My ‘regular’ job - if you can call it that - is in the print media, so I understand if rarely agree with how this sector works. Maybe this is why I afforded myself a few chuckles today when I saw the latest copy of Mixmag in the racks of my local record shop (the one where all the people who can make their own minds up about music go – only joking of course!). The cover story features an attractive looking young woman staring longingly at me – well, anyone who picked up the mag, but it made me feel good for five seconds – alongside the headline ‘how techno got sexy’. The premise of the piece was that techno used to be hard, fast, masculine and aggressive, but in recent years, it has softened, its sounds have become warmer and less angular, its tempos slower and more female-friendly. The evidence that techno has become sexy is that clubs like Cocoon (in Ibiza) attracts a high quota of women and that people like Richie Hawtin, Uncle Sven and Ricky V are unshaven and sport hirsute, floppy fringes.
In contrast, the piece showed photographic evidence of UK sweat/gurnbox The Orbit just five years ago, full of dudes with their tops off, flexing their pecks to a bastard-hard soundtrack. Horror of horrors, it also revealed Hawtin’s previous, pre-new school ‘sunshine’ minimal incarnation as a slaphead nerd.
What a scoop for Mixmag – but there’s only one problem: techno has always been sexy. OK, so there was a point in the late 90s and early 00s where the predominant sound of a one-note loop was enough to make even the most hardened fan, regardless of gender, chew their right arm off, but, as techno PR Jonas Stone, one of the people interviewed for the piece says (and I’m paraphrasing a bit here): “Even when techno was really hard, people like Jeff (Mills) made it sound sexy.”
Look back a bit further, eg back to Detroit in the late 80s and even to Ron Hardy’s earlier version of techno in Chicago, and you’ll find that this music has always been about getting your rocks off with a man or a woman (or both). Derrick May, a renowned lothario, made one of my all-time favourite pieces of music, ‘Icon’, as Rhythm Is Rhythm, a track that combines seduction with an intangible sadness. Whatever about May’s motives for making music once upon a time - was he trying to just impress the ladies? - there is no doubt that his work, as well as ‘Prince of Techno’ Blake Baxter’s grunting, sweaty tracks and even Stacey Pullen’s more esoteric work were all about the act of love. Later on, even when the Purposemaker copyists ruled the roost, the combination of emotional sounds and primal rhythms was still explored by the likes of Shawn Rudiman, Steve Rachmad, Arne Weinberg and, closer to my home, the criminally underrated Derek Carr.
So techno has always been sexy and women have always been into it: to try to sell the idea on the basis that more women flock to hear it now because it’s a bit slower or the people who play it have longer hair is, frankly, preposterous. Perhaps a more interesting question is ‘how Mixmag got sexy (again)’.
Anyone who followed UK music magazines over the past decade will probably be aware that Muzik, Jockey Slut and DJ gave ‘serious’ coverage to electronic music (even if you didn’t like what they wrote about) and, that by the late 90s, Mixmag had got into direct competition with Ministry, which meant that it focused on ‘lifestyle’ features.
However, when it was sold by Emap to independent publisher Development Hell (great name!) a few years back, it underwent an editorial sea change. Out went the gurners at hard house nights and in came ze cool Europeans and honorary Europeans like Ricky V, Luciano, Bug, Hawtin, Dice etc.
However, after a few years of decent enough editions, their coverage of the music - new minimal - that these guys play and make means that Mixmag has unwittingly slipped back into its old habits. The most noticeable aspect of their sexy techno scoop was that the big photographs accompanying the piece were not of produers and DJs, but of ‘elegantly wasted’ models sprawled on sofas. So are Mixmag really convinced that techno has got sexy and that it’s more female-friendly, or are they – and I hope that the irony isn’t lost on them - just looking for yet another excuse to sell their product by exploiting women?
