A pass for 135 euros, international headliners, La Sucrière and the Grands Locos as temples… Les Nuits Sonores, which are celebrating their 23rd edition this week in Lyon, have become one of the major events for electronic music in Europe. On the program this year, Juan Atkins, one of the founding fathers of Detroit techno with The Belleville Three, who also formalized the term “techno”, with his song Techno City by Cybotron, recalls the festival.
Because, for those who don’t know, techno does not come from Berlin or Germany, but from the United States. “House, techno was created at the end of the 1970s, beginning of the 1980s, in Detroit, Chicago, New York, by black DJs and producers, in spaces that were often underground and illegal,” recalls Laure Togola, co-founder of the collective Au-delà du club and Réinventer la nuit. “These were people who suffered in everyday life, who suffered violence, who created spaces to come together, to represent themselves and to have joy,” she continues. They were gay people, excluded from society, as well as black and Latino populations who were poor and precarious.”
The great erasure
At the end of the 1980s, music crossed the Atlantic. “Techno first landed in England and Germany, two countries which were relay points but which also transformed it a little,” explains Laure Togola who will release a podcast on the subject on June 21. “When it happens in France, it’s through the English rave culture ofAcid house from London, in trucks which transport the sound system. And in these trucks, there are almost only white people. “It has contributed to a significant erasure in terms of visibility and representation,” explains the artistic director.
Frédéric Trottier-Pistien, music anthropologist and author of a thesis on the Detroit techno scene, also observed this turnaround during the passage of techno to Europe. “Little by little, in England, with the development and mainstreamization of this music, it will lose its roots and its origins. Or in any case, the narration around his struggles, that is to say, creating communities of support through dance for minorities, he indicates. And these communities will be completely invisible with the whitening of the environment.”
In France, the audiences who participate in these illegal raves are “people who have the means to take this risk,” points out Laure Togola. But it also raises the fact that black people in France are not the same as those in the United States. “When techno arrived, it was the first generation of immigrants to France,” she describes. They already live in strong musical cultures which are also developing at this time. And they don’t even know that it’s black people who look like them, who made this music.”
Institutionalization has smoothed techno culture
Very quickly, with the arrival of electronic music in the 1990s, the French Touch saw its advent. “France has taken over and become a nation of electronic music celebrated through people very different from those who created music and club culture in the beginning,” observes Laure Togola. She recalls that the people who had the means to travel to find this culture in New York and export this music, that is to say, the future artists of the French Touch, were “rather well-off people”.
“France has always preferred to promote white, bourgeois artists. And by making electronic music fashionable, it also removed all the social, anti-establishment aspect which surrounded the culture of the party, which was originally difficult to accept. In France, this story is not told,” notes Laure Togola, who campaigns for more archival and transmission work. “With this voluntary action of invisibility, people, without necessarily being aware of it, consume techno by imagining that it comes from Berlin,” she adds.
In France, a shift in techno culture is taking place quickly. And it’s no coincidence. Samuel Lamontagne, researcher and author of a reference survey published in the journal Jefklak, documented how Parisian public policies have, from 2010, deliberately exploited electronic music for economic and tourist purposes. “Little by little, electronic music clubs became industries, businesses,” summarizes Laure Togola. And if the number one objective is to make money, all social issues, making prices accessible, addressing discrimination at entry, will not be their priority.”
Cultural gentrification, a perpetual cycle
Samuel Lamontagne describes a phenomenon of “gentrification” of techno, with party venues in the Paris suburbs becoming “trendy”. “In these very institutionalized spaces, there is really a fantasy of the underground party, of the raves, of all the spontaneous parties. We are going to take the norms, the decor, the codes of these underground festivals to sell a ticket for 30 euros to people who have never really had access to these spaces, by stripping it of all its political and protest aspects,” underlines Laure Togola, citing the researcher’s work. The latter calls this phenomenon an “alternative patina”, the aesthetic forms of the counterculture carefully reproduced, but emptied of their political substance.
This phenomenon follows well-established mechanics. “Originally, underground spaces are created by people on the margins, because they have no other spaces. As these spaces are desirable for people from the ”center” [blanches bourgeoises]they will colonize them little by little, distort them… This is the gentrification of culture. But these audiences will consume the party and leave quietly for home, because they don’t want to have it outside their homes either,” denounces Laure Togola.
In this shift, the queer origins of the techno movement were also erased. Mechanisms which were observed by Mathis Laquay, in his memoir dedicated to techno evenings and queer identities. Thus, he points out that as soon as disco, then house, then techno reached the general public, the founding communities were pushed to the margins. As he notes, the structuring of an attractive techno economic market, the reduction of its political symbolic charge and the extension of its cultural codes to a wider audience have reduced the place and role of the queer community “to simple issues of visibility and inclusiveness”.
“The dancefloor has always been politicalâ€
To all these economic and institutional dimensions is added a logic of representation. According to a CNM report, only 14% of artists programmed in current music festivals in France are women or people from gender minorities. Faced with this observation, collectives are seeking to reconnect with the political heritage of these cultures.
So, are Nuits Sonores part of the problem or the solution? “There is a real work of reflection on electronic culture, in particular through the Lab part which always asks relevant questions, anchored in the era,” underlines Laure Togola, who spoke several times during the festival. She says these questions also play out in programming, with “the mechanisms of identification, the fact of feeling welcome and legitimate.” But that’s not enough for her. It is also necessary to rethink “the sharing of capital” for an economic model that is as “egalitarian” as possible.
What Frédéric Trottier-Pistien insists on: “From the start, the party and electronic music have been political, he insists. The raves and the free parties were against the State and against capital, with the idea of uniting a community of people who do not feel integrated by any institution.” And concludes: “If we understand politics as changing society in a progressive way, by including minorities and a diversity of people who are not recognized by institutions, obviously the dancefloor is eminently politics. »
