A Detroit club genre from the mid-1990s that fuses Detroit techno, electro and Miami bass with rap call-and-response, danced as the jit. DJ Assault and DJ Godfather are its best-known producers.

The Song Ends Where Techno Began

Q: What does Roll Out sample?

Foul Mouth Avenue (Roll Out) interpolates Slum Village's Raise It Up in its first half and samples Cybotron's Enter in its second, with vocals from Goodmoney G100 and ATM Krown. It is track one on the CYBERFUNK '93 mixtape, released October 27, 2022.

01

Enter

The first song on the first Cybotron album is called "Enter," which is either very literal or very confident. Juan Atkins and Richard Davis released the album on Fantasy Records in 1983, and it opens on that title track.⁴ Three decades later, Pitchfork's review of the reissue called it widely considered the place Detroit techno began.⁴ Most genres are born in a dozen contested basements. Techno has a track listing.

Atkins had met Davis in a music theory class at Washtenaw Community College in 1980.⁵ They named the project by colliding "cyborg" with "cyclotron,"⁶ and they pulled from George Clinton and Kraftwerk in roughly equal measure,⁷ which is a little like being raised by a funk preacher and a German calculator. The singles arrived one at a time: "Alleys of Your Mind," then "Cosmic Cars," then "Clear."⁴ "Clear" became the famous one. "Enter" and "Industrial Lies" carried the dread, songs about what machines might do to the people who built them.⁸

I care about "Enter" for a narrower reason. I sampled it.

02

Techno City

Atkins also named the music, which is the part of founding a genre most founders skip. In a high school Future Studies class he was assigned Alvin Toffler.⁵ Toffler's later book, The Third Wave, described a kind of person it called the , and Atkins has said the word "techno" came partly from there.⁹ He was careful to call the book inspiration and nothing more. Cybotron never tried to apply its principles, he said, though it happily borrowed Toffler's taste for hybrid words like "cybotron" and "metroplex."⁹ Metroplex became the name of his label, the first techno label anywhere.¹² In 1984 Cybotron released "Techno City,"¹⁰ and the music had its title.

The friends he made at Belleville High, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, became the other two thirds of what history files as the .¹¹ Three kids reading futurism outside a city built on car factories. If you pitched it as a movie, somebody at a studio would ask you to make it more believable. I know, because for five years I was the person at the studio.

03

The second sound

Here the line bends. By the mid-1990s, Detroit DJs were mixing the city's classics into whatever was newest, and Cybotron records sat in those sets beside Kraftwerk, 2 Live Crew and Egyptian Lover.¹³ Nobody had a name for it yet. People called it booty music, mix show music, or just techno.¹³ Then Hobey Echlin, a Detroit native writing for URB, gave it a label that traveled: .¹⁴

Echlin's own description holds up: techno's fast beats with rap's call-and-response.¹⁵ Underneath ran Miami bass, which DJ Godfather says he was raised on right next to Detroit techno.¹⁴ On top ran a dance, the , built on fast footwork, drops and spins.¹⁵ The producers who defined it, DJ Assault and DJ Godfather chief among them, made records for a city that bought them by the box. Godfather has said a good ghettotech record could sell a thousand copies on vinyl in Detroit alone.¹⁶

Not everyone loved the name. DJ Assault has said he never called it ghettotech and prefers Detroit booty music, and he has a point about outsiders naming music they did not make.¹⁷ I use the word here because it is the word people search for, which is the least romantic reason to use a word. I have made peace with it.

04

Coon Daddy, then Goodmoney G100

Every party needs someone on the microphone telling the room what to do with its body, and for ghettotech one of the loudest belonged to a rapper who started out as Coon Daddy. Born Marlan Collier in Michigan in 1978, he was entering rap battles and dance contests at teen clubs by thirteen.¹⁸ In 1997 his voice ran across "Playa Haters in Dis House," a DJ Godfather record,¹⁹ and the Red Bull Music Academy's oral history of the genre lists it among the anthems the whole story circles back to.¹³ More Coon Daddy and Godfather records followed: "Get Yo Jit On,"²⁰ "One Time on the Mic" and "I'm Everywhere."²¹

He records now as Goodmoney G100, and the work kept coming under the new name. He is still on Godfather records, "Wack DJ" in 2021²² and "It's On Again" in 2018, which his press kit says topped charts overseas.¹⁸ He runs G100 Music Group and a clothing line called Grind2Greatness,²³ and he founded the Clinton Township Tarheels youth organization for kids as young as five.²⁴

A ghettotech MC does a specific and underrated job. The producer builds the machine. The MC tells a thousand people how to ride it. Atkins wrote songs about the future. Coon Daddy made Detroit dance in the present tense, loudly, at 150 beats a minute, with instructions.

05

Roll Out

CYBERFUNK '93 is an anthology I executive produced with Fasika Addis and Simran Porwal: loosely connected short stories set in an alternate 1993 where aliens have landed and, with the impeccable judgment of aliens, settled in Michigan.²⁷ The hero is Eric Bridges, a teenage scientist pulled out of Detroit's public schools for fighting, who steals and befriends a Martian robot named Murdoch while a cyborg bounty hunter closes in. A twelve-track mixtape scores the stories, finished on February 7, 2022, with cover art by the artist Adisa Ogbonna.²⁷

The song's full title is "Foul Mouth Avenue (Roll Out)." It opens the mixtape as track one, credited to KAISO Entertainment, Goodmoney G100 and ATM Krown, and came out on October 27, 2022.⁴⁴

Listen to "Foul Mouth Avenue (Roll Out)" on Spotify

"Roll Out" is built as a drive through Detroit in two halves. The first half "Raise It Up" by Slum Village, the group T3, Baatin and J Dilla formed in the city,²⁶ a song from Fantastic, Vol. 2 that went out as a single in 2001.²⁵ "Raise It Up" itself samples "Extra Dry" by Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk,²⁵ so the front half already carries a Detroit group in conversation with a Paris robot. The second half "Enter." Goodmoney G100 rides over both.

That pairing was the design. Ghettotech is what happened when Detroit kids took the city's machine music and refused to let it stay solemn. Putting the man who was Coon Daddy over a Cybotron record is the city's second sound talking back to its first.

The title belongs to a third Detroit-adjacent machine culture. "Roll out" is Optimus Prime's order to the Autobots in Transformers,³¹ and the verse is full of them. The biggest Transformers are , robots the size of a city that become a city.²⁸ The most famous Titan is named Metroplex.²⁹ Atkins got his label's name from futurist reading and Hasbro got its robot's name from wherever toy companies get names, so the overlap is a convergence and no one borrowed from anyone. It still means two corners of 1980s American culture reached for the same word for a city that turns into a machine. Detroit was that city.

Twelve stories, twelve songs, an alternate 1993. Tap "Roll Out" in the tracklist for credits and the link to listen. Cover art by Adisa Ogbonna Open the mixtape

06

The verse, bar by bar

The verse is a kid's walk home in a Michigan that has met aliens and still flies Confederate flags. It moves from street to sky and back down to the curb, and every line carries a second layer, either Transformers or American race history, and sometimes both at once.

01

Dirt on my Pony sneakers

Pony took its name from Product of New York and launched in 1972.³² Clean sneakers are a status object, especially for a Black kid in a city that reads you by your shoes. Dirt on them means he has been somewhere he had to run through. The rest of the verse explains the dirt.

02

Gonna roar like city speakers

A promise to be loud in a place that wants him quiet. City speakers are the club stacks and car systems where ghettotech actually lived. They are also the Titans, robots that are cities. The kid with scuffed shoes plans to get as loud as a skyline.

03

Connect with Titan tonight

Linking up with a city-sized robot, and with Saturn's largest moon underneath it. Reaching for space is an old Black American move, from Sun Ra to the Parliament Mothership to Cybotron. If the ground won't have you, the sky might.

04

We are our own believers

The thesis. Nobody is coming to vouch for them, so they vouch for themselves.

05

It gets late a little early here, can't stay outside

A turn on Yogi Berra's line about the shadows in Yankee Stadium's left field, "it gets late early out there."³⁶ Here, late arrives as danger before dark. That points straight at . Detroit's suburbs had them, Dearborn most famously, under a mayor who ran on keeping Black residents out for more than three decades.³⁴³⁵

06

Thinking about the blood-stained banners that we passed outside

The Confederacy's final national flag, adopted in 1865, was nicknamed the .³⁷ These kids pass it on the way home, in Michigan, in a world where first contact has already happened. America's oldest line is still flying.

07

Think we a cast of punks who run amok like masked monks

"Think we" is the accusation, what everyone assumes about them. A cast of punks, like a film's cast of troublemakers. Masked monks points at Daft Punk, who hid behind robot helmets for their whole career.⁴¹ A mask means nobody can profile your face.

08

Past cash in trunks, driven by Ponys who drive Dunks

Pony twice: the sneakers from bar one, and the , the class of muscle car the Ford Mustang started in 1964.³³ Detroit's car history carries them past the money in other people's trunks while their own feet sit in Nike Dunks. A sneaker is the only vehicle a kid owns.

09

Robot rock rhythms keep us wide awake like Daft Punks

"Robot Rock" is a Daft Punk single from Human After All.⁴¹ The duo's name came from a review that dismissed their earlier band as "a daft punky thrash."⁴² Machine music keeps these kids alert, which is the Atkins inheritance in one line, and the bar names the producer whose sample sits under the song's first half.

"Wide awake" also lands on "Get Lucky," Daft Punk's 2013 single with Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers, whose whole hook is staying up all night.⁴³ In that song, the all-nighter is a party. In this verse, being out after dark is the danger the next bar warns about.

10

Don't let the sun go down, run now

The sundown warning from bar five, now an order. Get home before dark.

11

Dixiecrat stars and bars got us all run down

The were the 1948 segregationist breakaway from the Democratic Party, with Strom Thurmond at the top of the ticket,³⁸ and "stars and bars" is the Confederate flag's nickname. Party and banner together, wearing everyone down.

12

We roll out, spot the shadow of a Doombox, grab the handle

Doombox is the boom box robot packaged with Soundwave, the Decepticon who turns into a tape deck, in Hasbro's Bumblebee line.³⁰ So the bar is a Transformers scene: the Autobots roll out, see a Decepticon radio, and take it by the handle.

Underneath sits Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing, the young man whose boom box starts the confrontation and who is killed by police by the end of it.⁴⁰ The two layers agree. A radio carried by a Black kid gets treated as a weapon, and in this world it literally is one. They see the shadow first and pick it up anyway.

13

It's all fated like a Huguenot

The Huguenots were French Protestants whose fate was settled by what they were born into: massacred on St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572, driven into exile after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685.³⁹ After a verse full of motion, the last line admits the route home was drawn in advance. And "hue" sits inside "Huguenot," so the bar says it twice: fated by birth, fated by hue.

Full verse · "Foul Mouth Avenue (Roll Out)"

Dirt on my Pony sneakers
Gonna roar like city speakers
Connect with Titan tonight
We are our own believers
It gets late a little early here, can't stay outside
Thinking about the blood-stained banners that we passed outside
Think we a cast of punks who run amok like masked monks
Past cash in trunks, driven by Ponys who drive Dunks
Robot rock rhythms keep us wide awake like Daft Punks
Don't let the sun go down, run now
Dixiecrat stars and bars got us all run down
We roll out, spot the shadow of a Doombox, grab the handle
It's all fated like a Huguenot

07

October 31, 2026

Juan Atkins died in Mexico City on October 31, 2026. He was due to play Yu Yu Club that night and was found unresponsive in his hotel room before the set. He was 64.² He never stopped working. In 2023 he revived Cybotron for its first EP in 28 years, and in his last two years he played everywhere from New York clubs to Movement in Detroit and Dekmantel in Amsterdam.³ Kevin Saunderson, his friend since Belleville, called him the originator who opened the door for the rest of them.¹

I never met him. I met his records, which is how most people meet the people who rearrange their lives. When I play "Roll Out" now, the last two minutes read like a credit roll. The song was always going to end where techno began. I did not expect to write about it in the past tense.

08

Questions people ask

Who was Juan Atkins?

A Detroit producer and DJ (1962 to 2026) widely credited as the originator of techno. He co-founded Cybotron with Richard Davis, recorded as Model 500, founded the Metroplex label, and is one of the Belleville Three with Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. He took the word "techno" partly from Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave.

What is Cybotron's Enter?

Cybotron's debut album, released by Fantasy Records in 1983 and produced by Juan Atkins and Richard Davis. It opens with the title track "Enter" and includes "Alleys of Your Mind," "Cosmic Cars" and "Clear." It is widely considered the start of Detroit techno.

What is ghettotech?

A Detroit club genre from the mid-1990s that fuses Detroit techno, electro and Miami bass with rap call-and-response, usually at 140 to 150 beats per minute and danced as the jit. DJ Assault and DJ Godfather are its best-known producers. Journalist Hobey Echlin is credited with the name.

Who is Coon Daddy?

The Detroit rapper Marlan Collier, who now records as Goodmoney G100. As Coon Daddy he voiced DJ Godfather's 1997 ghettotech anthem "Playa Haters in Dis House" and many Databass Records tracks. As G100 he still records with Godfather and runs G100 Music Group.

What does "Roll Out" sample?

"Foul Mouth Avenue (Roll Out)" interpolates Slum Village's "Raise It Up" in its first half and samples Cybotron's "Enter" in its second, with vocals from Goodmoney G100 and ATM Krown. It is track one on the CYBERFUNK '93 mixtape, released October 27, 2022.

09

The song ends where techno began