Techno Song Quotes

The Metal Horn Unicorns and their elemental friends are techno-magical.

I’d grown up listening to a lot of seventies progressive rock, songs about space travel and chivalry with frequent changes of time-signature and bombastic effects. As a teenager it had seemed superior to me, evidence of my intelligence. I had begun to listen to sixties psych and garage, inching backwards through the years, but at a certain point, I’d decided there were certain echoes I couldn’t afford to hear, so I made a run for it, away from human history and its dark places, into techno, the aural city on the hill. Here was a shiny sound-world made of pure electronic tones, in which I could float free of all context, cocooned in the reassurance that yesterday was long gone, or perhaps never existed at all.

It’s weird how as soon as you try to not be all keyed up for something, it becomes impossible. Your heart starts beating like a techno song and progresses into speed metal. Your thoughts race in tangled circles, coiling back on themselves, trying to fathom paradoxes within paradoxes. You can’t sit still. At all.

Screenplay is a company that provides music videos to businesses. Music and video screens are such common attractions in city businesses that court sexual minorities that many of them subscribe to this service. Via disc-based or direct-to-system download, Screenplay subscribers pay for access to a service called “VJ Pro,” where they choose from different genres of music videos that loosely resemble radio formats: HitsVision, a Top 40 mix that promises subscribers “nothing but the hits from every source”; DanceVision, featuring “exclusive remixes, hard to find imports and popular mainstream hits and everything in between designed expressly for the fast paced dance environment”; UrbanVision, a rhythm and blues/hip-hop hybrid that purports “to be all inclusive”; RockVision, rock music featuring songs “from Classic . . . to Disco, New Wave to Old School”; CountryVision, “an upbeat mix of current hits and classic favorites”; and LatinVision, “designed specifically for the sophisticated Latin dance crowd that demands only the hottest and best in tropical, Caribbean, merengue dance and Latin pop.”48 Many gay bars subscribe to ClubVision, which features a mix of “techno, trance and euro-flavored . . . tracks.”49 For dance-themed bars, this subscription features “an extended autoplay feature and individual chapter stops for single track selection.

Hours, packaged as “Bowie’s R&B album,” went equally deep. “Seven,” “Survive,” and “Thursday’s Child” felt like Babyface and Toni Braxton doing Young Americans. The major flaw of these records, one that many listeners understandably found (and still find) impossible to get past, was the butt-ugly guitar sound of Tin Machine leftover Reeves Gabrels, which was even more irritating than the techno effects. It would have been great to hear Bowie redo these songs with a better band and better production. I played them a lot anyway.

13. The Chemical Brothers, “Setting Sun” (1996) Everybody’s favorite song in the fall of 1996, uniting rockers, ravers, clubbers, druggers, all factions of the pop massive. The Chemical Brothers turn “Tomorrow Never Knows” into a banging techno loop, warping Ringo’s block-rocking beats into something new. “Setting Sun” is unaccountably obscure these days, considering what a fact of life it was for a year or so, but it’s a song that accurately predicted the future. There was nothing retro about it; instead of capitulating to the past, the Chemicals complimented it enough to ransack it. In this song, the Beatles aren’t legends or saints or icons—they’re a nasty drum break. The vocals were by Oasis’s Noel Gallagher, then Britannia’s biggest rock star, yet he sounded more antique than Ringo’s drums did. It was the ultimate Nineties statement of the Beatles as a right-now thing as opposed to a good-old-days thing.

Humans have created too many beautiful songs to settle on one particular genre. Whether techno or opera, it doesn’t matter, as long as it has that certain edge, that something that makes it more. You just have to be able, or simply in the mood, to listen to it.

Everyone experiences grace, even if they don't realize it. It's kind of like Moby's music. You could ask your average sixty-something-year-old retired banker in Connecticut if he's ever heard of Moby and/or his music and the response you'd receive more than likely would be a resounding, “No—what's a Moby?” But if you say, “Remember that American Express commercial where Tiger Woods is putting around New York City? Remember the song playing? That was Moby.” “Oh, then, OK. I guess I have heard Moby,” our theoretical retired banker in New Canaan might say. “So … what exactly is a Moby?” That's like grace. Not that grace is a pretentious vegan techno-rocker, but you get the idea. Grace is everywhere, all around us, all of the time. We only need the ears to hear it and the eyes to see it.