Electrifying Mojo Quotes

Techno emerged in the early to mideighties in and around Detroit, at the hands of black middle-class DJs who for some reason idealized the glamour and suavity of European electronic pop and Italo disco, as it reached them via GQ and the radio DJ who called himself the Electrifying Mojo. They brought some rigor and a hint of Motown to it and created an industrial-sounding music that was funky, futuristic, and kind of arch—evoking the auto plants that were putting these kids’ parents out of work.

Funk's liberation of Black music through psychedelic Afrofuturist explorations of mental and emotional states in the post-Civil Rights era,15 The Electrifying Mojo instrumentalized the airwaves to design sonic fictions as an overlay to the everyday lives and urban blues of the beginning of the Information Age. He remarked in a 1995 interview on the TV show Black Journal16 that he “just wanted to be a voice on the radio, a face in the crowd, a figment of the imagination. … When you elevate [a persona] too high on a pedestal, you remove yourself from the earshot of what regular people have to say and how they feel, and sometimes that makes it impossible to relate on a relative level.” 17

Through a confluence of radio shows programmed by Detroit DJs The Electrifying Mojo, Ken Collier, Duane “In the Mix” Bradley, Jeff Mills as The Wizard, and Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, the art of mixing with turntables and vinyl records, as well as the electronic sound of Detroit, quickly spread across the Midwest. In New York, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were leading a new wave of electronic funk, followed a few years later in the decade by Newcleus, Mantronix, and The Soulsonic Force with Afrika Bambaataa. Having relocated from New York City to Chicago in the late 1970s, Franklie Knuckles was already rerecording and modifying tracks in music studios to fit his DJ sets,

In 1979, a year before Sun Ra landed in Detroit and two years after The Electrifying Mojo began his Midnight Funk Association, the disco revolution came to a crashing halt on the “the day disco died,” July 12, 1979, with “Disco Demolition,” an act of symbolic racial violence instigated by Chicago radio show host and anti-disco campaigner Steve Dahl on his new radio station WLUP “The Loop.” 28 On the show, Dahl frequently broke disco records or tore through the vinyl's grooves with a needle while it played, encouraging his listeners to do the same. “Disco music is a disease,” Dahl declared over radio waves. “I call it Disco Dystrophy. The people victimized by this killer disease walk around like