Techno: Inside the Museum of the Living Dead

On the "musealization of techno" and the club-closure crisis

1.

If you have been following dance music news over the past two or so years, you might have picked up on the strange, but constant coexistence of two, perhaps at first seemingly opposed, trends. The first trend concerns the unprecedented acceptance of electronic dance music within traditional and mainstream cultural institutions, a process that has been dubbed the "museumification of techno", as goes the title of a Substack post by Michelle Lhooq.

This “museumification” has been mainly occuring in the form of museum exhibitions, podcasts, photo albums and documentaries. The sheer amount of these that are popping up now precludes any attempt at an exhaustive listing here. Just within the last few weeks, there must have been announcements for three new exhibitions, five podcasts, seven photo albums, and a dozen documentaries. If there is a running thread between all of these, it is that they all claim to "celebrate", "appreciate" or "shine light" on electronic dance music and club culture and its history.

In wider pop culture, there have also been unprecedented "appreciations" and "celebrations" by major stars such as Drake, Beyoncé and Frank Ocean. This has predictably led to the mainstream music press acting as if house music were a dead cultural relic until the great necromancer queen Bey decided to personally resurrect it. What I find striking here is that none of these figures and institutions appear to have thought it necessary to ask anyone involved in electronic dance music if it is even in need of such "appreciations" and "celebrations". Instead, it is simply presumed that any such acknowledgement will be readily welcomed by the crown’s subjects. “Appreciations” and “celebrations” are mandatory, or else.

The second trend I want to talk about concerns another category of headlines that has been a fixture in dance music related news — namely what has been dubbed the "club closure crisis", referring to the increasingly large number of clubs across the world that are being forced to shut down, relocate or continue operating under precarious and uncertain conditions. While clubs have, on average, always been short-lived spaces, what feels different now is that even established clubs that have been around for a long time are now at risk.

Without wanting to be alarmist, it does seem like following Covid, something about the socio-political and economic situation that let (certain) clubs lead a somewhat stable existence within the larger urban landscape has changed, with both state and private business interests committing increasingly aggressive land-grabs for the valuable real estate that many established clubs are sitting on (and not just clubs, Berlin’s legendary Hard Wax record store is currently being forced out of its iconic location after almost thirty years to make way for luxury lofts).

It has been a rather surreal experience to see these two trends side-by-side in my RSS news-feed on a weekly basis: New documentary, seminal club closes, new exhibition, seminal club forced to relocate, new photo album, seminal club facing closure. To me, this odd coexistence raises the following question: Why is it that electronic dance music is now, for the first time ever, being "celebrated" and "appreciated" by mainstream cultural institutions at the same exact time that it is facing such existential precarity?

Here, I can't help but be cynical, insofar as it seems as if the latter were a precondition to the first, that this “musealization” operates like a vulture that is allergic to living culture and can only "celebrate" that which is already dead, or in the process of decaying and can be easily assimilated into the halls of the living dead as a series of stale cultural-historical pastichés. Smelling blood in the air, the vultures are quick to the crime scene, let's quickly get some photo albums and documentaries out of this thing before it's fully bled out!

2.

One remarkable thing about these “celebrations” is just how late they arrive. Techno and house have been around for four decades now, old enough to even pre-date hip-hop's first mainstream boom in the late 80s. Perhaps a comparison to hip-hop, a genre that was embraced by cultural institutions much more quickly, can be instructive here.

While mainstream white America has obviously always had a complicated and sometimes conflicting relationship to hip-hop, it is also true that hip-hop was almost immediately irresistible to a certain subset of the NYT-reading, "culturally open minded" liberal white upper middle class. The fact that one of the very first books of hip-hop theory and analysis is by David Foster Wallace, of all people, should say enough.

For all its radical content, the genre's overall presentation, with its larger-than-life stars and thick cultural semiotics, was primed for existing analytical apparatuses of popular culture that were mostly concerned with language and cultural semiotics — Wallace's book is called Signifying Rappers for a reason. It is hardly surprising that the DFW's of the world did not go on to write books about techno, a genre that does not easily lend itself to this kind of analysis.

Viewed from within the inside of the cultural mainstream, dance music seemed like little but a strange fad. In 90's Europe, the sheer presence of rave as mass youth-culture forced some engagement with techno out of the cultural establishment, however its reaction was mostly genuine confusion and incomprehension in the face of a genre that was so far removed from mainstream practices that it couldn't even really be critiqued, let alone "celebrated".

As such, the continent's feuilletonists and cultural commentators were relieved when techno died off as a mainstream cultural movement in the early 00's and was swiftly replaced by home-grown variants of American gangster rap. While those mostly served as targets for predictable cultural conservative outrage, they were nonetheless a known target; there were lyrics and words to parse through, signifying-semiotic literary analysis to be done. Finally, some real cultural conflict! Out of touch boomers call for bans, every thirteen-year-old Caucasian in the nation runs out to buy the hot new material. The circle of life.

3.

I say all that to emphasize just how strange it is that electronic dance music is now being readily embraced by mainstream cultural figures and institutions. Although here, it is crucial to take a closer look at the form in which this is occuring. Because one can’t help but notice that techno's "museumification" is proceeding almost entirely in the form of vague cultural allusions and member-berries and not in the form of an engagement with the actual specifics of this music. Institutions may be "celebrating" techno now, but they still don't seem to understand it any more than they did twenty years ago.

There is perhaps no better example here than the little "Drexciya-industrial-complex" that has popped up within the last few years. Drexciya of course being one of the greatest electro acts of all time, one that explored the very limits of what electronic dance music can be capable of. But you wouldn't know that from the countless uninspired riffs that are exploiting the "Drexciya mythos" for easy imagery, with little concern for the fact that such a "mythos" has never existed as something independent of the form and content of the actual music (how can you say anything substantial about Drexciya without talking about electro as a genre and form?). This has gotten to the point where the late James Stinson's family felt it necessary to issue a public statement, telling people to leave Drexciya alone already and to spare it from further “celebrations”.

It is also worth considering the implications behind a form of music being "celebrated" as a "mythos" or as "culture". Because coming from institutions, such compliments almost always serve as slights of hand, with the unspoken conclusion being that, if they “celebrate” an artform as culture, they do not actually have to take it seriously as art. Or, in other words, no ones "celebrates" abstract expressionism (or any traditional art movement for that matter) by talking about how great of a "culture" it is. The institution's equation is that while art can be culture, "culture" can never be art in the full sense. This kind of strategy also echoes in the institutional treatment of hip-hop in recent years, with rappers being patronizingly "celebrated" as some kind of babbies first civil rights activist, rather than as artists that are allowed to express abstract and complex ideas that don't necessarily correspond with existing social reality.

4.

But what exactly is this supposed “techno-culture" that institutions are scrambling to musealize? As has been established, institutions aren't all that interested in the specifics of this artform. Rather, "techno" to them serves as a signifier for a vague collection of cultural associations, namely a certain image of the 1990s that has come to occupy a significant role in bourgeois ideology. Within the last decade or so, in the minds of the tweeting middle class, "the 90s" have become memorialized as an epoch of free market utopia, a time when capitalism was still humane, the corporations still nice to us, the rich were paying their fair share and real pressing political problems did not exist.

This fantasy obviously does not hold up to even slight historical scrutiny, especially since it was in the 1990s that center-left governments across the Western world put Thatcherism into practice for real and passed some of the worst deregulations and privatizations in history. Just within the context of techno, at the exact moment in which a myriad of short-lived techno clubs sprung up in the ruins of East Berlin, the city's government sold off a large chunk of its public housing portfolio for pittances to private investors, directly setting the way for the present housing crisis the city is facing now, thirty years later.

I think that techno-phantasmagoria is attractive to ideology now precisely because it serves as a signifier for a fantasy of a free and equal market society that even official ideology itself no longer pretends it can actually deliver. At a time when it is obviously no longer possible for young people to just start a club or squat in a derelict space across the street, or bum around in a major metropolitan area, raving or making music all week, our dear cultural institutions turn to us and say, don't fret, you can look at this photo album and listen to this podcast and visit this exhibition and watch this documentary to see what it was like, when things were still possible!

5.

Perhaps the most tragicomic figure in the world of contemporary dance music and club culture is a woman named Amy Lamé, who was appointed as the first ever "London Night Czar" in 2016. This "night czar" is a strange half-government, half-industry position that is supposed to be advocating for London's "nighttime economy" within the context of government city planning policy. What is interesting about Lamé's advocating activities is that she appears to have already entirely given up on the idea that advocating for nightlife on the basis of it possessing some kind of non-monetary artistic or cultural value could ever hold any sway with her government.

Rather, the only thing she appears to do (and perhaps is even able to do) in the face of unprecedented club closures is to repeat a list of basic Thatcherisms — look, we are creating jobs, we are creating economic value in the free market, we are stimulating the neighborhood economy, we shouldn't be restricted by pesky red-tape regulations — at a state that is so dysfunctional in the face of global investment capital's run on London real estate that it cannot even pretend to support its own free market ideology anymore. Because even from within the neoliberal fantasy of the market as a vibrant, creative force, it makes no sense that a night club that is partaking in capitalist market competition, that manages to be economically profitable, growing even, and is employing people and boosting the cultural and economic profile of its neighborhood, would be torn down to make room for uninhabited luxury apartments that only serve as abstract investment vehicles, their potential profit projected years, even decades into the future.

6.

I think all of this would come as little to no surprise to a character that was already heavily participating in London's 19th century "nighttime economy"; his name's Karl Marx. One of the less appreciated aspects of Capital is that it is also a proper gothic novel — Marx was writing in mid-19th century Britain, after all — full of references to creatures like vampires and werewolves. As many have noted, there is something quintessentially “vampiric” about the core capitalist process in which living, actually productive labor and objects are turned into dead abstract labor and commodities, sucked dry of their life to create ever more surplus value.

As is well known, in recent decades, the global market economy has been struggling in the face of falling growth rates across most developed countries. Faced with the limits of real material productivity, there has been a move towards what is commonly called "platform capitalism" or “finance capitalism” — the maximization of financialization and rent-seeking in all aspects of life in a desperate attempt to conjure more surplus value out of thin air. Chief among these processes has been the speculative real-estate bubble that is seeing global investment capital scramble to buy up metropolitan real estate across the globe.

Clubs are not just subject to social processes of gentrification, but collateral damage in a wider systemic process under which cities are turned into abstract, ghostly speculative objects. It is hard to not think of London here, a city that was almost entirely reshaped in the imagine of finance, with its inner city full of identi-kit office buildings and the monumental towers dedicated to the immortal science of banking that oversee the city. It is hardly surprising that the UK and London specifically have been among those hit hardest by the current club-closure crisis. Whatever clubs remain seem to be operating in spite of the city, not because of it.

While things currently may look a bit better here in my home town of Berlin, it is also subject to the same processes that are occuring everywhere. In one of the biggest crimes in urban development in recent memory, during the pandemic, Amazon was allowed to swiftly construct a dystopian mega-tower that serves as their European headquarter right in the middle of the Warschauer Strasse "techno district", only a few hundred meters away from Berghain and other clubs. A stark symbolic contrast if there ever was one, one that highlights that, while clubs may technically be businesses, they will never be Business with a capital B.

7.

Yet, if we've learned anything in the past thirty years, it's that club culture is nothing if not resilient in the face of such contradictions. It is used to subsist in the passing ruins of the market economy’s perpetual boom-bust cycle. After all, very few clubs reside in purpose-made spaces, at the feet of almost every club lies a failed business or obsolete strain of industry and it is no coincidence that the golden age of clubs happened at a time when the world's capitals were still littered with the ruins of Fordism, ripe for techno to feast on.

That is not to say that there aren't still ample abandoned industrial spaces in places like rural eastern Germany and Michigan. The ruins have moved to the periphery, but it lacks the socio-economic structures to sustain a club culture. Instead, the periphery is increasingly serving the booming festival industry, which offers a kind of "outsourcing" solution to the problem at hand, relocating the party from the midst of urban life to temporary festival grounds outside the city.

But isn’t what defines the club precisely its presence within the spectacle of urban life as a kind of permanent impermanence? Whereas the museum as an institution strives for an archival, trans-historical form of memory, the memories that the club produce are fragmentary in the way that Rainald Goetz captured so well in his club-novel Rave: a million little moments and pieces that only come together as nonlinear, fuzzy haze. This is a very specific kind of memory and history that cannot be captured by traditional attempts at musealization. What techno really is, the promise it holds as an artform, has nothing to do with the ideological version of it that institutions are presuming in their attempts at capture.

8.

I want to close by thinking about what a non-ideological museal engagement with techno could look like. Because I do think that techno has a place in a museal context, not as cultural pastiché, but as an exploration of a unique artform. Done properly, I think this could add to the understanding we have of techno, casting it in a different context, making us see it in a different light.

This would require giving up the pretense that this music is somehow remote from wider art history and to set it within a larger art-historical context, namely the history of modernism. I've long held the belief that techno is the late apotheosis of modernism. In the mid-1990s, when high modernism was already considered dead and postmodernist pastiché was dominating the art world, techno was thinking seriously about some of the key questions of modernism. At the same time that London's art world was celebrating YBA hacks, Steve Bicknell's London Lost parties were hosting the likes of Jeff Mills and Robert Hood at their peak, artists that were concerned with fundamental modernist concepts such as form, structure, color, abstraction and materiality. Even a cursory look at the cover art of classic Axis, M-Plant or Basic Channel twelve-inches bears light to the radicality of their aesthetic vision.

Taking this vision seriously would lead to a very different kind of exhibition, one that thinks about techno and electronic music in terms of very different set of questions: What connections and similarities are there between techno and traditional modernist disciplines such as architecture, painting and sculpture? Is there a mutual relation in their treatment of concepts such as abstraction, structure, function and materiality? What happens when we make such connections, in what ways does this shift our view of what techno — and also painting, sculpture, architecture etc. — is? To ask such questions would also mean to re-think what this music is and can be, the potential and promise that it presents. That is the real task at hand.