Infiniti (Juan Atkins) :: Game One
everyone’s got secrets, you know. and who doesn’t love to hear about the next man’s? (to live vicariously though him or rather just to calculate our moral standing in this world). well, sure as hell, i’ve got one; and it’s a little dirty alright.
but, no. i’m not ashamed.
say it loud.
UH-HUH.
say it proud.
THAT’S RIGHT
you know what i like? i like Dance Music.
now before you go and choke yourself into a state—all indignant scowls, furrowed brows and moistened murmurs—over the fact that, like, DUH, it’s eight into the aughts and even your hillbilly uncle in Pasipuchammuck, Rhode Island picked up the latest Gorillaz album. cause i’m here to talk about the capital-D Dance, not its bastard children. i might even be inclined to invoke the dreaded C-word despite the bad taste it leaves in my mouth; cause as much as this could be the soundtrack to one chapter of your appropriately bohemian midnight boudoir dance parties, it’s really meant for the Club.
i’ll spare you a rigorous history but supply a few tidbits of crudely oversimplified context instead. soul, funk and r&b begot disco; and disco begot house; and house and funk begot techno; and Eliud begot Eleazar; and the Lord said “this is good.” contrary to popular perception, techno wasn’t always the icy, teutonic clamor of sports car commercials and Polish discotheques. it was smart, soulful, and progressive—and, at the time, the latest in the long, distinguished tradition of innovative Black American musical genres. pioneered by a group of three Detroit teens (Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson) who were greatly influenced by a motley mélange of P-Funk, futurism, and Detroit’s slow urban decay, techno first emerged from the bedroom in 1981 with Atkin’s Alleys of Your Mind. perhaps no one has yet better captured the sound and genesis of this music in print better than May who once described techno as “just like Detroit, a complete mistake. It’s like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator.”
admittedly, i was hesitant to post this song, or a dance track of any kind. taken out of context—the club, the dance, the mix—its simplicity and monotony, while both essential to the track’s purpose, may strike you as liabilities rather than strengths. but it’s a mistake to evaluate dance music by the metrics of pop and rock. free yourselves from the tyranny of verse chorus verse, if just for a moment. there is an arc rather than a rhythm to the structure. a glacial unfolding. rhythm here is all micro, and swingin; the skittering, clipped skips of the hi-hat and gloriously reverbed, hollow stabs of keyboard compel my feet and hips to feats unhip but primal and natural and culturally unmolested. this is the secret of Dance Music, and mine, too. dirty, indeed.
Game One (7.9MB MP3)
Infiniti (Juan Atkins) (myspace, more info, and more)
As my meditation teacher said, let the small animal of your heart love what it loves. This jam has my small animals freaking out and wondering if they ate a psychedelic root or something. How does it roll from left to right inside my head like that? whoa.