Human Capital After All: Business Techno, Conceptronica, and the Neoliberal Rescripting of High/Low Hierarchies

As disco, house, and techno emerged from queer communities of color in deindustrializing New York, Chicago, and Detroit, these genres of electronic dance music occupied an aesthetic status that paralleled their creators' political abjection from white cisheteromasculinity. In 1979 white men rock radio listeners in Chicago made a spectacle of their disdain for the genre as they set disco records on fire in the infamous Disco Demolition.

That same year Richard Dyer published "In Defense of Disco," which argues disco's radical political potential lies in its aesthetic distance from the hegemonic white masculinity of mainstream rock. For example, he claims that disco's unserious and nominally apolitical qualities — its romanticism, emphasis on emotion, and corporeality — are a utopian departure from a fundamentally oppressive political reality: "Given that everyday banality, work, domesticity, ordinary sexism and racism, are rooted in the structures of class and gender of this society, the flight from that banality can be seen as — is — a flight from capitalism and patriarchy themselves as lived experiences."1 For Dyer, disco's femme, queer aesthetics articulate a queer feminist politics that reconfigures the gendered, raced, and classed criteria used to determine what counts as "real" art or politics to prioritize what white supremacist capitalist patriarchy otherwise excludes.

Over the last 40 years, electronic dance music's low aesthetic status has continued to be expressed and negotiated in gendered, sexualized, and racial terms. A decade after Dyer's essay was published, Pet Shop Boys's frontman Neil Tennant countered critics of the synthpop legend's lip-synched performance at the American Music Awards with the quip "It's kinda macho nowadays to prove you can cut it live. I quite like proving we can't cut it live. We're a pop group, not a rock and roll group."2 Similarly, the feminist multidisciplinary artists Chicks On Speed touted "we use gaffer tape/but...we don't play guitars" in their 2003 electroclash single titled for the negative half of that phrase. Emphasizing their use of electronics to relieve themselves of the burdens of guitar heroics, such as very narrowly defined ideals of virtuosity, originality, and authenticity, both the Pet Shop Boys and Chicks on Speed defined the artistic value of their music against the white cisheteromasculinity naturalized in rock's modernist aesthetics.3)

Even in the brief moment around 2010 when "brostep"4 — which blends dubstep's sounds with rock's songwriting and aesthetic maximalism — reigned in nightclubs and Top 40 charts, gender stereotypes about deficient masculinity continued to mark the genre's distance from elite aesthetic status: like the Transformers movies that it soundtracks, brostep is resolutely lowbrow.5

Though its use of ever-advancing technologies may lend electronic dance music a futuristic look and feel, gendered and racialized high/low art hierarchies from eighteenth-century European philosophy have remained central to its reception.6 Traditionally, fine art, like the white cishetero man, is autonomous (it exists for no purpose other than its appreciation as art), whereas craft, entertainment, and other low-status forms of cultural production are, like white women and people of color, subordinate — in this case, to function: clothes have to fit, records have to sell.

But because neoliberalism treats everything as a market and all forms of human activity as work, "selling out" has shifted from being an impediment to artistic freedom to its foundation. For example, musicologist Andrea Moore has written extensively about the relationship between neoliberalism and the institutionalization of entrepreneurship programs in college music curricula. Just as neoliberalism updates white supremacist patriarchy for maximum compatibility with its market logics, it makes overlapping changes to how tried-and-true high/low, serious/popular, fine art/not fine art distinctions are cut. 7

Trends in recent electronic dance music criticism reveal how exactly those lines are being redrawn. "Business techno" and "conceptronica" are two of electronic dance music's most buzzworthy and controversial new ideas. The "What is Business Techno?" thread on r/Techno from May 2019 racked up 228 comments before being archived, and veteran critic Simon Reynolds's October 2019 article on conceptronica spurred a flurry of debate on Twitter. Each term describes a different way of selling out: whereas business techno is a grassroots term for "big-room" mainstream acts with corporate sponsorships, conceptronica is Reynolds's neologism for the underground's gentrification by the artworld and its attendant nonprofit industrial complex. As Reynolds (who has long been on record as a champion of hardcore, street style in dance music) explains, "the way I would engage with these releases actually resembled a visit to a museum or gallery."

I'm not interested in whether conceptronica is art or business techno isn't; those questions distract us from a more fundamental issue about how those judgments are made in the first place. The high/low art distinction has always been a translation of white supremacist capitalist patriarchal status relations into aesthetic terms. For this reason, examining how the rhetoric of "business techno" and "conceptronica" relies on racialized and gendered concepts reveals how neoliberalism reshapes traditional high/low hierarchies in the arts. Just as people who are neither white and/or cis-men are conditionally and instrumentally granted access to elite status so long as they privatize the costs associated with such success, high or serious art is defined not by its autonomy from the market but by its success in privatizing the costs of market behavior. And such success is fundamentally gendered and racialized.

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Both "business techno" and "conceptronica" refer to something that's supposedly lacking. A derogatory term for techno that's been watered down for mass appeal, "business techno" updates the idea behind "brostep" to reflect that techno is hot and dubstep is not.8 Leading electronic dance music publication Resident Advisor (RA) traces the term "business techno" to an April 4, 2018 tweet from British techno artist Shifted (a.k.a. Guy Brewer). Responding to a complaint about RA's review of Anja Schneider's Prosperity, Shifted's tweet uses "business techno" to call out what a reddit user describes as "this kind of techno where all that counts is commercialism." Described variously as "melodic hands up in the air weak shit so girls can dance with their purses in their hands," "a catch-all term... widely used to ridicule the kind of monotonous, one-note bangers that dominate the setlists of big room DJs" and "about as far away from the underground as you can get before you ascend to the level of playing private parties for dictators," business techno can be anything from Peggy Gou's Rihanna-like partnership with an athletic wear brand and launch of her own clothing line to dudes in salmon-colored shorts and boat shoes showing up to hear industrial techno DJ and producer Ansome play the basement of the Elks lodge in Cambridge, MA. (I was there, I saw them.) Neither a style nor a genre, "business techno" is a term for whatever one perceives to be too mainstream.

Whereas brostep is a dis targeting fans' lack of sophistication, business techno more often refers to artists — specifically, women artists such as Gou or Nina Kravitz whose entrepreneurial success and spectacular social media presence resemble many of the features French Marxist collective Tiqqun attribute to their figure of the Young Girl, who is a mashup of popular feminism and neoliberal human capital. Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl updates decades-old scholarship about the feminization of commodities and mass culture for greater compatibility with neoliberalism and its emphasis on human capital and entrepreneurship.9 Human capital is work reimagined as a practice of self-investment rather than the exchange of labor for a wage. As Gary Becker argued, human capital was supposed to give back to individuals what commodified labor power took away from them: both the value generated by their work and the little alienable bits of themselves they exchanged for wages. For this reason, such self-commodification (mistakenly) appears like empowerment rather than subjection. As Tiqqun put it, "the YG is the commodity that claims to sovereignly desire her acquirer."10 Arguing that "the Business Techno set are the influencers of electronic music: they're hot, they have loads of Instagram followers, and they are happy to lend their personal brand to corporate sponsorships," Niloufar Haidari's "What The Hell Is Business Techno?" explainer for mixmag identifies Young Girl's thirsty entrepreneurialism as the central target of business techno's critics. As Emma Grey Ellis notes in WIRED, "influencer" is overwhelmingly used to refer to women: "the subtext is that influencing is somehow beneath producing, and, yep, that smells sexist." From this perspective, the term "business techno" is just a new version of Adorno's old misogynist gripe about commodity music: it's too feminine. Circulating primarily as a term of derogation, "business techno" is an idea that repackages tired sexism as edgy underground taste.

If business techno is purportedly dumbed-down, conceptronica allegedly aims too high. As Reynolds puts it, "forbiddingly theoretical...this high-powered discourse contrasts with the relatively down-to-earth vernacular of '90s IDM luminaries like Aphex Twin's Richard D. James and Luke Vibert, whose records were more likely to be daubed with puerile humor and porn references than concepts from poststructuralism." For Reynolds, conceptronica abandons its predecessors' laddish takes on body parts and their functions for overly intellectualized meditations on theory you learned in graduate school: "although it uses the rhythmic tools of body music, it doesn't primarily aim to elicit a physical response. It's music to contemplate with your ears, to think about and think with. In that sense, it's closer to an art exhibition of photographs or video taken at a bygone club than actual club music." Abandoning the body for the mind, conceptronica induces the feeling of "skeptical melancholy" — i.e., the disconnection from one's capacity to sensually affect and be affected that is required for the kinds of disinterested, rational cogitation privileged throughout the history of Western philosophy.

As Robert Gooding-Williams and I have argued, this skeptical melancholy is fundamentally gendered and racialized. From Plato to Kant and Nietzsche, Western philosophy's ideal subject exhibits distance from and control over one's body, and those things are achieved by being white (stereotypically associated with purity, disconnection from material reality) and masculine (stereotypically associated with mastery and rationality). Though skeptical melancholy arises from the performance of normative white cisheteromasculinity, it nevertheless represents a deficiency in that performance. Whereas basic white men cannot overcome skeptical melancholy, elites appropriate blackness and/or (white) femininity to reconnect with the bodily experience from which philosophy reputedly alienates them. Think about the history of Anglo-American popular music: white men artists appropriate stereotypical dimensions of blackness and femininity/queerness to get their groove on or demonstrate their genius.

The ability to reconnect with bodily sensation without succumbing to it proves one's macho superiority over effete white intellectuals who are disconnected from bodily affect. It also distinguishes the elite white consumer of popular music from white women and non-whites, who are overpowered by bodily sensation. Reynolds relies on these associations when he claims that

As fascinating as conceptronica can be, something about it always nagged at me. If its subject, in the broadest sense, was liberation, why then did I not feel liberated listening to it? It rarely provided that sense of release or abandon that you got with '90s rave or even from more recent dissolute forms like trap, whose commodity-fetishism and sexual politics are counter-revolutionary but which sonically brings the bliss. The parallel is truest with post-punk's critical commentary on rock itself, the way it refused the simple freedom and cutting-loose of '60s and early '70s rock in favor of tense, fractured rhythms that expressed alienation and unrest.

Counterposing conceptronica to today's most mainstream hip hop style and comparing it to a genre characterized by its stylistic and aesthetic whiteness,11 Reynolds faults conceptronica for being too white and disembodied — and not black and sensual enough. Like business techno, conceptronica lacks some key dimension of elite white masculinity: the ability to master that which is otherwise forbidden to it, i.e., embodied affect and sensuality.

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With its snowballing popularity and profitability, business techno is well on its way to becoming the next EDM bubble. The "EDM bubble" is a term used by critics such as renowned dance music journalist Phillip Sherbourne to describe the way the music industry's overinvestment in the big-room and often Top 40 adjacent DJs of the late 2000s and early 2010s (think Calvin Harris, Skrillex, Eric Prydz, Avicii) adopted practices of financialization and speculation similar to those that led to the 2008 crash. As Sherbourne recounts, from late 2010 through 2013, an industry built up around this scene that gradually consolidated into huge conglomerates designed to make a killing upon their IPO. In other words, these EDM companies — like SFX, which was founded by the guy behind Live Nation as an EDM clone of that corporation — were less like traditional labels or promoters who turned profits on sales and more like Spotify, whose profitability comes from investors' willingness to speculate on its value on stock markets. This bubble burst sometime mid-2016, when both investors and tastes moved on.

As Sherbourne points out, it's not just EDM's business model that mimics financial capitalism; its aesthetic does too.

EDM — the hype-fueled, glowstick-twirling meeting of Southern California rave culture, Vegas bombast, youthful hedonism, and corporations eager to cash in — was always an unsustainable proposition. Like capitalism, it was predicated on limitless growth — ever bigger main stages, ever fatter paychecks for the DJs, ever brighter sparklers jutting from the jeroboams in the VIP section.

That delirious maximalism is also audible in the music. As I argued in my 2015 book Resilience & Melancholy, the EDM of this era (which often crossed over onto the pop charts, e.g., Rihanna & Calvin Harris's "We Found Love") generally used a compositional device that represents financial capitalism's boom-bust creative destruction. That device is called the soar, and it's an exponentializing, Zeno's paradox-like rhythmic intensification that mimics crossing the limit of human hearing's ability to distinguish individual rhythmic events; this damage then fuels the next downbeat's ever-more-pleasurable return. Examples of soars can be found in Psy's "Gangnam Style" (2:20-2:30) and Ludacris feat. Usher and David Guetta's "Rest Of My Life" (2:33-2:41).

Feminist theorist Michelle Murphy has identified a similar device used to represent the blossoming potential of investable human capital. As she explains, this figure is a stereotyped abstraction of a subject "figured out" from a variegated patchwork of social science correlation and wishful speculation, of linked probabilities painted pink with tropes of agency imported from liberal feminism for a North American audience. The Girl is calculated as a risk pool that draws together a bloom of possibility, a bouquet of potential, a cluster of affect, applicable to any dispossessed condition anywhere, as long as it is "girled."12

Like the deliriously snowballing growth that Sherbourne and I identify in EDM aesthetics, Murphy's Girl figure is a representation of financial capitalism's ideal market, framed here as a market in human capital. As Melinda Cooper shows, because the whole point is to boom until you bust, it can be hard to distinguish resilient growth from cancer.13 Murphy shows how gendered metaphors are put to work to clarify the distinction between profitable growth and dysgenic threat. An explosively productive risk pool is profitable when it obediently complies with the demands of patriarchal racial capitalism — i.e., when it looks, acts, and sounds like respectable, proper girls always do. Though The Girl figure is used in reference to actual girls as investable human capital for social entrepreneurs and NGOs, it can refer to things that aren't people.

Like a genre of music.

Although business techno doesn't express its maximalism in the form of soars or other musical representations of resilience, both the industry segment it refers to and the artists accused of stooping to its level exhibit The Girl's definitive "bouquet of potential" for investors to turn a profit. Whereas Adorno draws on historical associations between femininity and the commodity form, "business techno" uses the contemporary association between femininity and resiliently profitable investments to update his gripe to work in neoliberal contexts where investment has replaced commodity exchange as the basic model of the market. In this way, "business techno" updates the gendered art/commodity distinction, relocating the relevant break not between masculinity and femininity, but now between those who can privatize externalities and achieve self-ownership and those who can't, don't, or won't.14 Shorthand for "sellout" or "too popular" or "too corporate," "business techno" is a slur directed against artists and other members of a scene perceived to be insufficiently self-owning because they occupy the traditionally feminized, low end of the gendered high/low art hierarchy. Just as women of color who rely on social welfare are demonized for their reliance on government support while nobody raises an eyebrow as corporations and billionaires gorge on government subsidies and tax cuts, business techno's kind of selling out is the wrong, insufficiently respectable kind of selling out.

Respectability, as Cathy Cohen theorizes it, is a racialized, gendered private property relation: something is respectable when it contributes to the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal transmission of wealth and personhood, e.g., in the nuclear family.15 Complementing Cohen's analysis of the queerness of nominally heterosexual women of color who benefit from social welfare programs, Melinda Cooper has shown that neoliberalism reconfigures respectability so that it's less overtly about (hetero)sexual propriety and more a judgment of one's capacity to privatize the costs of choices you make on free markets, sexual and otherwise.16 Such privatization preserves the property rights white people have been legally granted to the benefits they experience from white supremacy17 (e.g., stop-and-frisk policies reveal how the Fourth Amendment right to privacy really only protects white people from unwarranted searches).

Conceptronica's perceived whiteness — i.e., its skeptical melancholy — grants its kind of selling out the respectability necessary to elevate it over mere entertainment. Calling it something "not so much to buy... but to buy into," Reynolds demonstrates how conceptronica's status on the marketplace of ideas distinguishes it from other forms of electronic dance music that traffic in the crassly consumerist market in music and musical experiences. Blue-chip theories — like Judith Butler's concept of "precarity," which has gotten a fair amount of attention recently among electronic dance music artists and critics — are effectively a form of market value that lets musicians buy into the market in grants. As Reynolds puts it, "fluent in the critical lingua franca used in art institutions and academia worldwide, conceptronic artists know how to... present projects in terms that translate smoothly into proposals and funding applications." Success in the grant market doesn't bring a snowballing cascade of profits, but it does bring lots of prestige or human capital. Artists accused of being "business techno" don't necessarily operate in a significantly different fashion than "conceptronica" artists — Gou and conceptronica grande dame Holly Herndon both rely on external support, be it from corporations or academic institutions. The key difference — here as in all instances of the high/low art hierarchy — lies not in objective properties of either the music or its conditions of production, but in the perceived racialized and gendered status of the music, musicians, and their audiences. Not-fine-art is still associated with non-respectable, non-white non-masculinity, and fine art still occupies the status traditionally accorded to white cisheteromasculinity, even as that status is conditionally and instrumentally extended to people with more diverse identities.18

As scholars such as Cooper, Lisa Adkins, and Jasbir Puar have observed, finance capitalism reimagines value not as quantity but as qualitative capacity: what matters isn't how much you have, but the infinitely resilient degree to which you can do.19 In this context, what Doreen St. Felix calls the racialized distinction between "cash" and "wealth" — cash being what St. Felix calls "ratchet" and wealth being "respectable" — manifests, respectively, as the difference between The Girl's explosive productivity and conceptronica's restrained expressivity. The whole reason The Girl has such excessive capacity for growth is because (apologies to Drake) she starts from the very bottom. In this context, the incapacity for Girlish blossoming is a mark of one's existing high status... but only when the object in question exhibits adequate whiteness; otherwise, such incapacity is pathologized. As I've argued elsewhere, this framework is also what's driving "chill" aesthetics on streaming media: "chill" is about preserving the value of already well-vested human capital. Serious or fine art has always used whiteness as a buffer against the negative effects of feminization, the former's stereotypical disembodiedness cancelling out the latter's stereotypical hypercorporeality. In this context, where femininity's low status is represented as the capacity for explosive productivity, the whiteness of fine art is not a failure but a sign of high status.

As neoliberalism reshapes how gender and race look, feel, and work, fine art/not art distinctions upgrade themselves for compatibility with such reshaping. The discourse around business techno and conceptronica reveals one way this has happened. As the stakes and boundaries of whiteness and femininity evolve, and selling out becomes inevitable, art is still policed as white and masculine, not art is still associated with devalued femininities.

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Robin James is associate professor of philosophy at UNC Charlotte and co-editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She has published several books on popular music and sound studies, including The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, & Biopolitics (Duke 2019), and is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Electronic Dance Music.

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