While Carl struggles with the cables Derrick runs a track from an old DAT. “I made this on one of my sadder days, my girl she had left me,” he explains as the music begins. “Can you hear the bassline? It’s crying.” There is something about that b-line, it seems to twist towards feeling while the rest of the track moves like water, quiet spirals of harmony propelled by clear and funky breaks. Like most of his records it seems to have leaked in from a parallel dancefloor where artists, dreamers, lovers, poets, angels and ravers trip across the clouds. “People haven’t heard this before,” he adds, “it’s from the Rhythim Is Rhythim LP that I never released.”
Derrick cooks dinner (a mozzarella and tomato salad followed by baked salmon with wild rice) while different people bang on his door. Kevin Saunderson turns up and signs a contract with May’s Transmat label, Chicago producer Glenn Underground checks in to say hi and May’s close buddy D. Wynn arrives.
They play with Derrick’s plastic toys, D. Wynn posing an action man with balaclava and sub-machine gun to look mean, Derrick countering with his Buzz Lightyear. And all this time Carl’s fiddling with the wires, getting the studio together. I’m drinking red wine with Derrick (“fuck that you gotta have white with fish”), eating the food he’s made and having such a cool time that I almost forget that I’m surrounded by the people dance culture reveres as legends, icons and immortals. Because it’s now accepted as undeniable history that Carl, Kevin, Derrick and Juan Atkins somersaulted dance and electronic music beyond disco, electro, Kraftwerk, Eno, Kraut Rock, P-Funk, New Romantic and New Order into something new. At the time they called it techno.
THERE’S some graffiti on the staircase leading to Derrick’s space that gives clues as to where he was coming from. There’s Juan Atkins famous quotation where he compares Detroit’s two best known products: Berry Gordy’s Motown Records and Henry Ford’s car-manufacturing plants. “Today the automobile plants use robots and computers to make their cars,” declared Atkins. “I’m more interested in Ford’s robots than Gordy’s music.”
There’s a diagram of Eno’s ambient speaker system, statistics matching Soviet and US nuclear arsenals, Kraftwerk song titles and lyrics from a Thomas Dolby song, ‘Tune in Tonight, Try To Think Of Nothing.” And surprisingly, but maybe not for anyone who’s danced or listened to any of Derrick’s tracks, a quote from Frankie Goes To Hollywood. “Pleasure,” it reads, “will be sensual in the afterlife.”
A saying that’s always been attributed to May is the description of his techno: “George Clinton meeting Kraftwerk in an elevator. ” But that’s only the barest outline of a music that suggests golden wings, hot pants and full hearts spiralling above the Earth. When they first appeared in the late 80s records like ‘It Is What It Is’, ‘Strings Of Life’, ‘Beyond The Dance’ and ‘Nude Photo’ shocked dancefloors with the birth of the new. The beats were familiar from house or electro but existed somewhere inbetween, infinitely more complex yet icily sharp. The strings carried the feeling and his signature.
You could tell you were listening to Derrick May from those strings that weren’t strings, sounds that were neither electronic nor acoustic but shimmered in their own space. He didn’t release many records, just a handful of 12 inches, each one sparse but musical, machine but human. To this day there isn’t an artist working in dance music who wants to be taken seriously as a creator who doesn’t namecheck May and Detroit as an influence, if not a standard.
So it seems strange that neither Derrick nor any of the people hanging out in his apartment have deals with major record labels.
“I would love to work with a large record company,” purrs Derrick. “But I had some fuck-up situations with large record companies and realised that these majors don’t work on the same frame of mind as artists. I went in as an artist and was suddenly told that I had to be an entertainer. An artist is David Byrne, Tori Amos, Peter Gabriel, David Bowie. An artist is Prince, people who tend to be able to say what they want to say the way they want to say it – and make money at the same time.
“He continues: “Black people can’t get the opportunity to be artists. They can get a chance to be entertainers all they like but they can’t get the chance to be true artists. Especially in a genre that hasn’t been totally proven. Record companies want to take their chances with marketable people which happens to be people of their gender, colour or race. Maybe it sounds racist. I don’t think it is racist. It’s business.”
Juan Atkins once remarked that if he, Derrick, and Kevin had been white by now they’d be the biggest thing since sliced bread. May agrees but he insists he’s not bitter. He’s happy with his life, he travels the world as a DJ and people treat him with respect if not reverence. He compares his situation to Goldie’s, pointing out that ‘Timeless’, was a perfect, beautiful record that failed to sell in the US because the record companies, radio stations and music infrastructure still couldn’t deal with a black man producing non-recognisably black music. But the race question troubles him most as it affects the dancefloor. Because techno’s black root is so invisible, he argues, it keeps black kids off the floor.
“You’ve got black kids in this country who won’t come out and dance,” he complains, “they don’t want to know about dance music. They’re not even interested. Half of them don’t even know it exists. It’s the same shit all over the world, even in Africa man. I been to South Africa and the black folks don’t want to know. Nobody has a black audience except for the r n’ b and rap crowd. I long for a black audience to hear my music. It hurts me to believe that black people are not down. Because I’m black.”
Parte 3: Martes 11 Jun
Parte?4: Martes 18 Jun
Parte?5: Martes 25 Jun
