Teaching Techno
EARLY AFTERNOON ON THANKSGIVING FRIDAY in 2023, two branches of Black American dance music’s family tree broke philosophical bread together in Detroit. The occasion was a lecture by King Britt, a Philadelphia-born and -raised, three-decades-plus elder of club culture, delivered at the Underground Music Academy (UMA), an organization recently founded by the DJ/producer Waajeed (born Robert O’Bryant), himself a respected elder in the Motor City’s music family.
The lecture mirrored the typical opening session of “Blacktronika: Afrofuturism in Electronic Music,” a course that Britt teaches at the University of California San Diego, where he’s a professor in the Computer Music department. On that crisp November Friday, he spent ninety minutes (half the usual three hours) crafting a historical music survey—opening with the nineteenth-century Dogon bullroarers of Western Africa, touching on the work of jazz maverick Sun Ra and Jamaican dub engineers (among numerous musical tributaries), and ending up at the Chicago house and Detroit techno sounds of the 1980s and ’90s, referencing tracks made by producers who were sitting in the room.
Britt and Waajeed are longtime friends and collaborators, and the lecture, one of the monthly workshops produced by UMA at its still-being-renovated building on East Grand Boulevard, publicly celebrated the men’s primary shared pursuit at present: encouraging the next generation of electronic and dance music practitioners and listeners to continue its sociopolitical trajectory and legacy of Black community–building aspects. In 2024, this project is fraught with societal landmines. Given academia’s track record of stripping social principles from the teaching of Black musical traditions, and the pop culture industry’s historical dissociation of club sounds from Blackness (Beyoncé notwithstanding), it’s more common to see organizations profiting from values-driven African diasporic forms rather than communicating their stories.
With “Blacktronika” and UMA, Britt and Waajeed are, in differing ways, displaying how Black music traditions are a guiding light for global sounds and local aspirations—not simply in the popular imagination or on dance floors, but as individualized self-realization. In Britt’s words, this music “threads together technology” with “innovation, the necessity for survival, for Black Joy, and bringing people together, while also [acting as] a political response to what’s happening.” The evidence can be found right there, in both men’s lives and careers.
Britt’s growth from a high-schooler working at the South Street Tower Records in the late ’80s to a Philly sonic ambassador is a music-nerd fairy tale. The infinitely curious producer/DJ spent three decades connecting Brotherly Love hip-hop, dance music, and jazz to sounds and scenes around the world, collaborating with artists across generations and genres, whether local icons like the Roots, Digable Planets, and Moor Mother, or global ones such as Carl Craig, Tyshawn Sorey, and Charlie Dark. (Dark’s early-’00s “Blacktronica” events at ICA South Bank, which brought together Black London artists of all disciplines—painter Chris Ofili once called it “part house party, part revolutionary meeting and part social gathering”—remain an inspiration to Britt.) Having grown up a sci-fi obsessive, Britt began aligning his work with Afrofuturism, an idea that science fiction writer Ytasha Womack locates at the “intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation,” and which recently became a popularized aesthetic. Britt initially waded into the waters of interdisciplinary Afrofuturism in 2014, when he curated “Moondance,” a daylong program of music, dance, and talks at MoMA PS1—and in 2022 he brought another such program to Carnegie Hall, cocurated by Womack. A point of view developed in music began to be reflected through other practices.
After accepting the UC San Diego teaching post in 2019, Britt proposed a course on the history of Black electronic music. For four years, “Blacktronika” was presented primarily via Zoom (it started in spring of 2020); now it has expanded throughout the UC system, drawing nearly five hundred students a quarter. The course mixes lectures with presentations by culturally astute guests such as Herbie Hancock, the late critic Greg Tate, rapper Common, and house producer/DJ Honey Dijon. There are on-campus extra-credit activities, including a club night (to ensure students feel rather than just intellectualize the music) and a film series that includes screenings of John Akomfrah’s Last Angel of History (1996) and Jenn Nkuru’s Black to Techno (2019). The multimedia “Blacktronika” programming has expanded into one-day festivals in Los Angeles and Brooklyn and, this past March, to a multiday program Britt produced at Big Ears in Knoxville, Tennessee. Britt says his ambition has always been to activate the curriculum, build an archive, and present the work as broadly as possible. Such audience-building extensions are meant to serve the core goal of “Blacktronika”: amending the record “to give a lived, actual history of electronic music that Black people have contributed to. It’s important to bring that source to the forefront, especially in a time in America where a lot of that history is being erased.”
Britt is not the first to propose a Black pedagogical perspective around DJing and electronic music at a major university. That would be Lynée Denise, whom Britt explicitly acknowledges as a predecessor. In the early ’10s Denise, a queer interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, developed what she calls “DJ scholarship,” a methodology to study the relationship between the global techno epicenters of Detroit and Berlin and to engage “Afro digital migration,” the act of “people bringing their local sounds to new places, that then become a globalized sound” (albeit in ways that often erase the original contributions of Black musicians). She’s brought her school of thought on DJing and soundsystem culture to classes at UCLA and Stanford, and also has been a visiting professor at Williams College. Denise actively broadens the borders of the conversation—she’s based in Amsterdam and often works in South Africa, a hotbed of Black electronic music practice—but is extra-conscious of engaging community involvement, especially in academia’s ivory towers. “At Stanford, Williams, and UCLA, I had majority Black and majority women students,” she says. “What was unique was the value placed on the culture that is typically ignored, and denied scholarly attention by universities at large.” This seems to be changing: In fall 2023, Harvard historian George Aumoithe initiated a course on “A Black History of Electronic Dance Music.”
Waajeed’s goals for UMA align with those of Britt and Denise. Yet, as befits Detroit’s ruggedly insular music community, UMA’s perspective is more localized, less academic, and more proletarian, the path its students are on at once more hands-on and more emotionally charged: For them, music-making is a traditional craft and a potential escape from the city’s economic decline. That approach reflects Waajeed’s own history. As teenagers he and his crew, who would go on to form the legendary hip-hop group Slum Village (including the iconic producer James “J Dilla” Yancey), were invited into the basement of a neighborhood musician named Amp Fiddler, a keyboardist who spent the ’80s and ’90s touring with George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic. Amp, who died from cancer in 2023, was a famed local counselor, creating a space for youth to learn discipline and craft, but also to experiment and critically apply Detroit’s stalwart independent-music ethos. In Amp’s basement, Waajeed discovered music-making as a “harmonious competition” in which “your level of will is your challenge.” He calls the experience “the warm hug before the knife fight,” the latter referencing the music business that bloodied him for a decade-plus in Los Angeles and New York before he returned to Detroit in the early ’10s, armed with industry knowledge that could bring local value.
By that point, with Dilla and other comrades having passed away, Waajeed was thinking about legacy. Changing his sonic template from hip-hop to 4/4 dance music, he began working with another deeply respected Detroit figure, Mike Banks, cofounder of the Underground Resistance techno collective; of Submerge Distribution (which handles many of Detroit’s artist-run record labels); and of Exhibit 3000, the Detroit techno museum. Waajeed’s new tracks were critical successes that reshaped his creative reputation. But when a building two doors down from Submerge (the former local headquarters of the NAACP, no less) became available in 2015, Waajeed’s vision of how “Amp gave me an opportunity to the world” became the genesis for a new project. Other Detroit producers, most notably the late Mike Huckaby, had created mentoring programs, but Waajeed and Banks began thinking of this as a musical space for stories, “where one can go congregate in the same way you would in a church, or a barbershop or a beauty salon,” where a community’s past and potential future could align.
This attitude makes UMA’s idea of pedagogy different from that of a university. Waajeed’s first major hire was Taylor Simone, an educational program director whose experience lies less in music than in community organizing and cultivating arts residencies. For Simone, “curriculum is more of an ecosystem versus this list of classes you have to take.” UMA’s free workshops, like Britt’s last November, are opportunities for speakers to share their skill sets—DJing sisters Analog Soul have come in to lecture on mixing vinyl records; the producer Tall Black Guy has shown students how to make a beat, from initial sample to track mastering—but all roads lead back to UMA’s core values: legacy, equity, community, wellness, and music. Simone speaks of a desire to balance the independent artistry students aspire to with the need to give them basic tools and opportunities. This spring’s partnership with the video-game maker 2K enabled a tutorial on creating music for games and licensing content (and for one student, placement in a game, plus the check that goes along with it). In Simone’s eyes, the academy’s educational goals are less a “certificate that symbolizes the mastery of a thing [than] students coming out more confident in their practice, more ready to go down whatever path they take.”
For Britt, one of the purposes of “Blacktronika” is “to build communities around the truth [that electronic music is Black music], so that these communities can pass on the truth to the next generation.” In Detroit, this community already exists; the goal is to continue developing its creative philosophy of survival, self-determination, and independence. For Waajeed, the model UMA student isn’t merely “curious,” or ready “to use whatever information we give them to [go] to the next level”; it’s “a person living to the extreme . . . if you are willing to go out there and die, what happens when you have that much compassion and willingness to live? These are the people we want inside of this space.”
“We don’t directly cite Afrofuturism throughout our curriculum,” says Simone. “But that has been such an important way of thinking about how we empower our students, understanding that at the core of [UMA] there is the deep desire for students to recognize that they’re the future architects.” Here Simone makes a point worth emphasizing: Teaching techno is not simply about righting archival wrongs. It’s imagining oneself and these reframed values as central to what happens next.
Piotr Orlov is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and musicker who publishes the newsletter Dada Strain.
