Dance Music Is Starting to Lose Its Pioneers
a.k.a. Thoughts on the deaths of Paul Johnson and Kelli Hand, and electronic music's failure to properly celebrate its legends while they're still alive.
Hello there. I’m Shawn Reynaldo, and welcome to First Floor, a newsletter focused on electronic music and the larger scene / industry that surrounds it. This edition of the newsletter has first been made available exclusively to paid subscribers. If you fall into that category, thank you so much for your support!
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“All of these incredible older artists are out there, and if we don’t interview them soon, they’re going to start dying—and taking their stories with them.”
That’s not an exact quote, but it’s the gist of something a co-worker said to me a few years back when I was working at Red Bull Music Academy. We were actually talking about Fireside Chat, the flagship RBMA Radio / Red Bull Radio series where artists recounted their careers in their own words. During its long run, the program highlighted musicians young and old, but its best episodes often revolved around those with decades of history to unpack—after all, anyone who’s survived 20 or 30 years (or longer) in the music business is going to have at least a few great stories to share.
Sadly, many of those Fireside Chat stories are no longer available, as the Red Bull Radio website was decommissioned after RBMA came to an end in 2019. That admittedly isn’t the best endorsement for the long-term viability of corporate-sponsored archival music journalism—for what it’s worth, some of the radio archives do still exist on Mixcloud, and RBMA’s famed lectures do continue to live online, as do the written articles from the RBMA Daily—but while the initiative was up and running, RBMA was one of only a few music-centric platforms that devoted serious resources to collecting these kinds of oral histories.
That effort was by no means perfect, but in its absence, it does feel like something of a void has opened up, particularly when it comes to comprehensively documenting the history of electronic music—a genre that’s never been particularly good at spreading its canon to the masses. Ironically, although words like “legend” are thrown around liberally within electronic music circles, that hero worship rarely seems to disseminate to the general public—just look at how many people are still unaware of house and techno’s origins in the Black communities of Chicago and Detroit. The music’s highly transient fanbase doesn’t help matters—a whole lot of generational knowledge gets lost when scene veterans are basically working to educate an almost completely new crop of clubbers every few years—and neither does the genre’s stated obsession with futurism, which unduly prioritizes the “new” and often leaves the past feeling more like a nostalgic footnote than a foundational building block of the culture.
Many of these ideas have been explored previously here in the newsletter, but they’ve once again been on my mind following the untimely deaths of both Chicago house legend Paul Johnson and Detroit innovator Kelli Hand (a.k.a. K-Hand) on the same day last week. Within the electronic music world, there’s been a massive outpouring of grief in recent days, its intensity fueled by their relatively young ages—Hand was 56, while Johnson (who died of COVID-19) was only 50. Some beautiful tributes have surfaced—I’d recommend both Gabriel Szatan’s and Marcus K. Dowling’s pieces about Johnson, along with Annabel Ross’ words on Hand—and it’s been heartening to see their work celebrated, but at the same time, no amount of posthumous superlatives can erase the feeling that neither one of these artists received their proper due while they were still alive.