The Battle Over Techno’s Origins

I visited the museum in December, and decided to start my drive where East Grand curls southwest, wrapping around General Motors’ new electric-vehicle factory. The boulevard unfurls like a conveyor belt across the north side of Detroit and is dotted with landmarks from the city’s storied past. G.M.’s headquarters sat three blocks west of Exhibit 3000 until 2000; Henry Ford’s first Model T factory was on Piquette Avenue, two blocks to the museum’s southeast. There are no signs welcoming prospective visitors to Exhibit 3000. You make an appointment, show up to the red-brick box of a building, and knock on the blue door leading to the headquarters of Underground Resistance. John Collins answered the door, wearing glasses and a black mock-neck sweater. He cuts a professorial figure, and spent the first few minutes of our conversation sussing out whether I was there to listen or presume.

The museum itself is the size of a small gallery and takes up the first floor of Underground Resistance’s headquarters. There’s a set of recording studios upstairs, and artists filed in and out during my visit. On one side of the room is a chronological telling of techno’s origins, starting with its philosophical underpinnings: a picture of a smiling Coleman Young, Detroit’s first Black mayor; record jackets from Kraftwerk and Funkadelic; photos of Nichelle Nichols and Leonard Nimoy in their “Star Trek” costumes. (The show’s futurist utopia—and Nichols’s groundbreaking role as Lieutenant Uhura—figure heavily into techno’s ethos.) Banks, one of Underground Resistance’s founders, emerged from a backroom where he was watching a World Cup match with friends and greeted me warmly upon arrival. When I met him, he was wearing what I came to recognize as something of a uniform in Detroit: work boots and weathered Carhartt overalls softened by years working on construction sites.

As Collins and Banks took me around the room, I noticed how the exhibits started to form a fuller schematic of Detroit’s music community. There was a dusty copy of “Techno Rebels,” the journalist Dan Sicko’s comprehensive history of the genre; collected records from artists that had been distributed and promoted by Submerge over the years; a blue Michigan vanity plate emblazoned with “TECHNO”; and several pieces of work from Detroit artists, including the painting “Detroit Babylon,” by Ron Zakrin. In the art work, two nuclear reactors sit in the gray distance like alien hourglasses, an image that would appear to be an homage to the 1966 partial meltdown at the Fermi 1 reactor, memorialized in Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s song “We Almost Lost Detroit.” In Zakrin’s work, the reactors are powered by a pair of Roland 808s. Machines are a large part of the display at Exhibit 3000. Behind a glass window at the back of the museum is an antique cutting lathe used to produce master vinyl. An entire section is dominated by a display of vintage drum machines and synths—Korg PolySix, Roland TR-727—that gave techno its driving thump, creating a trophy wall of technology, each piece with its provenance and significance.

There’s even a case of Hot Wheels-size miniature cars and a picture of a glossy eggplant-purple Pontiac, a sign of the cultural inheritance that you take on just by being born in Detroit. Banks sidled up to me as I was looking at the photograph. “I was too young to go to Vietnam, so I went around the neighborhood when kids were getting drafted and asked the older guys if I could have their car if they got fucked up other there.” He had a couple of takers, and still sounded surprised that anyone said yes. Banks is a natural comedian and storyteller, but he went from ebullient to sombre telling this story. The purple muscle car belonged to a neighbor who died in combat, he said. He bought the car from the kid’s parents, and kept it in mint condition for decades.

Collins led me over to a case on a wall near the center of the room. It’s simply labelled “The Future,” and the display is filled with baby photos and school portraits from the extended Underground Resistance family. It’s more altar than exhibit, a hopeful vigil for music’s impact on Detroit and the community that it wants to continue fostering. A typed message, hoisted by a small alligator clip, lays down Underground Resistance’s mission like a challenge:

We are urban African American Futurists who pioneered yet another sonic gift to the world. We are taking the sound into the future.

The question becomes: will a history of greed and ignorance repeat itself and unknowingly make us irrelevant? Did we learn anything?

Alex Azary waited for me underneath an awning across from MOMEM. It was a gunmetal-gray December day in Frankfurt, and, by the time I met him in the midafternoon, the minimal light was already fading into a monochromatic dusk. He wore a chunky knit beanie and large duffel coat, sniffling because he was just getting over a bad cold.

MOMEM sits in a sunken plaza below Hauptwache square, as if someone decided that a major city needed a conversation pit right in its center. On my visit, the Christmas market was in full swing, with tourists and locals biting into snappy bratwurst and sipping glühwein from ceramic mugs, wisps of steam making the entire scene look like a holiday postcard. You have to be looking for MOMEM in order to find it, and I got turned around several times before I found the correct staircase. The only other people in the plaza were a group of men in stone-colored jackets, talking quietly and smoking.

The space was most recently occupied by the Frankfurt Children’s Museum; Azary’s team knocked down the walls and painted everything black, to give it the feel of an underground club. In the weeks before I arrived, MOMEM had hosted an exhibit on the Frankfurt d.j. Sven Väth, and visitors were able to spin records from his personal collection. I visited after the exhibition had ended, so the space had the empty feeling of an office in between tenants. I asked Azary whether he considered MOMEM a museum in the traditional sense. “I want this space to be a cultural institution for club music,” he answered. “I want this to be a place for young people to come and gather and be inspired and learn about the past, present, and future of club culture and electronic music.” I started to wonder if I was getting caught up in semantics. Museums summon up a defined template, and tradition asks that they be equal parts reliquaries and schools, whether they’re on the grand scale of the Louvre or the more modest dimensions of MOMEM or Exhibit 3000. They also require a tight curatorial definition of what’s housed inside them, so that visitors can understand how concepts flow and collide with one another. Musical genres aren’t as defined as museum exhibits, of course. The boundaries are porous and argued over.