The Dance Issue Add to favourites

I know we're going to bang some cats over the head with this one. While our first Dance Issue has taken nine years, it's been brewing since I realized that a lot of those breaks I was digging for were actually on disco records. Eventually, it wasn't even about the breaks, just the music. Yet, I still had my limits, never really venturing out into the deep house and techno ends of the musical spectrum. But the real desire for this issue came about from doing just that. Not growing up in Chicago, Detroit, or New York with an understand- ing of the history of house, techno, or underground dance music in general, the average head could be easily fooled into thinking it was all European import. But house and techno are just as American as hip-hop and jazz before them.

Even when artists we dug ventured into that territory, we knew to tread lightly. While some may be familiar with Bohannon's heavily sampled classic "Save Their Souls," few recognize the dance-floor burn behind joints like "Let's Start the Dance," much less little-known gems like "Zulu." Bohannon kept pushing his music forward, evidenced by a career-spanning progression from funk to disco and house. As the musical landscape changed, few transitioned and flourished as easily. His unique rhythm combined raw chicken-scratch-guitar-style funk with four-to-the-floor disco, creating a sound that influenced underground disco and dance and helped give birth to house. Bohannon's groove can be heard on tracks like Caroline Crawford's "Coming On Strong," prominently featured at both Chicago house-music meccas, the Warehouse and Music Box. Though Frankie Knuckles gave birth to house at the Warehouse, it was pioneering DJ Ron Hardy at the Music Box who would push the music into higher ground. Detroit techno pioneer Derrick May was there to observe it all firsthand, even selling Knuckles his first drum machine. This period saw both Chicago and Detroit combining New York disco with European electronic music that would take the sound of both cities in directions no one could have predicted.

That European electronic dance music had its origins in postwar West Germany, when a group of musicians found themselves inventing a new musical identity, is telling. Like these postwar German musicians who didn't want to rely on imported American and U.K. blues-based rock, instead creating their own language in Krautrock, the techno pioneers turned their backs on Motown and the vocabulary of soul to create a new vernacular born out of the new postindustrial reality of Detroit in the '80s. Kraftwerk would serve as inspiration for Detroit techno artists searching for a new form of expression, and the band laid the foundation for what would become New York electro along the way as well.

As I dug deeper into the history of techno, I discovered the genius of Juan Atkins, the cat who started it all, and who now graces our cover. While I grew up on Cybotron, I somehow never connected the dots back to techno. Considering the prevalence of and ef- fect that digital music has had on modern society, it's hard to imagine that Juan Atkins remains relatively unknown, while lesser-thans are getting rich off his template. Just as Herc, Flash, and Bam are celebrated as hip-hop's founding fathers, so should Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson be lauded as the founding fathers of techno. These are the godfathers of modern Black electronic music-some of the most important music of the twentieth century, pure abstract art of the postindustrial digital age.

We enter this new decade gearing up for our tenth anniversary in December. Some real bangers ahead as we continue to build with more legends in the game, many who've taken this long to get at. But it's worth the wait as we stay pumping out classics on the low like the Belleville Three.