Assembling a Black Counter Culture
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany)
DeForrest Brown Jr. is a musician, media theorist and curator who has been an essential voice in questioning the current state of global electronic music and framing it within the radical black perspective. In Assembling a Black Counter Culture (2022), he traces the “black secret technology” centering Detroit techno meanwhile covering black vernacular cultures, racial capitalism, industrialization and black resistance. Combining both academic and underground knowledge, Brown visits the black labor, ingenuity and futuristic desire, questioning techno’s later depoliticized and dehistoricized reception within various discursive and practical realms among the global electronic music industry. More than a linear musical timeline, this book is rather a counter-archive; interviews, artist biographies, scene insights and media archaeology are constant while Brown digs further into the direction of techno’s cybernetic essence and creative drive. Doing so, the book references valuable literature at the intersection of racial capitalism, cybernetics, and black desire, citing authors like Cedric Robinson, Paul Gilroy, Kodwo Eshun, Fred Moten, as well as frequently referring to the Afrofuturist heritage and diasporic Myth-science.
Starting from Detroit, Brown later situates techno within the broader Black Atlantic, as well as its further branches through locations like Japan, Germany and the UK. While each chapter breaks down techno’s timeline by focusing on different perspectives, locations or concepts, Brown eventually re-assembles all the information in the final chapter, “The Collapse of Modern Culture” a title that is very much self-explanatory. Brown merely hesitates to express his personal opinion, in fact, he clearly shows his position also on the very first page of the book with five different diagrams; the first one being a forecast of unbearable ecological load that inevitably leads to the “collapse of modern civilization”, and the second one that maps out the timeline of the Black Atlantic that starts with the global slave trade that he indicates the inevitable future result, “the journey home”. In that sense, Brown underlines the inescapable outcomes of a culture that is assembled through racial capitalism and neocolonialism, combining self-reflexive insights with the comprehensive research data he provides.
In the first few pages, the book cruises through the racialized history of the US and colonialism with their connection to current racial capitalism and the “rise of modern industrial complexes”. While discussing the essence of black usage of media and machines in the context of electronic music and dance cultures, Brown pays dues to early architects of Afrofuturism such as Sun Ra, Lee “Scratch” Perry or George Clinton, discussing their influence on later black electronic musics. He quickly sets its route to Detroit in the following chapter, zooming into the life of techno’s originators in the US Midwest, where post-Fordist racial capitalism peaked post World War II. One of Brown’s main arguments is that techno’s emergence is inseparable from the conditions of post-Fordist America and the automation of black labor. He conceptualizes techno as an embodied and racialized extension of the workers’ engagement with industrial machinery, adding that the music’s futuristic desires are not merely stylistic but are direct reflection of the industrial environment, that he eventually refers to as “black secret technology.” Brown positions Detroit techno pioneers like Juan Atkins, Jeff Mills and Underground Resistance as sonic engineers responding to industrial debilitation and using machines and rhythms to pursue new aesthetic forms and sonic fiction, while continously providing examples from Afrofuturistic heritage and Myth-scientific practice that points out to the everlasting connection between pasts, presents and the futures of the Black Atlantic Sonic Futurism.
Brown also goes over the world’s changing economic and political climate and its impacts on the racialized, social and financial structure of the USA and beyond, zooming into cases such as US’s post-civil war and more contemporary topics such as racial policies and riots, or state-driven violence in the 20th century as what equally shaped the conditions for techno to flourish. At the intersection of racialized structures and mainstream media, he constantly provides concrete examples of techno and other black music being whitewashed through media tools such as news narrations, charts or interviews to show the double-edged sword of British and American music market; where Britain has become a melting pot of different black music with enough financial stability to the US’s, covering techno’s expansion overseas and its results with another self-explanatory chapter called “Wake up America, you are dead!”. Next chapter “Detroit-Berlin Axis” provides even more insights by revealing further connections of black musical cultures with racial capitalism and neocolonialism, focusing on the genre’s second decade of existence and exportation outside of the US, under “a colonial project that white European crowds fetishize Detroit’s sonic labor and whitewashing it”as Brown puts it, diving into stories from post-Cold War era Berlin with a hedonistic, neocolonial venture that simultaneously serves for the Western cultural hegemony. Exampling paternalistic assumptions of Kraftwerk and other Western-white influences on Detroit techno, or scholars such as Stockhausen and Adorno, Brown maps out the post-colonial multiculturalism that reappropriates the African American musical continuum on the 1990s and beyond, going over cases like Underground Resistance or Drexciyan Empire as black resistance in response.
Brown brings his focus to the present in the final chapters, interrogating how platform capitalism has restructured the global music economy and further marginalized black producers. He maps out the consolidation of power in media platforms, streaming services and corporate-backed festivals, showing how these infrastructures continue the exploitation and erasure of black creative labor. Here he reframes all previous chapters through the lens of platform capitalism and questions its impacts on techno and beyond, going over the capitalization of the black body, mind, and labor through contemporary technological infrastructure. Yet, he already made the conclusion clear many times throughout the book, that blackness is always already in counter-position to the structures of racial capitalism that seek to contain it. If there is a central claim in Assembling a Black Counter Culture, it is that resistance, speculative imagination and reassembling are constant variables of the black secret technology.