Hailing from Little Rock, Arkansas, "The Electrifying Mojo," a.k.a. Charles Johnson, was an eclectic and influential Detroit radio DJ during the '80s and '90s.
http://music.hyperreal.org/lists/313/09.htmlDerrick May once described techno as "just like Detroit, a complete mistake. It's like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator." "I've always been a music lover," says Juan Atkins. "Everything has a subconscious effect on what I do. In the 1970s I was into Parliament, Funkadelic; as far back as '69 they were making records like Maggot Brain, America Eats Its Young. But if you want the reason why that happened in Detroit, you have to look at a DJ called Electrifying Mojo: he had five hours every night, with no format restrictions. It was on his show that I first heard Kraftwerk."
Dan Bell:
d-the thing that really, really, REALLY did it for me was...um, my grandparents had a cottage on the canadian side of lake huron...and, i would stay with them over the summer, and you could get all the detroit radio stations. when i first started listening, around 15 or 16, there was one guy i started listening to, his name was electrifying mojo. he did this show on, i think it was WJLB at that time... the stuff he used to play...just really opened my eyes because i had heard kraftwerk, and knew all their stuff, i had heard "planet rock," and then one night when i was going round...he used to start his shows at 12 o'clock midnight, and one night i came across it and i was like, "holy shit." he was playing cybotron, afrika bambaata, a LOT of kratwerk, a lot of model 500, and stuff like that, that i had never heard before. plus, he played a lot of parliament, funkadelic, and a lot of funk like zap and all that stuff. i really wanted to do music after i heard those shows...i listened the whole summer. and the reception was kind of weak, so i had to hook the back of the radio, the antenna, up to a clotheshanger and everything...so i could get the station (laughs). but it was just...man, i loved that show. and it influenced a lot of people.
Jeff Mills:
I would have to say Electrifying Mojo, a local DJ in Detroit. He plays anything he feels like playing and the whole city is always with him man, he's a cat. Mojo would play anything from James Brown and Jimi Hendrix to Alexander Robotnik and Tangerine Dream. We heard Kraftwerk, we heard YMO, and all this right in the middle of the inner city, he's been doing it for years. They kick him off the radio every couple of years but he's a true rebel, he's like a leader to me. And then Jeff Mills had a radio show at WDET, that's like the State college station, for years he was playing stuff like Meat Beat Manifesto and Nine Inch Nails, a lot of alternative stuff. He played a lot of interesting music and Jeff Mills was known as the wizard. He would play a lot of Chicago, a lot of Detroit techno and a lot of hip hop coming out of New York and he'd mix them all together. So at that time we had Mojo and Jeff Mills on the radio and some heavyweight music getting played. The state of affairs now is we got a little radio show that we're trying to sponsor to educate the kids but it's gonna cost a lot of money so we'll have to wait and see.
For Juan Atkins, it's the same old song, just remixed for '99.
He's got a European deal lined up for his next musical project, Model 500, on a Sony-distributed label. The album is due out March 1. Yet he has yet to find any takers in the United States.
"I don't know what's going to happen for North America," he summed up by phone.
It's all rather symbolic of what's happened with Atkins' career. He and an entire generation of black electronic musicians from Detroit — including Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Underground Resistance and Carl Craig — are worshipped overseas, often credited as a pivotal spark in the techno/electronica revolution that swept over Europe in the '80s. But 15 years on, outside of the dance-music underground, they — and the entire Detroit techno movement, one of the most distinctive homegrown pop movements of the last 20 years — are unknown in America.
Atkins doesn't quite know what to do about it. "(No major company) wants to take a chance on something that hasn't been proven in America," he said from Detroit. "It's almost like a catch-22 thing. How is this going to get proven here if no one backs it? It's getting to the point where, hey, you're doing three or four pages in Spin, getting reviewed in Rolling Stone and Vibe, and, to me, it says it's time. Is nobody in American record companies reading these magazines? Is nobody keeping abreast of the trends in music?"
Atkins hasn't stopped trying. Though his six main solo albums are available only as imports, he has two new releases in American stores: a DJ mix album, "The Juan Atkins Mastermix," on the Chicago-based Wax Trax label and "Skynet," released under the name of Infiniti on X-Sight.
Both are geared to the hardcore dance-club crowd, and that may be one of the reasons Detroit techno has never blossomed beyond cult status here. There are a couple of exceptions — such as "Clear," a hit for Atkins' former band Cybotron, and the work of Kevin Saunderson's group Inner City, which had minor hits with "Big Fun" and "Good Life" — but Detroit techno is not particularly commercial.
Yet that's also what makes it exciting. Influenced by everything from Kraftwerk to Prince, European avant-garde to New York new wave, Detroit techno doesn't sound anything like what many people would expect of music coming out of young black America. Less perpetually dance-oriented than Chicago house, less in-your-face than rap and (sometimes) with as many arty pretensions as anything out of boho Manhattan or Berlin, it certainly doesn't fit most people's perceptions of the Motor City. As with most things in life, the real story is a lot more complicated.
THE ELECTRIFYING MOJO AND THE SONIC REVOLUTION
"Detroit's a very unique city," Atkins said, pointing to the town's auto industry '60s heyday, when good salaries flowed into both black and white households.
"Black kids had money, and it kind of created this attitude, almost bourgeois attitude, and you go to other cities and you don't find that. They wanted to hang out with themselves," recalled Atkins, 36. "They didn't want to hang with the kids from the projects. They needed their own music."
By the late '70s/early '80s, these kids found some of that identity in Italian disco and German art-rock, especially the hard, electronic, minimalist beats of Dusseldorf's groundbreaking Kraftwerk. A popular local radio DJ — Charles Johnson, a.k.a. The Electrifyin' Mojo — mixed up all sorts of European dance music and American new wave and funk.
According to Spin editor Simon Reynold's well-researched book about the global dance-music scene, "Generation Ecstasy," a Euro fascination swept through Detroit in the '80s, elevating continental acts such as Front 242, Depeche Mode, and Meat Beat Manifesto as well as new-wave American groups such as Devo, the B-52's and Talking Heads to star status. The Euro attitude can best be summed up in the title of a recent song by Underground Resistance: "Afrogermanic."
(Of course, Detroit wasn't the only scene influenced by Kraftwerk. New York hip-hoppers like Afrika Bambaataa, the Miami bass scene of 2 Live Crew and 69 Boyz, and the early L.A. rap of N.W.A. and Ice-T also would take a few cues from the Germans. But much of the Detroit crew — which fused the hard math of the European avant-garde with the future-funk of black America — plumbed deeper into Kraftwerk's essence.)
There was also an interest in technology and the future. One of Atkins' favorite books of the era was Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock," and Atkins co-compiled "The Technospeak Dictionary." (The scene was also helped by the tumbling cost of technology, especially the Roland 808 and 909 synthesizers.)
Atkins maintains that even the economic hard times that befell Detroit after the auto industry's restructuring helped techno. "What happens now is that there's not too many things to do and places to go. You have a lot of people just sitting at home making tracks. It's unlike a city like L.A. or New York, where things are happening every night. We have time to sit at home and hone our craft."
TO THE WINDY CITY AND BEYOND
Detroit techno was merely a regional phenomenon put out on small labels until it started being lumped in with house music — the better-known, silky, Philadelphia International-influenced sound — coming out of nearby Chicago. House music was starting to generate a lot of buzz in Europe, and Europeans were sweeping into the City with Broad Shoulders looking for the next big thing. While there, they tripped upon Detroit.
"People discovered Detroit while they were in Chicago," Atkins said. "Detroit records were getting more heavily played in Chicago than Chicago records (because) we were doing innovative electronic records. Those guys were still emulating Philly International. We were coming from a whole new direction, and a lot of the DJs liked that."
The Detroit artists found a hungry audience in Europe, a continent that never fully took part in the anti-disco backlash that hit America in the '80s. In fact, dance music exploded in Europe in the late '80s, even ushering in what the English dubbed a second "summer of love" in '88. (That was helped along by the use of the drug Ecstasy, something that was not part of the Detroit ethos.) The liner notes to "Innovator," a double-disc Derrick May retrospective, even claim that without his "Strings of Life," the summer of love — which outwardly was more about English acts such as 808 State, Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses — never would have happened.
This brings us back to where we started: why America has ignored the sound. Detroit techno would appear to be part of the list of African-American musical contributions — jazz, blues, Jimi Hendrix — that aren't taken seriously in mainstream America until Europe embraces it.
There has been some recompense lately. Detroit makes up a significant chapter in Reynolds' book, and the genre was given its due in last year's documentary about dance music, "Modulations." Still, it remains unknown to most.
The easy answer is a racial one, though Atkins thinks that's only a small part. It may have more to do with the fact that American majors simply are at a loss as to how to market Detroit techno.
"I gotta believe that if we were a bunch of white kids, we'd be millionaires by now, but it may not be as racial as one may think," he said. "Black labels don't have a clue. At least the white guys will talk to me; they aren't making any moves or offers, but they say, 'We love your music and we'd love to do something with you.' But blacks don't even know who we are."
Cary Darling is an entertainment editor at the Orange County Register. He can be reached at carydar@aol.com or (714) 953-7866.