlanta, Georgia, where Keisha Lance Bottoms was elected the first black woman to be governor in the United States. What cultural narratives about the South got rewritten on election night? Yeah, so I'm not only just in Atlanta, I was raised in Jackson, Mississippi, in where we've had probably the biggest upset in political history of the 21st century in my lifetime, where a black man as a senator should be the senator, just all this litigation thing. Yeah, the results are still being, but that fact that it's even this close is why. Right. Yeah. And we'll be the first one since reconstruction, right? And I think like one thing that is important is that coming from a place like Mississippi, especially, is that people, when you say that, you say from the South, say from Mississippi or Georgia and people go, I don't know. I don't want to, you know, like I don't know about being there. You're black. How do you, how do you survive there? We, we can't do that. I fly over those places. All that stuff that you hear. And we ignore the fact that the South, especially plays like Mississippi is the blueprint for liberation movements in this country. Like when you look at what it takes for black people to be able to vote, to be able to get elected in Mississippi, where you don't even really have early voting, where you have to do it on that day, where the lines are hours long, where they're voting suppression is where it's a majority black state. And you still do not get black representation. Like I think we are understanding that movement work in this country kind of starts in the South. And we have this stereotype of it being an oppressive place of, you know, regressive place. Instead, we should look at it as the place where the movement work, where we would not be here as a country and any sort of acid without the work that starts and ends in the South. I will say, though, like as far as I have known the South, you know, like people talk about the South in this, in the latter way that you describe, like the stereotype of a regressive place of conservative politics kind of thrive. And that's the only thing that's maybe possible in the South. And then you get a night like Tuesday. And suddenly, that narrative is not only not possible. It's like unsustainable for that to be true at all. And I want to get into that. I want to get into a bunch of other narratives that are clearly not sustainable. Let's zoom out here. What assumptions do you think about American culture? Do those election results challenge? What do they reveal about how this country is changing? I think, well, first of all, the youth vote was massive, which I think shows, you know, going forward where this country might be heading, you know, 18 to 29 vote was pretty much entirely democratic across the board. I think it was 65% in Michigan voted Democrat between the ages of 18 to 29, 76% in Mississippi. Like those are massive numbers. So I think it shows that the youth is leaning left. They're motivated, but to get to the polls and vote. But I think it also shows that these sort of angrier, more culture-worry political conversations that have been defining so much of American politics for the last 12 years. People are wanting to move away from that and are really hoping that politics can actually give them policy and change their life for the better, rather than this being some sort of like ideological slap fight that takes place on on X or someplace else on the internet. Those are, I mean, like just off the bat, those are two large culture narratives that you suddenly, you can't actually confirm at all after these results. Like the idea that the South is just one thing, the idea that the young people don't vote and if they do, you know, the New York Times ran this long piece about how Trump lost men, you know, like particularly lost his group on young men. And maybe that was never really as true as people fought it was before this. I think one of the most indelible moments from Tuesday night was James Telleriko, who's the Senator of Election Texas. I just want to just play this clip right here. As this movement heads to the seat of power, as we head to the United States Senate, we know what this moment requires of us. Texas, it's time to start flipping tables. All right, I mean, you get James Telleriko and then after that, of course, it ends with choosing Texas as a Langley subtly, that is somehow the soundtrack to this revolution, which is how could it not be, right? Suddenly, David Dennis Judy is dancing to Tuesday, Texas. Let me ask you, David, what stands up for you in terms of the midterm results and the broader cultural qualifications here? Well, so we have to go back to 24, right? When Trump wins and there's everybody this feels like there's this mandate and these people who like these corporations and rich folks and all these people sort of felt like this was a backlash from the 2020, or they're like, oh, we don't have to do the DEI thing anymore. We don't have to like, like, skittles doesn't have to send the we stand with emails anymore. We're done. And so like, you could do this thing where you can fire like 700,000 black women do not have to have their jobs more. You could say we're getting rid of DEI. We're saying we don't need to like feed into this cultural idea of anything else but white. Like, we don't need black people don't need queer folks, we don't need any of that stuff. This is what we want on our TV screens. This is one of our writer rooms, all of that stuff. That's what the last two years have been like. And so what we saw this week was like, no, actually diversity is good. The country's built on that. The diversity makes the world better. Like, let's invite more of these people, even though as they were getting rid of DEI, there are people who are like, the research shows the DEI is kind of better for everybody. And now we're seeing like the country reckon with that and say, no, actually, we liked this world that was not monolithic. We liked all of this stuff. And we want to put that in place in politics, in culture, in pop culture, and all of that stuff. And it's, you know, something that the people who went so far the other way in the last two years are really going to have to figure out how to claw their way back because we see we saw you. We saw what you were trying to do. We saw what you did. We saw what you did. We saw how, you know, excited you were to purge yourself of anything that was non-white. And so now you have to figure out what the rest of your existence looks like when the whole country has seen you for who you are. All right. Let's see, you spent a lot of time looking at the way that the right has operated online since Trump got elected back in 2016. Do you want to describe like bat strategy and how those results suggest it's actually like maybe isn't actually working? Yeah, I think it's been a push and pull since 2016, like I think the Trump administration identified that there was a very large group of unmotivated young men, particularly men that were online a lot in gaming spaces. And not only could they motivate them to get involved in politics and sort of help meme him into the presidency, but on a larger scale, they could kind of mimic some of their behavior in these online spaces and copy pasted onto political campaigns. That's when we saw all the fake news, all the really disgusting mudslinging stuff that Steve Bannon really helped push into the political conversation. And for a while, you know, I think the more reactionary corners of the internet were eating that up. And we did kind of see the push pull again of like we get the progressive movement of 2020. And then we settle back into another kick back of regressive ideology. I think what keeps happening in this push pull and what I'm hoping doesn't happen this time is that the left has really leaned harder into putting policy forward and not not not having identity as part of the conversation, but not making that the driving force of their political conversation, actually turning around and telling people there's ways to make your life better. And I think if the Democrats can really take hold of this movement and actually do something with this mandate now that we've seen, I think maybe this kind of pendulum swing that we've been feeling so aggressively since 2016 might slow down a bit. I'm hoping I hope. No, I mean, listen, that is the stuff that's in the air now, right? I mean, I want to use that phrase that you just said, Alyssa, that idea of the Republicans were hoping they could meme Donald Trump into the presidency. In large part, that kind of did work, right? Like for at least for a period of time that didn't fact work. But David, when you look at candidates like James Salarico or Abdul Al-Sayed, uh. their social media strategies very similar to that to someone like Zora Mamdani, who of course took over the entire internet when he was running for Mayor of New York City. Do you want to describe the way that the social media has kind of played a factor into elevating some of those figures? So someone like Abdul El Sayed becomes a national figure even though he's running in Michigan, for example. Yeah, I mean, I think the word is kind of practicality. Like I think there was so much of all of these years of attacking these words that the left was using. You're attacking critical race theory, you're attacking defund the police. It was like, that's not sustainable. You're attacking socialism. And so what these folks have come in and said is like, okay, we're not going to give you the words. We're just going to say, hey, do you want free food? Like, hey, do you want to go and get like a forger groceries? Hey, do you want free education? And like go to the doctor and not having a big bill and people are like, oh, well, let's do it. You know, like you could call the socialists, call us whatever, but we are going to break down exactly how our policy is going to make your life better. And we're going to, you're going to have more money. You're going to have better education. We have all these things that you want without having these easy targets for everybody to sort of jump on and say like, this is, you know, this is wrong. This is communism. It's like, who doesn't want the free stuff? And so I think like that sort of understanding of language and breaking it down and really digestible bites for people who want things in the simplest way possible and spreading it across the internet, I think has really been one of the the game changing tactics that they've been using over the last few years. Listen, the, the, the, the narrative I'm trying to thread throughout this conversation here is that what, what, what those results reveal to me is a bunch of really fixed ideas about certain things have suddenly become unfixed, right? Whether it's like that idea of like the south can only go in one direction politically or young men can only go in one direction politically. The other one that I think like this election is challenged is this idea of the inevitability of AI. Like not just in the sense, I want to talk about that, not in the sense of like how campaigns use AI. That's a whole other thing. But I want to talk about like, you know, for the last few years we've been hearing about how AI is inevitable. AI is coming. There's nothing you can do to stop it. These results actually suggest something different. Like Lisa results suggest that like in places where they need to build large data centers in order for AI to continue to even exist or keep growing, there was a bunch of a bunch of opposition to the folks who are supporting the data centers, right? Like most, that's kind of held up across the board across the United States. What does that tell you like, are these results in a way a repudiation of the spread of AI? Do you think 100% I mean, first of all, no one wants a data center in their backyard that's going to take their job and suck up their air and pollute their world? You know, it's just not like that. I mean, also the audio pollution, the noise pollution that comes from these things that people have shown how loud these can be. I mean, it just shows that if you're struggling financially, your government doesn't appear to be helping you. And then they're dumping some giant shopping mall size computer in your backyard. You're not going to like that. And I think NBC Exit polls showed that more than half of people considered AI data centers, a crucial or major factor in their votes. And oh, I think it's almost three quarters of people said they would oppose construction of them in their communities. So at a certain point, you can't keep taking and taking and taking from people and then dumping something in their backyard that not only messes with their their air quality, messes with their life, but potentially has the power to take their job, whether it's because they're going to be using this generative AI to wipe out all entry-level jobs that require, you know, that a lot of people rely on for work. We all are aware of the ways that AI doesn't necessarily help the everyday person when it comes to work. I mean, cool. You can AI generate a picture of like your kids for Christmas card, but like at the end of the day, like if that AI then turns around and takes your job, like does the Christmas card matter? You know, so I think people are recognizing that as well as also the people in the tech companies that are making money off of these things, the questionable practices about whether or not these companies are worth what they're saying they're worth. That stuff is all coming up to the surface and people are turning around and going, hold on, I don't want the job taking pollution machine in my backyard, and especially if my gas is this expensive. Like, what are we doing, guys? David, let me end with this. I want to go back to keep returning to this image when Trump was warning for the second time. And behind him, you see Mark Zuckerberg and you see Jeffrey Bezos, you see Elon Musk and you see Joe Rogan. And that feels like a very emblematic of that time period, you know, image to me. If this election was a cultural shift away from those figures, where is culture going, David? It's sort of going to the people. It's sort of going to like creativity again. I think it's like this, what we have seen with the data centers with all this is like this way that capitalism, like left to their own devices, has made life just more, much more worse than we would have, and they've kind of run them up for these last two years, where every single day is like, I don't know what I can eat. Like, can I eat lettuce still? I don't know. And then there's like AI and stuff all over the place. People are losing their jobs. And it's like, this is your world. This is your world view with all of these billionaires. And there we, we're already seeing this anti sort of super rich guy shift. But now we've seen like Elon Musk cut these jobs. We've seen like what these guys are capable of. And that sort of idea that they're geniuses, that they have or work for the greater good of the world. All of that stuff has really fallen apart. And so we're looking at a community in a sort of society that's like, I kind of like this idea that the people are able to do these things on our own and not these billionaire, trillionaire overseers and overlords who are tamping us down. And I think like this was a real moment where those rich dudes sort of miss their shot. Like, they had the chance to like, paint the world in their image. And what we've seen is the world in their image actually kind of stinks. And it's not better than anything that came before. So let's re-envision something else. I'll just I'll give you the same question briefly. If the image, you know, used to be Joe Rogan and and Elon Musk behind Donald Trump, where's culture going now? Uh, Elon Musk deported. That's what customers are saying. Okay. I'm in favor of one more deportation and it's Elon Musk. I think we're seeing that the Dems, if they're in control, they're going to be able to hold these kinds of people to account. They're going to look at corporate America. And how much corporate America has infested our politics, super PACs, people being able to donate. Elon must be able to put $150 million into the Tallerico campaign just to lose, because he did not want Tallerico to win. You know, that amount of money should not be anywhere near our politics. People shouldn't be accepting money when they're running for office at that level. It completely changes what they're sitting down and actually doing in government. And I think more people are waking up to the fact that if somebody is donating millions and millions of dollars to a politician, that politician is now at their behest. That politician has to do what they want them to do. And I think a corporate America that is held accountable and a better share of the money for everybody is what everybody wants. Everyone will benefit from. And I think, yeah, we're also all finally realizing that all of these tech leaders are losers, dude. They're losers. They're losers. I think no amount of money will change that. I think that is actually a good place to leave it. I really appreciate your time. You guys, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you so much for doing this. Good to see you. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Other summer countries and internet culture journalists in New York, David Dennis Jr. is a culture critic based in Atlanta, Georgia. In a world where the news feels bigger, louder, and harder to make sense of, Canadians need more than headlines. Hi, I'm Karen C. Olin, news reporter and host of the big story podcast from world shaping events to the everyday stories that spark debate. My team and I will explain what matters and why it matters to you. We're here to help you make sense of the news and give you the context you need for those kitchen table conversations, trusted, Canadian focused, curious. Listen to the big story wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Halloween, Abdul Mahmoud, and this is commotion. This past week we lost a giant in the world of electronic dance music. Juan Atkins was a Detroit DJ, a producer, and one of the godfathers of techno music. Look, that word techno has come to mean different things to different people, but he was Juan's unique fusion of funk and synth pop that birthed the techno genre that went on to influence and change pop music writ large. Juan Atkins died this past Saturday. He was 64 years old, and there's been this outpouring of sadness, but also deep gratitude for his legacy that is continued across social media all week. Julian Chamberlain is a professor of history at Michigan State University. He's also the host and creator of the podcast Rise, Detroit's machine music. Julian, welcome to the show. How's it going? Great. Thank you for having me. Yes, of course. Listen, I want to start off by saying my condolences for Juan's passing. I know he's been a tough week for Detroit and fans of Juan's legacy, but let's dig briefly into Juan Atkins' early rise. What were some of the larger sort of trends and tensions in Detroit? What was going on in pop music also when he kind of began to inspire the sound? Yeah, he came on the scene as Detroit was really struggling in the late 70s, de-industrialization, closing, and losing of auto jobs. At the same time, the deep cultural history in Detroit was still there. It was a very vibrant radio culture led by figures like Electrified Mojo. You could hear lots of new wave music. You could hear funk, George Clinton, Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, The Human League, The B-52s, all that's happening on the radio. Juan is a young man and his peers. They were listening to that music and they were thinking about themselves and thinking about the fun. future, really rejected this idea that Detroit has no future really, and starting to create music that kind of reflects that new view. That idea that Juan was rejecting this idea that Detroit has no future, it's important to point out like he's doing this, he's creating this new sound while he was still in high school, right? Like this is like a really early kind of start, right? Right. Yeah. He's like, sorry about what he's 15, 16, 17, and is in high school in Belleville. Right. It's worth noting that the term techno, I, you know, as I said, it means different things to different people. How do you define techno music as he was conceived by Juan Atkins and other pioneers in Detroit like Kevin Saunderson and Derek May? Well, first of all, you know, techno is black speck of the sound. What that means musically is that you have a set of young men who are taking new instruments, new synthesizers and drum machines, they're being introduced into the marketplace, hearing those sounds and imagining the potential of those sounds, even if traditional musicians aren't able to sort of see what they could, they could be and they sort of marry the potential of those, those instruments with the culture and Detroit to create a unique sound that really kind of captures their vision of the future. I, I, I, we asked you to pick one, uh, Juan Atkins track that you felt invited his impact and you chose this one. So that's clear by the groups I betron, which was founded by Juan Atkins and Richard Davis, another Detroit based techno pioneer out of all Juan Atkins classics. Why that one? What made you pick clear? You know, and a lot of ways, I think clear really captures the, uh, the height of the sort of transformation that wine is making when he's creating techno and way clear is the biggest uh, success for cyber trunks, you know, yeah, heavily sampled and it really captures the kind of combination of electronic music and what it can do, but at the same time takes on the flavor and feel of soul and the, and the sort of musical ethos of the city and that's why it's so iconic. It's a sound that you know because it has been sampled so much and people have built upon it and it sounds like something that could have been made today. Yeah. Like, if you hear clear, oh, that could have been made yesterday, right? Is that eternal? Yeah, I honestly like, people say that about a lot of songs I hear that song were like, oh, this could have been, this could be on the charts right now, this very specific moment. Uh, we get this moment, right? What techno is taking off, Juan Atkins becomes this internationally renowned producer in DJ, but the story of any genre and its creators, you know, it doesn't tend to be this kind of like clear sort of rosy line. What are some of the challenges that Juan Atkins ends up facing and also maybe techno music ends up facing over the, over the next few decades after that? The basic one is that the, the fact that it's a black music created by black eaves gets obscured, right? That starts almost from the very beginning with the success of the compilation techno, the new dance music, new dance sound of Detroit, which is a 1998 British compilation that features Juan, Derek, Kevin, Blake Baxter, all these people. But since it's the UK, it gets packaged and sent back and then people started to get this idea, well, this is a European sound, right? And, and so the blackness and the, and the, and the sort of origin point of techno gets erased, and that has a knock on effect, uh, that, that really has powerful ways that sort of detaches the kind of culture and origin of story. And that, that is something that we still struggle with today. That is probably the most frustrating thing, right? When you think about a music that is specifically black founded, black originated, and then that founding story gets obscured, that's a really dangerous thing because the, the thing becomes too diffuse and you can't always trace a battery's origin story, which is part of why we're having this conversation. Now, I want to ask you about like how, so your work in academia focuses on black futurism. How do you see Juan Atkins's artistic journey fitting into black futurism? Well, in a way, Juan is an example of a generation of African American creators who are sort of surveying the cultural landscape, using the tools that are available and creating something new. That intervention, that sort of breaking, um, the possibility related to the tool. It's, it's a difficult for us to understand this now, but when people first heard the synthesizer sounds, electronic sounds, they didn't think that they sounded musical. They didn't think that they, they, they were supposed to, they didn't do what they were supposed to do. And Juan and Derek and Kevin, they actually saw a way, you know, this sound has, you know, it has potential. There's a world in the sound and they make that world and people take up that challenge and then follow in their footsteps. And that's really fundamentally something that is distinct. Like they represent a kind of post civil rights generation, making sounds that speak to the future. I think that idea of hearing something and going, this doesn't sound musical to some people and then forging a whole genre and sound out of that. That is a significant and magnificent legacy. I really appreciate you being on the show today to reflect on it with me. Thank you so much for being here, Julian. Oh, thank you so much as well. Yes, of course, I really appreciate it. Julian Chamble is a professor of English at the Michigan State University. He's also the creator of the podcast, Rise, Detroit's Machine Music. Juan Atkins was a producer, DJ, and one of the creators of the music genre known as Technope. He died this past Saturday. He was 64 years old. My name is Alameda Mahmoud. The show is called Comotion. We'll be back tomorrow. We will see you then. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.