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.
I didn’t know either Johnson or Hand intimately, but as someone who once interviewed Johnson (ironically enough, for a Fireside Chat episode that no longer appears to be online) and also worked a bit on K-Hand’s monthly Red Bull Radio show, I can say this: they definitely had stories to tell. These weren’t forgotten one-hit wonders or semi-retired relics; these were genuine musical giants, both of whom played a major role in spreading the house and techno gospel (particularly during the ’90s) and remained active all the way up until their deaths. (Johnson literally posted a video from the DJ booth the week before he wound up in the hospital, while Hand played her final gig at Detroit’s Marble Bar less than three weeks ago.)
Of course, it’s especially galling to lose Johnson and Hand in the midst of a pandemic that’s disproportionately hit the working class and people of color (i.e. communities that were already dealing with all kinds of structural inequality, especially when it comes to health care). It’s impossible to know where or how Johnson got infected with COVID, and it’s unknown whether he himself was vaccinated, but either way, it’s concerning that he felt compelled to DJ during a time when the delta variant is still raging, and increasingly loud sectors of the public—including members of the dance music scene and industry—refuse to get vaccinated or at least follow / implement health protocols.
Even if the pandemic is removed from the equation, there’s a long, ugly history of Black musical innovators being undervalued and undersupported during their lifetimes, hustling to make ends meet as subsequent generations capitalize on their accomplishments. The annals of jazz, blues, rock & roll, funk, soul and R&B are littered with these underappreciated heroes, and now that house and techno have been around for more than three decades, its pioneers sadly seem poised to join them. Perhaps that’s what’s most upsetting about the deaths of Johnson and Hand; they’re ultimately just two more names on a depressing list that dates back decades, maybe even centuries—and they’re unlikely to be the final additions.
How does this get fixed? I wish I knew. From a purely economic standpoint, it’s unlikely that the electronic music industry is going to set up some sort of pension plan to take care of older artists. (Even if such a plan existed, would it have helped Johnson and Hand, two working artists in their 50s? Probably not.) On a more practical level, the industry could step in, with bookers, promoters, agents and managers all working to make sure that legendary / influential acts aren’t left behind when it comes to bookings, but that’s easier said than done. Marketing artists in their 40s, 50s and 60s—many of whom aren’t social-media savvy and / or up on current trends—to an audience of mostly twentysomethings is no simple task, especially when a huge chunk of that audience is more concerned with partying than the historical legacy of whoever is behind the decks.
Herein lies one of the many problems of an industry where artist income is so heavily tied to playing live and touring. When the gigs start drying up, what exactly are the artists supposed to do? Record sales certainly aren’t going to sustain them, and not many house and techno acts are garnering the millions of streams needed to earn a decent living. Performance royalties could perhaps help—after all, countless tracks from legendary producers are constantly played by DJs all around the world, some of whom are pulling in obscenely high fees while exclusively playing other artists’ music—but performance rights organizations have so far been incapable of monitoring these plays and doling out the appropriate payments.
So if the economics of helping these artists is fucked, perhaps following a more culturally oriented support path makes more sense. Ideally, this is where the music press could step in and help to build / sustain pioneering artists’ prestige, but in the clickbait and social media era, they too are fighting an uphill battle. In the current media landscape, outlets are rewarded for chasing trends, repackaging the familiar (e.g. anniversaries, lists, etc.) and stirring up controversy with hot takes. Outside of sheer altruism, they have little incentive to spend time and resources correcting the historical ledger, and even when they do elect to make the attempt, only a handful of folks are likely to click the link and see whatever content they’ve created. (Speaking as an editor, few things are more disheartening than when a long-form piece highlighting a niche corner of music history gets less traffic than a hastily thrown-together, three-sentence news story saying, “Popular Artist X Unveils New Single.”)
Academics and institutions have a role to play, although it’s unlikely that another book detailing the rise of the Belleville 3 or an art exhibition inspired by Drexciya is going to make a serious dent in the cultural conversation. Not even government action seems to move the needle—K-Hand was literally named “The First Lady of Detroit” by the city council in 2017, and yet a lot of young electronic music fans probably had no idea who she was before news of her death surfaced last week.
In the end, a lot of these issues boil down to one simple fact: the story of electronic music, particularly in the United States, has been flawed from the very beginning. As stated before, electronic music is not the first or only genre that’s been a victim of this phenomenon, but it does feel like the one where the least has been done to set the record straight, at least within the cultural mainstream. For decades, dance music has been falsely presented and marketed in the US as something foreign, a largely European (and yes, largely white) phenomenon that needed to “break” in America. It happened with “electronica” in the late ’90s, it happened with EDM in the early 2010s and to a large degree, it’s still happening now. Incredibly, the American music industry is still selling its ahistorical version of dance music to the world, ignoring its own cultural legacy in the service of cash as the music and culture goes fully global.
It’s maddening, and even as certain sectors of the electronic music industry have worked to shift the discussion and amend the historical record over the past year, it’s difficult to measure real progress. The pandemic has upended the club and festival economy, and the many of the club / festival lineups that have emerged so far this year have been littered with a whole lot of familiar names. And yes, that makes sense on some level, as promoters are likely both fulfilling pre-pandemic booking contracts and trying to play it safe after a year-plus without income, but it’s also telling that neither Paul Johnson or K-Hand, two verifiable legends, had a full festival calendar booked in the months ahead. Things clearly haven’t changed that much.
There’s no stopping the hands of time, and that means more losses are coming. More electronic music artists whose music quite literally changed the world will pass away in the years ahead, and when they’re gone, they’ll probably be showered with praise, at least by those in the know. That’s lovely of course, but wouldn’t it be better if at least some of that acclaim was delivered while these folks are still around? They’ve lived fascinating lives, done incredible things and have probably collected all sorts of wisdom along the way. Just like Paul Johnson and Kelli Hand did, they have stories to tell and knowledge to contribute, but it’ll all go to waste if they’re not asked to share.
Shawn Reynaldo is a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn or drop him an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or potential work opportunities.