In the early 1980s, the shimmering highs of disco were just beginning to fade. American teens had learned how to party via glimpses of Studio 54 and Saturday Night Fever, and were itching to replace the ‘70s sound with something new. In the suburbs surrounding Detroit, Michigan, it would turn out, local high schoolers were recasting the nightlife in their own image, and inventing a whole new genre of music in the process.
It remains a little known fact to the masses, but techno music as we know it can largely be traced back to one American high school, and the 79-80 school year. Belleville High School, thirty minutes outside the heart of Detroit and right on the edge between rural and urban, became a landing ground for a musical revolution.
Belleville 1980 Yearbook Inside Cover from Classmates.com
The High School Students That Changed Music
| Key Takeaways – Origins of Techno Music: Techno was born in the early 1980s in Detroit, Michigan, pioneered by Belleville High School students Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson. – Detroit’s Cultural Influence: The city’s industrial landscape, African American musical heritage, and post-disco creativity shaped techno’s futuristic, machine-like sound. – The Electrifying Mojo: Local DJ The Electrifying Mojo and his late-night radio show The Midnight Funk Association inspired Detroit teens with versatile mixes of funk, new wave, and electronic music, encouraging them to experiment with synthesizers and drum machines. – From Detroit to Global Stages: By the late 1980s, Detroit techno spread to Europe, fueling the rise of rave culture in Germany and the UK and solidifying the Belleville Three as international icons. |
The Belleville class of 1980 held three upstart music lovers: Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, and Juan Atkins. This trio, who would become known as the Belleville Three, are largely credited with inventing Techno music, the electronic dance genre that is recognized globally today.
1978 yearbook photo
1980 yearbook photo
What started as an interest in funk, italo-disco, and new wave rock music, became an impulse to capture the metallic sounds of industrial Detroit on record. The parties and movement to come were all for the purpose of gathering with friends, making new ones, and creating lifelong memories in real time.
1980s Detroit: A Hub for Cultural Innovation
For many decades leading up to the 1980s, the auto-industry was Detroit’s central economy;factories and plants where cars were manufactured, like Ford and General Motors, employed assembly line workers, managers, engineers and administrators.
Detroit at one point boasted the largest middle class in the country, and as such, claimed a bustling teenage population who’d grown up with disposable income and a taste for nice things.
A Blend of African American Culture From Different Neighborhoods
In particular, Detroit’s sizable African American community thrived. Schools across the metropolitan area featured diverse student bodies, and the bohemian late 70s laid the groundwork for extensive cultural exchange.
“The scene was made up of lower-middle-class and upper-working-class Black people, basically preppy college kids wanting to be different,” Saunderson said in an interview with Wax Poetics in 2011. “It was really a highfalutin thing, really just for kids who lived in a certain community,” added Derrick May. “Rich Black kids from places like Palmer Woods and Indian Village.” These teenagers were already hip to the Stevie Wonders of the world–Motown was famously a Detroit innovation–and sought out sounds that were even rarer and more eclectic: Devo, Parliament, Prince, The B-52s, and arguably most impactfully, Kraftwerk.
The Belleville Three’s Active Involvement in the Community
As high school students, May, Saunderson and Atkins played football and basketball and participated in pep rallies. But they found their passions after school hours, in neighborhood parties sprouting up all over the city.
The party scene they enjoyed, and helped cultivate, took place mainly in church halls and theatres, rented out by entrepreneurial teen promoters who recognized the demand for new social gatherings where teens could strut their stuff.
Different crews would compete for who had the best venues, fliers, merch, marketing tactics, and most importantly, DJs and soundsystems. Inspired by the jetset lifestyle they saw in magazines like GQ and Playboy, as well as the interstellar, futurist aesthetics of the era, kids dressed to the nines for these parties, and dancing was taken seriously.
Drawing High Schoolers From Around the Metro to Parties
Students from Belleville, as well as area schools like Southfield High, Lutheran West, Mercy High, Cranbrook, and Detroit Country Day flocked to these spaces, where no adults or parents were present, to establish their own adolescent hierarchies.
Consider the sounds of films scored by Giorgio Moroder of the era, and you can begin to imagine how aspirational the lush synths and pulsing drum machines of Italian disco were to these youths, driving cool cars fresh off factory lots.
Garnering Attention From the Electrifying Mojo
This new sound coalesced on a Detroit area radio show, “The Midnight Funk Association,” hosted by the Electrifying Mojo in the early 80s. This is where listeners heard the spread of artists and genres that would become the party soundtrack of the city.
“Cars” by Gary Numan might sit next to “Flash Light” by Parliament, with some Jimmy Hendrix and Phillip Glass thrown in for good measure. The show aired late at night, commercial free, and kids stayed up loyally to hear the latest transmissions from Mojo’s other-wordly broadcasts.
“Midnight Funk Association” became an in-the-know signifier for young music lovers, who would rush to record shops to purchase the newest cut they’d heard the night before. “It was kind of like a cult,” Saunderson said. “We would listen to him religiously every night. He provided the youth with a positive direction and a new kind of energy.”
Inspiring Other Electronic Musicians
The city’s dual history with music and technology created an appetite for innovation: soon, Mojo’s listeners were buying synthesizers and drum machines of their own, to create songs and play them at their local parties.
Once Mojo began playing these homespun tunes on the Midnight Funk Association, for the whole city to hear, a feedback loop formed. “Mojo dropped ‘Alleys of your Mind’ on his radio show, and it just blew up,” Atkins told NPR in 2011, about the single he co-produced in 1981, when he was only 19 years old and a freshman in community college. “Nobody knew that this was some black kids from Detroit making this record, man,” he explained. “They thought it was from Europe.”
Kraftwerk’s Influence on the Techno Genre
The influence of the German electronic band Kraftwerk is arguably the most central to techno’s development in Detroit. Beamed in by Mojo’s radio shows and the earliest MTV broadcasts, Kraftwerk’s cold-steel, robotic approach to music spoke directly to Detroit youths, who’d grown up surrounded by factory metals.
Amidst a budding technological revolution, the Kraftwerk records conjured images of the future, and young fans, bored of the past, soon adopted a futurist philosophy. “Within the last five years or so, the Detroit underground has been experimenting with technology, stretching it rather than simply using it,” Atkins told The Face magazine in 1988. “As the price of sequencers and synthesizers has dropped, so the experimentation has become more intense. Basically, we’re tired of hearing about being in love or falling out, tired of the R&B system, so a new progressive sound has emerged. We call it techno!”
The origin of the name “techno” is often credited to Atkins, who cites Alvin Toffler’s book, “Third Wave” as where he first read the term “techno rebels.”
Legendary Teen Parties That Shaped The Music
Other early techno songs include “Sharevari,” named after an influential Detroit teen party called Charivari. Those who recognized that name knew what sounds to expect: Charivari–the party–was loyal to European new wave and Italo disco.
The deep beats, pastel synths and dramatic violin strings became the soundtrack to the young preps who frequented the night. When a crew of scenesters called A Number of Names decided to produce their own dance record, they titled it “Shavevari.”
You can hear the four-on-the-floor kickdrum beat, hi-hats and claps still synonymous with techno and dance music today. And the lyrics are a survey of the high life these kids hoped to emulate: “Some bread and cheese and fine white wine/Designer chic but a matter of time,” the track opens.
From Detroit to Europe: Global Expansion
As the sound progressed and travelled, techno found loyal followers in Europe. Rave culture flourished in England, Germany, France and more throughout the late 80s and early 90s. Thousands of fans connected to a sound forged in the midwestern American city.
Atkins, Saunderson and May found fruitful careers as DJs and producers, spending decades traveling the world, releasing records on their independent labels and shipping them across the ocean to obsessive followers.
Techno music created a thriving sub-culture (and economy) in Detroit that still lives today. Detroit festivals like Movement and Sustain/Release bring fans of the music from all over the world to the Motor City each year.
European fans did their own documenting of the story: Detroit became hallowed ground and a tourist attraction for record collectors and executives alike, and the Saunderson, Atkins and May were referred to as the Belleville Three in international press and history books.
The Belleville Three’s Ongoing Impact
The three DJs initially resisted the title, as each had their own style and sound. But in 2017, almost forty years since their earliest sets, they hosted a high school reunion of sorts. The Belleville Three performed as a trio at the Coachella music festival that year, and then weeks later returned home to perform at Detroit’s Movement festival.
In an interview with the Detroit Free Press that year, the trio, then in their 50s, reminisced about old times with all the warmth of old friends. As teens in Belleville’s halls, they revealed that they had avoided each other, until bonding over games of chess. “I always told Kevin I couldn’t stand his music,” May told the paper with a laugh. “And when I’d tell Kevin I didn’t like his record, guess what happened…” “It was a hit,” Saunderson added. “Every time,” May continued. “I’d say, ‘I don’t like it.’ And he’d say, ‘Perfect!’”
From Belleville High School to Global Tours Today
Today, the Belleville Three can be seen touring individually and together, around the world, with a direct line to the experiences that shaped their adolescence, creating reasons for friends and fans of the music to gather again and again.
A connection forged in the hallways and schoolyards of Belleville High School at the turn of the ‘80s became a global movement, largely because kids just wanted to dance.
Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May pictured in the sophomore year on the Bellville High’s JV football team.
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