In February 2020, shortly before the first official deaths in the corona pandemic were reported from Italy, at a time when George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery were still alive, zweikommasieben co-publisher Marc Schwegler had a conversation with DeForrest Brown Jr. on Skype. The Afro-American artist, author, and curator has been an outspoken advocate for a renewed interrogation and a critique of the whitewashing of Techno—most prominently with the meme “Make Techno Black Again,” a project powered by Brooklyn-based apparel line HECHA / 做.

Initially, an article from Brown that Fact Magazine published at the end of last year prompted Schwegler’s interest (soon after, the online magazine started focusing solely on video content). In “Techno is Technocracy,” Brown argued for a rewriting of the genre’s history. Mounting an acerbic critique of techno’s appropriation by the market, Brown sketched out how a capitalist and colonial logic ensured that the circumstances as well as contexts of this music and its birth in the Black community were forced into oblivion. This erasure particularly took place in the course of the genre’s exportation to Europe.

Brown presented his article in the context of the so-called “1619” project of the New York Times. “1619” was the US-newspapers initiative for retracing the history of slavery in the US through an audio series as well as a collection of texts and photography. This history, the Times claims, began with the arrival of a ship in Virginia carrying 20 enslaved African men and women in that year. 400 years later, Brown saw this initiative and others as an indication of a shift in the public discourse around race. However, he also pointed out that the music industry in particular remained far from translating such efforts into structural action.

Since the article, the world appears to have changed. Following the global (at least from a Western perspective) wave of protests, the political and cultural representation of people of color, the persisting racial violence against them, and the demands for a fundamental change regarding these issues are no longer are just a focus of the US-American public. It remains unclear though in as far the American discourse around “race” will effect the state of affairs on the other side of the Atlantic. Even the term itself is subject to different problematizations in the German language and in Germany in particular, as the ongoing debate surrounding the use of the word “Rasse” in the country’s Basic Law demonstrates. The challenges of a transatlantic “translation” of this term and the issues around it are central questions, asked repeatedly by Schwegler in his conversation with Brown.

DeForrest Brown Jr. recently released the LP Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu. We took this as an opportunity to publish the discussion the two had in three parts. For the first one, Browns appearance at a panel discussion at the Dweller Festival in New York in February 2020 acts as a starting point.

Marc Schwegler You were part of a panel discussion at the Dweller festival a few weeks ago—a discussion about the appropriation, commodification, and commercialization of techno music. I watched it on YouTube. How did this panel come together—what prompted it?

DeForrest Brown Jr. The panel consisted of Frankie [Hutchinson, from Discwoman], who might be potentially representative of a Black Techno music scene, in the sense that she created Dweller Festival to bring together disparate factions of dance music. Then it was me with “Make Techno Black Again” and Assembling a Black Counter Culture, the book I’m currently working on, as well as Camille Crain Drummond. She’s the editor of my book and a general culture producer. Right now, she’s also editing this book called Black Art Notes for the NY-based publisher Primary Information. It’s an art book from the 70s in which Black artists say all the same stuff that I’m saying—just 50 years earlier! It was important to have her as a rebuttal from an older time from before techno, even though she is my age. And finally, there was Syanide, a newer DJ that started just a year ago or so. The way they think about their practice as a DJ is way different from all the other Boiler Room kids that are just pressing the SYNC button on the CDJ and play Robert Hood into tracks from their best friend from Pittsburgh.
It all started when Frankie and I were at Unsound together and we were on a discussion panel there—the only two Black people in the middle of Poland. And we kept bumping into these very strange culture clash situations together. And eventually Frankie proposed that we just should have a talk—because Dweller was going to happen anyway. We were both tired of all the bullshit being thrown at us. For example, at Unsound, we were sitting in this giant cathedral were Sote and Moormother were playing. Half of the crowd walked out during Moormother’s performance where she was playing with a string quartet while reading out the entire history of the transatlantic slave trade. People were just casually like, “ok, I’m done with this,” and left during the show. I realized that nobody was there for Moormother and they didn’t want the information she was trying to convey. They just wanted some random show to happen. That’s totally fine and valid—but still, what do you do when you’re asked to come somewhere and do your art and your art is about something that is so important and everybody is basically just passing through? When I gave my talk there, which was a precursor to the book I’m currently working on, I literally locked the door, being like, “we’re gonna talk about this!” And that move became some sort of sensational thing where camera people were following me around the entire time after the talk.

MS While watching the discussion on YouTube, I was once again irritated by something—and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. The way I see it, there seems to be a friction between the discourse around race in the US and the one—if there’s such a thing—here in Europe. The way I perceive it, the US discourse around race and identity seems to have become more confrontational, more radical, and more pronounced in the past few years. This happened to an extent that I as a white European am still not used to, it seems…

DB   I’m glad you’re bringing this up because this seems to be a question that nobody asks. Some rather say that I’m an American exceptionalist. Black Americans have radicalized, yes! So far, they have just not radicalized beyond a meme yet, hence the “Make Techno Black Again” statement. They won’t go and flip over a car or something, but they will say “Make Techno Black Again”—and then not show up to any of the events.
Europeans came over to the Americas in the mid to the late 1400s and then kind of established America in 1619, according to the “1619” project of the New York Times I mention in my piece. That’s the date the first slaves came over, that’s when the first industrial inventory is established of the people used to cultivate the land and take it over. And I generally always say that with white Americans. There’s like 300 years of unaccounted-for savagery that the Europeans know nothing about. I was showing my partner the film There Will Be Blood the other day. She was like: “This is so violent and this is so weird, they’re like ripping open the ground and ripping out oil!” And I answered: “Yeah—do you know what they were doing 200 years before they even got this technology?” We now know that trees scream when they get cut—and we had people murdering every single tree in the entire nation! There are all these official wars with native Americans, but I’m pretty sure they were just killing them. Just straight up killing them—and then labeling it as a war after the fact. And this violence just kept going until today, from the civil rights movement to the race riots of the 1960s to the media riots of the 1990s.
My age group, born between 1988 to 1995, the Millennial group, was then being told that segregation was over and we went into the workforce. But I literally never worked with another Black person in the music industry. I never had a Black colleague that wrote with me, I never had a Black editor. And after a while you start to realize that despite the fact that there’s so many of us around, there seems to be a filtration system inside the managerial layer. So a lot of younger Black people go like: “Oh, shit, we’re actually not going to be able to make a living wage.” And we will be completely on the whim of some editor, being like, “I don’t like the way you approached the piece.” This is the way that they keep Black people out of their narratives. And I don’t think it’s because they hate Black people. But editors and publications are looking for attention and clicks—and deem some of our ideas as not delivering that. And so there’s a cultural tarnishing or an erasure that starts to happen. You’ll hear a lot of people talk about cultural appropriation and all they’re trying to say is: No one will pay them to actually do their thing. Instead you have some writer at Mixmag telling you who the Brooklyn scene is—instead of him going to the Brooklyn scene and ask… The radicalization is coming from the millennials unfortunately being ignorant enough to think that colonizing has ended.
To be more explicit about it: America is a place that is pretending to be a democracy, when they actually act like savages. And now when Donald Trump has been President for a while and Mike Bloomberg is running for President, we’re all starting to recognize—or at least Black people are starting to recognize—that Americans are not going to be diverse and they’re not going to fix the problems. As millennials who already have hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debts a piece, there’s no 401k [pension account] for us. There’s a lot of us that are 30, asking: “What are we going to do when we’re 60?”

MS You mentioned an incident in the panel discussion where, while you were in Berlin, this one guy comes up to you and says: “Explain to me the history of American Racism.” How do you perceive statements like these – would you say that they come out of a naivité here in Europe when it comes to issues around race in the US?!

DB I didn’t think about naivité… Maybe it is a kind of obnoxious naivité that I really had to come to terms with when I was over there. But I don’t think any Black millennial was really thinking about the past in regards to race relations. Me, personally, growing up, I was thinking that racism was a thing of the past, that I would now go get a job and everything would be fine. And years later, suddenly, I run into this German guy who asks me to tell him about American racism. And you’re like: Huh, American racism…
It took me a long while to start using the term racist. In Europe, there are these naturally born nation states. Yes, you had a lot of wars that locked things into place, but not quite in the savage way of America. Here it was like a free-for-all, a getting drunk off of the fat of the land. There was just 300 years of literal savagery. I mean I would imagine it somewhat like Lord of the Flies or something, a bunch of people coming here, bringing in a lot of diseases, losing their minds in the middle of the woods. It’s miraculous that America even became the place that it is. I think that’s the difference: Americans have an inherent trauma of this kind of international war within. White people only exist in America. And everyone else has just appropriated whiteness.
That’s kind of where the radicalization comes in: The only thing “white” means over here is that you have a certain amount of pigment on your skin that allows you to inherit a certain amount of wealth of 300 years of slavery. The Irish get to suddenly be white in 1982—like everyone suddenly became white in 1982 here on their drivers’ license and identity cards. Before that they were all Irish-American, Jewish-American… And I think, there’s literally an export of white and Black to the rest of the world that has not been dealt with. Because I talk to Europeans sometimes and they will say: “As a white person…” And I’m like: “No, no, you don’t want to claim that!” In Europe you are your nation. The land belongs to you, you know what I mean?
With the climate change in the States, I can see that white people are not being able to deal with it. When I went to Rotterdam, I suddenly understood what New York was supposed to be. Like: This is the right temperature for this form for an urban environment. The days are long enough for you to have this hustle and bustle attitude. New York does not have the literal ecosystem for what they were trying to do here! It gets way to warm for people. There’s a sort of bio-capitalism over here that I don’t think happens in Europe at all. Because there’s a 1000-year-old enlightenment history whereas America just split off at some point and has been on some other type of shit ever since.
But to add on to this in relation to techno: What [futurist writer] Alvin Toffler was talking about in Future Shock was the building of modernity as we understand it. I’ve always been into Francis Fukuyama’s theory of the end of history. I heard a lot of Europeans say that history is not over. I had to explain to them: It’s American history that is over! America bottomed out the moment Detroit fell apart. America, at that point, started running out of oil, the Japanese imported cars that were slicker, faster, more cost-efficient and Ford wasn’t doing good. Those were the conditions that started techno: An industrialized utopian city in America falling apart… It fell apart from the 50s to the 70s. New York had to file for bankruptcy in like 1973 and the only reason the city did not go bankrupt was because they Blackmailed the teachers’ union to give up their budget in exchange for the teachers still having their 401k and get pensions.
I can’t watch these cycles anymore, this industrial capitalist cycle of slavery techniques. Capitalism in America has always been brutal and it’s affecting Black people mostly. And I’m starting to get really mad—but not mad enough…