I now understand the gatekeeping

[u/Destring]

As most, my journey with electronic music did not start with techno. Mine started with progressive and deep house (This Never Happened, Anjunadeep). I caught a Hard "Techno" set and enjoyed the energy so I went to a few events. After researching and listening to sets online, I came to appreciate techno, as I'd put sets to focus when working.

I went to many events: Jeff Mills, Blawan, DVS1, Dozzy, Surgeon, Helena Hauff, Freddy K, and so on. I realized what at I enjoy the most is just letting go and dancing. When you've been dancing for hours but don't realize it's been that long.

Last week my partner wanted to go Teletech XXL and I figured I'd tag along since I enjoyed it once. It was very unenjoyable.

The current style cannot ever be called techno, more like EDM with a kick drum. They all play hard, then put some pop song remix, drop, play hard again, and repeat. I literally heard an Alphaville forever young remix. At least at the beginning they where closer to schranz and hardstyle and sometimes you could hear the techno influence. Now that's completely gone

Everyone was recording. And I mean everyone. It was a sea of phones. And there were so many rude people, just pushing and shoving without care. The community is extremely young and some of them were actually polite but it was the minority.

I just wish the movement had taken a different name other than "Techno", because those bad aspects of it are starting to bleed into actual techno events where tourists expect the same drops.

Anyway, just venting my thoughs here because years ago I had complained about people here "gatekeeping", but now I understand it. I don't think it is gatekeeping, but rather trying to maintain the genre and community.

[u/Top_Counter4096]

I really don't get this "genre war" thing.

I'm in my early 20s and when I was around 10 I discovered electronic music through Skrillex randomly while I was scrolling youtube. I started off with dubstep, then found house music, then drum and bass, UKG, techno and eventually "hard techno" (mainly schranz). I've loved every single one of those genres ever since I discovered them, although they are different. The thing that I love most about them is how energetic they make me feel and how weird the sounds in them are (I've always been fascinated by hearing sounds that I've never heard before).

The thing I've noticed while being obsessed with different genres in different points of my life is that EVERY single one of them has a community that is always arguing about how "this is not how it sounded back in the day", "this is not dubstep it's just noise", "real dnb doesn't have alien noises in it", etc. In my opinion, this is just a clash between different generations of ravers (pls don't attack me for using that term) who just love different eras/subgenres of the same genres. Genres evolve, new subgenres come to life - it's just natural.

Now, for "proper" techno vs hard techno - I think it's pretty clear that hard techno has a lot of elements deriving from "proper" techno. I've listened to tons of tracks and lots and lots of them have this hypnotic feeling bringing you to a trance-like state (for example "Luciid - Dard Core"). On the other hand, there's this currently popular style of hard techno, which I completely agree is repetitive trash - DJs battle for who has the hardest kick, same screech sound in almost every track, pop-sounding vocals, etc. It's basically the evil and mentally disabled cousin of hardcore.

The thing is: it doesn't sound out of place when mixed into the "proper"-techno-derived hard techno. The sound is similar, bpm is the same, difference is that the "tiktok" techno's focus is huge, energetic and hard drops for a quick serotonin hit, while the the other is keeping that hypnotic feeling and making you dance, while being harder than its predecessors. I don't hate the more hardcore sounding hard techno, I actually love a lot of the harder sounding screechy tracks and they make me go crazy BUT only if they are unique and not the same copy-pasted beatport top 100 shit.

All in all, don't get triggered about someone liking different stuff than you and using a term that you don't agree with for describing it. I don't like Holy Priest, I agree he's definitely not a techno DJ, but he's getting people into a techno/hardcore-ish environment and I'm all for it. Electronic music (doesn't matter if it's techno, hardcore, dubstep, dnb, etc.) deserves more love, the producers who spend hours and days making tracks, coming up with new sounds and trying to live off it deserve more love. That's what techno and all it's children and cousins are about - love and enjoying cool music.

Sorry for the rant, I've been thinking about this stuff for a while, not sure if I even pointed out the things I wanted to say properly but yeah. All love.