If there’s one thing that dance music has continued to cling onto like a bad smell over the years, it’s mythology. Because there’s nothing quite like historical stories that you suspect are mostly untrue to sell tickets for things – especially when those things involve those same legacy DJs from those same historical stories.

This is something that’s incredibly well understood in Detroit. For some reason, the house and techno scenes in the city seem to think they can’t sell themselves on their own talent – but instead have to rely on the discredited Belleville Three fairytale, which itself elevates three men at the expense of everyone else who was around in the 1980s.

And yet every single year, the same old nonsense is trotted out by Paxahau, the organisers of Movement – the biggest house and techno festival in Detroit nowadays. Now, there was a time when this was easy – but Derrick May being embroiled in sexual abuse allegations complicates the picture somewhat. So what do they do instead?

Er, they just focus on Juan Atkins instead. Mostly because all anyone remembers Kevin Saunderson for right now are not his own actions – but those of wayward son Damarii. Back in 2021, Detroit’s Metro Times reported on a bizarre incident where the younger Saunderson urinated on a dancefloor in some bizarre attempt to sabotage the DJ set of Mindy Sherman.

Hence why Paxahau is currently pushing this “originator” stuff in an Instagram post promoting an event with Juan Atkins himself, scheduled for January 27th…

Now, let’s be clear. At the risk of being threatened with a defamation suit again, Ears To The House does not accept the narrative that Juan Atkins is the originator of techno. Mostly because he doesn’t either – saying this in 1994 to Wired Magazine…

“Today, I think techno is a term to describe and introduce all kinds of electronic music. In fact, there were a lot of electronic musicians around when Cybotron started, and I think maybe half of them referred to their music as techno. However, the public really wasn’t ready for it until about ’85 or ’86. It just so happened that Detroit was there when people really got into it.”

The lineup for Movement is due to be announced in the next few weeks. We’re sure that commercial motivations to sell lots of tickets have absolutely nothing to do with this guff being in circulation again, of course…