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!
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.