I’ve just finished reading Dan Sicko’s Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk. I was disappointed. Imagine a potter’s wheel. As you begin to lose control of the clay, the spinning force sends it into odd shapes and ultimately it flies off the wheel. This was the impression I had.

Sicko knows his stuff. I know this because I’ve heard him interviewed on the excellent and now-defunct Clinically Inclined show on WNUR (Evanston, IL). His book discusses some things that, amazingly, had never crossed my mind. (Plus 8 Records made serious missteps in their early days as a couple of white guys from Canada jumping into the mostly-black Detroit scene without building their rep. Race, nationality, music = an interesting, dramatic intersection!) But it jumps. It jumps a lot.

It’s best described like this: I had a best friend in second grade named Peter. Peter and I used to play with Legos. Eventually, Peter became pretty popular and dated pretty girls while I was an awkward teenager. He went to a good university and is now a respected astrophysicist. He’s written several important papers on the behavior of large planetary bodies as they interact with debris in their midst. Anyway, in second grade we really like the pizza that they served in the cafeteria. We’d eat it every day if we could have.

See what happened there? The substance worked but the structure was off. There’s this increasingly non-linear format to Sicko’s writing as the book progresses that makes me wonder, since I haven’t read the first unexpanded edition of Rebels, if the added stuff with regards to Hawtin’s current work, DEMF/Movement, and Ghostly International was shoehorned in late in the game.

If it isn’t the form of the story, then it’s the focus. I would have much rather read an examination of how Detroit shape(s)(d) techno and a discussion of the shift from the bored black teens of the 80s who wanted to make funk records to the mostly white roster of Ghostly who (rightly so by hard work and by talent) have shaped the latest wave. I want to hear a critical deconstruction of the idea of Detroit as a Techno Mecca that we worship and pay lip service to, but don’t acknowledge and include the community that made it possible. (I’m reminded of the ghost town tourism that I witnessed, and yes, took part in, while attending DEMF/Movement. )

Detroit said something to me when I was there, and I wanted to know and understand what it was saying. I tried hard to listen to the echoes of the Renegades’ Funk amidst the minimal bleep bloop that had become the popular sound of the early 2000s, but I still have questions. Maybe it’s up to me to write that book.