one of the things I like to do to annoy Detroit Techno Pietist-Purists, who certainly deserve it, is to argue that Detroit didn't invent techno, it was just a way-station in the evolution of the music as it passed from Munich + Dusseldorf + Sheffield + Basildon to London + Chicago + Sheffield (again!)+ Frankfurt + Berlin + Rotterdam and... just one station on the train track that started with "Trans-Europe Express" and "I Feel Love" (and a bunch of other things obviously)
this is more than enough to goad them but the truth is, i could be even more annoying and point out that Detroit did not even invent the term "techno"
viz
Yellow Magic Orchestra's "Technopolis" (on Solid State Survivor), 1979
Yellow Magic Orchestra's Technodelic album, 1981
Man Parrish, "Techno Trax", 1982
all predate Cybotron's "Techno City" of 1984
probably the decisive move towards semantic closure was made by Kraftwerk with "Techno Pop" in 1986 (off Electric Cafe)... that surely prepared the ground for the scrambling-around-at-the-last-minute "what shall we call this compilation then?" decision made by the Belleville 3 and Neil Rushton of Network a few years later that for some reason or other made "techno" the property of Detroit in perpetuity, as genre term and as style of music
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