Of course, all genres are arbitrary and there continues to be lots of cross-pollination between electronic music that is mainstream/popular and the stuff people are just throwing together in their bedrooms for their mates online or for the local party scene.
Cybotron was a rock band with guitars. They only started doing electronic-only music later.
When Atkins left the group, he started recording solo under the aliases Model 500 and (later) Infiniti. The early Model 500 releases like “No UFOs”, in addition to being absolute classics, demonstrate the progression from electro to what we would now call Detroit techno. He also collaborated with many of the Berlin techno pioneers in the 90s, forming a key link between the two cities.
Not to mention that Atkins mentored May, Saunderson, and many of the other techno originators.
(ps. Cybotron is not really techno, IMO. It is better categorized as electro with a few prog-rock and post-punk flourishes, a sort of proto-techno. But pointing this out makes you kind of a pedantic bore, so most are happy to go along with calling Cybotron techno.)
Nothing worse than when journalists try to turn the genesis of musical genres into a defined, definite thing and play the game of accusing some of "stealing" from others. It's absurd, and defies everything about art.
There's a serious rift in the world between those who view (Detroit) techno as "Kraftwerk, but a bit different" and "yes, inspired in part by Kraftwerk but actually its own genre". There's an important racial/cultural subtext to those two origin stories as well.
I've seen this argument play out on various blogs, podcasts and even a couple of college level courses over the past 10 years.
Kraftwerk started being called "Techno-pop" around 1978 by a Japanese critic, and the term caught on in Europe. "Techno" alone was a term being thrown 1982 (perhaps earlier) by German press (and even Billboard seems to have used) to talk about electronic music in general, from Kraftwerk to New Order to Front-242.
However: those European acts that were called "Techno" in the early 80s are now retroactively called "Electro" or "Synth Pop".
Interestingly, the early-80s Bellevue Three music, by the way, is much closer to the "Electro" camp, as the popular tunes often lacks the four-to-the-floor associated with today's techno (which the article itself talks about), and feature a breakbeat instead (check out Afrikaa Bambaata for comparison).
The four-on-the-floor itself was already a feature on electronic club music like Trans Europe Express by Kraftwerk and I Feel Love by Donna Summer, both 1977.
The term "Detroit Techno" and the style itself, featuring the four-on-the-floor, only appeared in the late 1980s. Some people say 1987/1988.
And to make matters more complicated: by the time Detroit Techno was flourishing, there was already some music from the Frankfurt Tape Scene that was starting to sound like modern Techno. It wasn't something that happened overnight, in Europe it mostly evolved from Acid House (which also used the four-to-the-floor as a rule), while in Detroit it evolved from Electro.
To me, the problem happen because of some disagreements about terminology. First, groups that Europeans called "Techno" are now being called "Synth Pop" or "Electro" because they sound different from modern Techno, or because they made more diverse music (Bigod 20 and Nitzer Ebb is called EBM). Second, the misconception that early-80s Detroit music was "the real Techno", when in reality it wasn't exactly modern techno, it was as different from it as Kraftwerk was.
In reality there was a lot of music being called Techno and a very rich heritage, but some people want to say theirs was "the real first", while in reality it's not that simple.
TEE by Kraftwerk is not four-on-the-floor.
See "Analyzing Kraftwerk's Beats" for a full explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qhcp6iVWbw
This has been my core insight, any one person you are talking to may well be correct given their location and time that they learned about these things.
To 2023 me, "Electro" doesn't have enough information to know for sure what music you mean, but in early 2000's in the Australian club scene, Electro was a specific sub-genere of modern club house. We would probably call it electro-house now that it's not the current zeitgeist.
The fact that I know for sure people will disagree with that is how I know the former insight is right, it's very dependent on time and place, and there is no authority.
In the end, the differences are minimal, and the more trivial they are, the more people squabble about it. Add or remove a keyboard pad and you have a new genre which people will hate.
Along with that are space age and lounge jazz. Take Hugo Montenegro – Moog Power from 1969 for instance or the Mort Garson album under the name Atraxia from 1975.
I used to think these weren't part of the story but I've been coming around on it
Yep, that’s definitely what it is. Still not stylistically homogenous as late techno, but lots of ideas and the foundation was already there.
What tunes are you wanting to highlight? Skimming that the video and I recognise Frankie Knuckles, Farley "Jackmaster" Funk, Mike "Hitman" Wilson (all Chicago House) and The KLF (British erm... Rave?).
Technopop was not just some journalist’s genre descriptor for Kraftwerk. It was a rich genre originated in Japan by Yellow Magic Orchestra, who combined Kraftwerk’s sound with a more pop sensibility.
Many of the Detroit techno originators have cited YMO alongside Kraftwerk as a key influence.
Two key contributions from YMO come to mind, but there are many others:
YMO’s “Technopolis,” recorded in 1979, might have been the first dance music track to use the word “techno”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek1oCwp7oms
Their 1981 version of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Thousand Knives” is often cited as the first track to use the Roland TR-808: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2d37oySCfk
ps: Technopop would later evolve into what we know as city pop, and eventually present-day J-pop. The sound quickly diverged from what we would recognize as techno; the early releases in the genre are the most important for this discussion, especially YMOs since those were by far the most accessible in the US. It’s all interesting to listen to though!
Zappa? Do you mean Zapp as in Zapp & Roger ? I've never heard anyone credit Frank Zappa with any exploratory forays into what became known as "techno".
Zappa's own explorations are amazing (watch parts of Live at the Roxy to get an idea of his ensemble at its best, and there's oodles of other incredible rock-infused-with-jazz-and-classical-understandings in his output), but they really have essentially nothing at all to do with the evolution of techno.
>The Music Institute’s juice bar – in tandem with its membership scheme – helped the owners keep a “grip on the tone” of the club, according to Miller. Only Depeche Mode seemed to object to the no alcohol policy. John McCready, reporting on Detroit techno for The Face in 1989, escorted the band to the bar. “Then they got there and realized there was no liquor, and it was too late to get them any,” said Kai Alcé, who had been hired to work the coat check. “Waters all round,” was Martin Gore’s rueful response.
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/05/music-institut...
While only briefly mentioned in the above history, here's Steve Reich, in a piece he made in a 1966 piece called Come Out[2][3], which definitely has the seeds of repetitive electronic music like techno (it's pretty long, I recommend starting about 9'27" in if you don't want to listen to the whole thing).
Though it couldn't be mistaken for a full techno track, I would not be at all surprised to hear something like a portion of that in a lot of electronic music today, almost 60 years later. It sounds a lot more modern than Kraftwerk, anyway.
And here[4] is Delia Derbyshire's[5] Dr Who rendition from 1963... a fully realized electronic dance track, also long, long before Kraftwerk.
[1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Y8t10LMuk
[2] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g0WVh1D0N50
[3] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Out_(Reich)
the wikipedia article on the Belleville Three says the "first wave of Detroit techno" was some of the future members meeting and forming Cybotron, releasing Alleys of Your Mind in 1981 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMHNhJJnve4 to me this is quite clearly Kraftwerk inspired, and Kraftwerk had been going for about 10 years at that point.
1981 puts them after Devo had been around awhile, and Talking Heads and B-52s, which were more pop but featured many of these sounds, and contemporaneous with Depeche Mode, Eurythmics, and Yaz/Yazoo.
Two years later Cybotron released Clear which is Kraftwerk blended with more of a funk sound https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3QHj7lai9I
I'm not trying to assign/give/take credit, just saying here's what they sounded like and who else sounded similar to me. Zappa and P Funk are generally noted as having explored these sounds early on, but I don't enjoy their stuff so much so I don't listen to it much. This comment is a bit of "you might try listening to this" if you're interested.
I don't remember when we all started saying techno, it was definitely in full swing in the 90's, I think it was the 80's but gotta admit, I dunno.