Ask an American what Detroit means and the answers come quickly: Ford, the assembly line, Motown Records, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye. By 1980 the city had spent two decades losing all of it. Auto plants were closing, the white middle class had decamped to the suburbs, and the population was on its way down by more than a third from its 1950 peak. By the mid-1970s Detroit was routinely called the nation's murder capital; by the early 1980s, writing the city's obituary had become a national pastime.

The strange thing is that the absence of an obvious future is exactly what made room for something new. With no visible path forward through the industrial economy, a small group of suburban Black teenagers started building a different one in their bedrooms.

Belleville is a small town about thirty miles southwest of downtown Detroit. In the late 1970s, three Black high school students there — Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, later known collectively as the Belleville Three — spent their afternoons listening to Electrifying Mojo's radio show on WGPR and WJLB. They were suburban kids from Black middle-class homes, raised to expect a future that did not run through the auto plant.

Mojo's playlists were unusually broad: Prince and Parliament-Funkadelic, but also Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express, Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the Giorgio Moroder productions that powered Donna Summer's late-70s disco. The Belleville Three heard the Kraftwerk records as a thesis about the future, and grafted it onto a city that had none. Juan Atkins later said that if machines could make music, that music could be the soundtrack for a city that hadn't been finished yet.

Cosmic Cars, below, was a 1982 single by Cybotron — the duo Atkins formed with Rik Davis. He was barely out of his teens.

In 1987 Derrick May, recording under the alias Rhythim Is Rhythim, released Strings of Life on his own Transmat label. The track is structurally strange — its signature piano line came from a ballad called "Lightning Strikes Twice" that his friend Michael James had been playing him; May looped it, sped it up, and layered it over programmed drums and a string pad. DJs understood it instantly as something new — dance music with the ache of a song in it.

Within a year it had crossed the Atlantic. Strings of Life became one of the foundational records of the British Second Summer of Love in 1988, the rave wave fueled by MDMA (Ecstasy) that filled fields outside London and warehouses in Manchester. The same year, 10 Records, a Virgin imprint, released a compilation called Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, assembled by British label man Neil Rushton — the executive who scouts and signs talent — with tracks from May, Atkins, Saunderson, and others. The word techno came from Atkins's own track Techno Music, but it was this compilation that pushed it into the global vocabulary as a genre name. The record that started it all is below.

Through the 1990s techno was misread as a European music. The reading was understandable — the post-reunification void of vacant East Berlin buildings produced clubs like Tresor and, later, Berghain, which scaled techno into a global tourism industry. The Belleville Three were rarely on European magazine covers.

But the three of them never moved away. Derrick May still throws warehouse parties in Detroit. Saunderson's Inner City project still tours. Atkins still records as Model 500. The annual Movement festival on the Detroit riverfront, held every Memorial Day weekend, treats the city as the genre's permanent home address rather than a museum.

Music does not, by itself, fix a city. Detroit's structural problems outlasted Strings of Life by a wide margin. But a city can give its music the conviction that the future still owes it something. Detroit did exactly that — and forty years on, the genre still claims it as an address.