The Battle Over Technos Origins
I visited the museum in December and decided to start where East Grand turns southwest around the new General Motors electric car factory. The boulevard functions like an assembly line on Detroit's North Side and is lined with monuments to the city's glorious past. GM's headquarters was three blocks west of the 3000-2000 fair; Henry Ford's first Model T factory was on Pickett Avenue, two blocks southeast of the museum. There are no signs welcoming potential visitors to Expo 3000. They make an appointment, appear in the red brick lodge of a building, and knock on the blue door leading to the headquarters of the underground resistance. John Collins opened the door. He wore glasses and a low-cut black sweater. He puts on a teacher face and spends the first few minutes of our conversation wondering if I'm listening or guessing.
The museum itself is the size of a small gallery and is located on the first floor of the underground resistance headquarters. There are several recording studios upstairs and artists were coming and going when I visited. On one side of the coin is a chronological account of techno's origins, beginning with its philosophical underpinnings: a photograph of a smiling Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor; albums from Kraftwerk and Funkadelic; Photos of Nichelle Nichols and Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek costumes. (The show's futuristic utopias — and Nichols' groundbreaking performance as Lt. Uhura — stand out against the techno atmosphere.) Banks, one of the founders of the underground resistance, came from the corner where a world had look at. Cup football match with friends and gave me a warm welcome. When I met him, he was wearing what I recognized as the Detroit uniform: bare work boots and Carhartt overalls, slicked back from years of construction.
As Collins and Banks walked around the room, I could see that the exhibits were beginning to paint a bigger picture of Detroit's music scene. There was a dusty copy of Techno Rebels, journalist Dan Sick's in-depth history of the genre; Artist recordings that Submerge has distributed and promoted over the years; a blue Michigan license plate that read " TECHNO "; and several works by Detroit artists, including the Detroit Babylon painting by Ron Zakrin. Over the artwork, two nuclear reactors loom like alien hourglasses in the gray distance, an image commemorating the partial meltdown of the Fermi-1 reactor in 1966 and immortalized in the song "We Almost" by Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson. Detroit lost. In Zakrin's work, the reactors are powered by two Roland 808s. The machines make up a large part of the exhibit at the 3000 exhibition. make Vinyl Masters. Drums and vintage synths dominate throughout the area - a Korg PolySix, a Roland TR-727 - providing techno dynamics and creating a wall of tech trophies, each with its own origin and meaning.
There's also a box of Hot Wheels-sized toy cars and a photo of a shiny eggplant Pontiac, a nod to the cultural heritage that comes with being born in Detroit. Banks approached me as I looked at the photo. "I was too young to go to Vietnam, so when the kids were out, I would go around the neighborhood and ask the old people if I had the car because they were having fun." He had several people and was always surprised that someone said yes. Banks is a born comedian and storyteller, but in telling this story he went from jealousy to obscurity. The purple muscle car belonged to a neighbor who died in the fight, he said. He bought the car from the child's parents and kept it in pristine condition for decades.
Collins led me to a closet in the center wall of the room. It's simply titled "The Future" and the screen is filled with childhood photos and school portraits of the underground resistance's extended family. More of an altar than an exhibit, it celebrates the impact of music on Detroit and the community it seeks to continue nurturing. A message printed with a small alligator clip presents the Underground Resistance's mission as a challenge:
Alex Azari was waiting for me below you in front of the MOMEM . It was a December day in Frankfurt and when I met him at noon, the minimal light had already turned into a monochromatic twilight. He was wearing a big knitted cap and a big coat because he had just caught a snoring cold.
MOMEM sits in a sunken square below the main train station, as if someone has decided that a big city needs a talking hole in the middle. When I visited, the Christmas market was in full swing, tourists and locals eating tender, sweet meat and sipping mulled wine from ceramic mugs, while jets of steam made the whole scene look of a Christmas postcard. You have to search MOMEM to find it and I went back and forth several times until I found the right scale. The only other people in the square were a group of men in stone-colored jackets, talking in low voices and smoking.
The Frankfurt Children's Museum recently took over the premises; Azar's team tore down the walls and painted everything black to make it look like an underground club. A few weeks before my arrival, the MOMEM organized an exhibition of Frankfurt DJ Sven Wet, where visitors could spin records from his personal collection. I visited the exhibition after the exhibition ended, so the space looked like an empty office between tenants. I asked Azar if he thought MOMEM was a museum in the traditional sense. “I want this space to become a cultural institution for club music,” he replied. "I want it to be a place where young people gather, get inspired and learn about the past, present and future of club culture and electronic music." I started to wonder if I had fallen in love with semantics. Museums create a specific template, and tradition dictates that they are equal parts relic and school, whether on the scale of the Louvre or the modest dimensions of the MOMEM or the 3,000 exhibits. In addition, they require strict preservation of their content. so that visitors can understand how the concepts work and clash with each other. Musical genres are of course not as defined as museum exhibits. Borders are porous and contested.
