For those who have been to both venues, here's a further delineation: Flammable @ Re-bar = House, while Neighbors = Techno. Drilling down further: Flammable = Deep house, while Neighbors = Bad techno.

This is bringing me back the great "is this trancey-house or housey-trance" debate of 1998.

Drum & Bass?

Early on, the difference IMO, was mostly vocal, i.e. Chicago House featured soul and disco inspired vocals (and fitting loops), while Detroit Techno found more inspiration in drum machines, synth programs, and the stripped down hip-hop of electro.

By the late '90s, House had changed and expanded in ways that no longer appealed to me, to the point that I always knew I was too high at a party if I wasn't bothered by some Deep House cut.

Techno, meanwhile, seems almost unchanged throughout its waves and iterations.

Definitions change. Genres merge and split regularly.

History books record "Big Fun" by Inner City as a Detroit Techno song...and those same history books place "Acid Trax" by Phuture as an important part of Chicago House.

Eventually, terms (and the barriers built around those terms) are irrelevant.

Yeah, with house you can dance forever... with techno, it's so mechanical & piston-like that you eventually run out of moves.

@6 What is not irrelevant is whether or not you can dance all night to it. House wins, hands down and feet up. ;>)

"How can you tell the difference? By this completely abstract and subjective opinion of mine!"

Thanks for giving another great example of why the music blog should never have joined Slog, Segal. Between this and Mizell randomly dropping by to give a drunken shoutout to "the homiez " in the #YesAllWomen post, it's getting hard to decide which of you is the larger waste of server power.