“When I Count to Four …”: James Brown, Kraftwerk, and the Practice of Musical Time Keeping before Techno

Abstract

This paper examines the set of musical, social, and technical practices that later became essential for producing techno. In particular, the focus is on how musicians kept time, drawing from examples of James Brown and Kraftwerk. Only at the intersection of Brown's human-centered approach and Kraftwerk's machine-oriented method are the resulting musical practices of techno made understandable.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. I want to thank Paul DiMaggio, John Tresch, Emily Dolan, and Cayce Hook for their insightful comments and keen eyes.

Notes

^[1] Cf. Faulkner for instances when this authority breaks down during rehearsal, leading to open conflict between musicians and the conductor.

^[2] For history and context, see essays by Sherburne and by Neill.

^[3] This methodological orientation is a central tenet of Bruno Latour's actor-network theory. This view, however, is not without significant controversy (see Latour).

^[4] Goodwin argues similarly that new digital music equipment technologies of the 1980s represent a further rationalization of music making without the explicit Weberian pessimism often associated with the process.

^[5] This is similar to Weber's discussion of the routinization of charisma, in which charismatic authority must be traditionalized or rationalized in order to be sustainable over time. See Weber (246–54).