Future Shock / Techno Rebels

 

1972 program based on Alvin Toffler's best-seller, with a wonderfully grave narration from Orson Welles and occasional shots of the great man wandering pensively through the city.

The kind of things that the book / program / Welles-voice-over hand-wrings about seem lightweight biznis compared to the horrowshow panorama of the present, from microplastics to AI to drone war to techbro-enhanced nu-fascism. 

The narration absurdly tries to make out that what are in fact miraculous advances in medical science - organ transplants, pacemakers, electronic prostheses for missing limbs - are vaguely sinister: steps towards an artificial man, a replacement human.  They are sort-of equated with the general plastic-ization of everything and put on a par with robots putting workers out of work, non-biodegradable pollution. When in fact they were and are humane and humanist inventions, extending the lifespan of specific humans or enabling them to function and even flourish despite otherwise incapacitating injuries. 

I read Future Shock when doing Energy Flash but I can't remember much about it, beyond the central concept - change is happening too fast, information overload, we can't cope etc. Datapanik in the Year  2000.

Can't remember if I read The Third Wave, his later, more technoptimistic mass-market paperback,  which would have been more relevant for Energy Flash given that the Belleville 3 were fans of it. I think the claim goes that the chapter "The Techno Rebels" is where they got the name "techno" from. 

Hmmm, highly doubtful about that, given that "techno" and "techno-rock" were in wide parlance as terms for synth-enhanced music since the mid-70s, although often as negative terms ("technoflash" as an insult for Emerson Lake and Palmer and their ilk). 

"Techno" as a term crops up all over the place in electropop and electronic dance music from about 1979 onwards. Most prominently with Yellow Magic Orchestra (they birthed the Japanese genre of technopop, put out the single "Technopolis", the album Technodelic, and a flexi titled "The Spirit of Techno" in 1983.)

But there are so many other examples. 

Technopop was a synonym for synthpop in the early 80s. Here's another place where "techno" had a pejorative life - not in reference to overblown prog but to boppy New Wave with keyboards. There's a scene in Valley Girl (1983) in which Nicholas Cage's punk rocker negs his suburban sweetheart, saying she's into all that Noo Wave "techno shit".

On the West Coast early rap scene out of which Dre et al emerged, they didn't refer to "electro", they talked about "techno". 

There was the Frankfurt industrial/EBM night Teknoclub, started 1984 at the venue No Name Club. The deejay who started it, Talla, had been using the term in the record store where he worked for a couple of years by then. Teknoclub, by 1987, had moved to Dorian Gray, a foundational club for the German rave / techno-trance scene.

Kraftwerk's "Techno Pop", from 1986.  Which was originally the working title of the album that became Electric Cafe.

So the Detroit bods's last-minute decision to name their compilation Techno: The New Dance Sound of Detroit is bringing up the rear, really. 

The "new" in "New Dance Sound" is debatable too - I see it as an incremental shift, a condensation out of and from within a broad pre-existing sound spectrum that included synthpop, electro, industrial / EBM, electrofunk / electroboogie, and other first-half-of-Eighties club sounds. A condensation helped on its way by a neighbouring condensation-shift (Chicago house) (not forgetting NYC developments  - Mantronix, Nitro Deluxe).

But spiel and framing count for a lot in popular music .... to the discursive victor, the spoils.