Electro Wars

These days everything is labelled electro. Give me a synth loop and a drum loop and boom. Cut Copy. Kid Cudi. Justice. La Roux. Anything on a blog gets called electro. My Mom is electro.

So what really makes a track electro? Is it an off-shoot of hip hop (Kid Sister) or synthpop (Ladytron) or blog house (my Mom, again — all her tracks sound the same)? Let’s take a look back to get to the bottom of it…

In the beginning (in New York City anyway) there was disco. Underground gay clubs of Manhattan and Jersey exploded with the new sound of the ’70s, and the mass recognition of dance music made club DJing an actual career (yay).

Overseas, some English DJs liked it so much that they brought it back from NY in the form of vinyl, introducing disco to the northern club scene. Quickly, electronic sounds were woven into rock-rooted acts like Thomas Dolby, and propelled the bleak stormy sounds of Joy Division to the synth-driven constellations of New Order.

Back in NY, the club DJ approach to playing records (off TWO turntables, wow!) paved the way for techniques like cutting, scratching, and breaking. This cutting and pasting of live music was echoed in production with developments like the Roland TR-808 (the first big drum machine), and bore Electro, a beat-driven genre layering drum samples and affects over synth melodies.

Electro really arrived when Bronx native Afrika Bambaataa put out Planet Rock, (which sampled melodies from German proto-techno pioneers Kraftwerk) and was followed up by acts like Newcleus and J.J. Fad. So Electro’s true roots are in 80s NYC and the sounds that later became early hip hop — but there is that synth-pop connection from the other side of the Atlantic, that influenced much of the synthpop and rock called electro today.

Check out my latest playlist, featuring new songs by Ladytron and old favorites by Santigold. If you want to be technical about it, I guess this playlist is nu-electro. Or maybe its proto-something else that hasn’t even come out yet! You decide.

—Fucci