Electronic Dance Music Origin 3/14

Wait. Scratch that last bit. 1970! Yes, 1970 was the year everything started!
That was the year Bob Moog--the eminent electronic music equipment
manufacturer at the time--teamed up with Dr. Evil to create the Minimoog,
a synthesizer that was every much as awesome as his original Moog Modular....
only one-tenth its size.

This was important. Like all things electronic, everything tends to start
out really fucking big, and then get smaller as time goes on.
Moog had been making synthesizers since 1961, the only problem was
barely any of them could fit inside a room.
Therefore, the only people who had access to them were bigwig recording
studios and people with lots of money but little to no musical talent.
Or transexuals. And don't even get me started on the learning curve,
which consisted of studying the original design schematics to figure out
how to turn the things on (only to learn that they required 1.21 gigawatts of electricity).
When they actually managed to produce a note on key--which wasn't
often--they usually blew out 30 vacuum tubes in the process,
and then everyone had to evacuate the room, because the smoke was toxic.

The Minimoog changed all that. It was small. You could carry it through
a doorway. You might even take it on the road,
which is why Pink Floyd didn't start becoming a listenable live band
until they could take their studio sound effects gizmos on tour with them.

But most importantly, it led to a revolution in electronic equipment
manufacturing that was paramount in making electronic music accessible to a
whole class of people who wouldn't otherwise be exposed to it.
I'm talking, of course, about black people. And this is really important in
electronic music's development,
because up until now the genre had been completely dominated by white people.
And not just white people, but the squarest of the white people.
White people who were even too white for white people. Mostly scientists,
mathematicians and Parisian experimentalists.
People so stuffy, pretentious and intellectual, for them getting down and
boogeying was picking a nickle up off the street.

This sounds like a broken record, but once again the brother saves
humanity from turning into a race of boring dunces.
While Italian futurists and musique concrete tards were busy patting
themselves on the back about
how insipidly genius they thought their cat-strangling atonal compositions were,
jazz and soul musicians picked up the Minimoog and immediately
found its raw edgeyness to be something quaint and funky.
The low-fi sounds of these quirky analog boxes led to one of the most
endearing electronic samples of all time, courtesy of the Ohio Player's Club:
The Funky Worm. From there came Herbie Hancock and George Clinton,
always game for futurism, but not futurism the way the french and
italians envisioned through stiff intellectualism and mathematic precision,
but rather a weird, warped future full of funky freedom, camp sci-fi themes,
and operatic space sets featuring an alien mothership descending
upon the world to drop DA BOMB on y'all. Oh yeah. Make mine the P-funk.

From here, things would only get better, and by better I mean blacker.
There are lots of great exceptions,
but generally white people just suck at making electronic music.

Fuente: Ishkur's Guide