TMR Culture Break: When J Dilla Met Raymond Scott

If you don't know who J Dilla or Raymond Scott are, click the tags below and don't mention it to anyone.

Sound And Fury Signifying Nothing (We've Seen Before)

 

Yes, Obama came off like an idiot talking about Detroit, but while Motor City's politics and infrastructure suck, I want to remind you that it was also the home of Motown, and it's birthed cultural bright spots ever since. Detroit's decay inspired it's artist's to respond and they did, with dreams of themselves as George Jetson, and that holographic flower has been rising secretly from the broken concrete ever since.

 

Recreating, refining (and eventually replacing) the now-silenced jack hammer sounds of those good paying industrial auto factory jobs their parents had, but with a very early ear past old folks' Rock 'N" Roll to the real soundtrack Steve Jobs should've been influenced by, recording artists like Juan Atkins and Derrick May imagined how modems would "sing" long before they (or we) knew what a modem was. Both instantly took their rightful places alongside electronic musical visionaries like Warner Bros.' legendary cartoon composer, electronics innovator, and Motown's actual head of electronic music, Raymond Scott, German pioneers, Kraftwerk, Japanese giants, Yello Magic Orchestra, and the father of merging electro with Hip-Hop culture and Rap, Afrika Bambaataa.

I'm saying Detroit changed the world and, sonically, we'll never go back.

   

Detroit Techno is our past, present, and, now, our future. It's proven itself to be The Borg that will never stop. And if you ask me, as a statement about the people of America's most maligned city - one that's been effectively on it's back for the last 60 years - that accomplishment's nothing to sneeze at.

But for the president to also see what is essentially a mirage - however real it sounds - is nuts,...