“I Don’t Think Subculture Is Gone. I Just Don’t Think It Serves the Same Purpose.”
A conversation with Ghostly International founder Sam Valenti IV on the occasion of his new coffee table book.
- Written by: T.M. Brown
- Photos: Toaki Okano
- Art Direction: Practise
It’s Sam Valenti IV’s 46th birthday, and, for some reason, he has decided to spend the morning with me sitting in a corner booth at Balthazar on a chilly November morning. He slides his 6’3” frame into a banquette seat facing a long table of tourists. His dark beard is speckled with salt granules of grey these days. When the waitress comes around, Valenti orders an egg sandwich and asks for a green salad instead of home fries. After handing over his menu, he looks at me and switches to his mode of good-natured ribbing: “I don’t want that to be the T.M. Brown lede.”
I’ve known Valenti for a few years; we circled each other as something like mutual admirers before we ever talked to one another in person. He’s best known as the founder of Ghostly International, the venerable record label he started from a University of Michigan dorm room in 1999. Ghostly is mostly known as an electronic music label, but when you take a closer look at the label roster it’s like thumbing through the record collection of a free-form radio DJ.
Ghostly emerged during a relative fallow period for American electronic music. Valenti is from the Detroit suburbs, and has a deep appreciation for the different sounds the Motor City has incubated over the decades. He entered the city’s club scene as a teenager, carrying records for Detroit legend DJ House Shoes and playing gigs with Mike Servito. His love for Detroit carried over to Ghostly’s first release, the funky house track “Hands Up for Detroit” by Matthew Dear whom Valenti met in his first week of undergrad. Dear’s song was both an indication and a smokescreen of where Ghostly was headed. The label would become an electronic music tastemaker, of course, but also became known for signing hard-to-define acts like Tycho and Ginger Root. Being genre-agnostic doesn’t go against the Ghostly philosophy, Valenti told me. “The human has to be leading through all the music," he said.
Last month, Valenti published a coffee table book that looks back at Ghostly’s first 25 years. I wanted to talk to him about what he’s seen change in that quarter century, as Valenti has always had an expansive, optimistic view of the music community’s ability to adapt and endure, which runs counter to so much of the current discourse. One thing that was clear after our conversation is that Valenti knows that even after 25 years of shaping part of the music landscape, he knows the next generation is coming for him. And he’s just fine with that.
T.M. Brown
Sam Valenti IV
What does a Ghostly artist sound like?
The original thesis, going back to my 1999 brain, was starting as an electronic label, which in Detroit techno terms means a very specific thing. I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit under that influence. But as dogmatic and hardcore as Detroit techno is—it’s very anti-mainstream—there were also other flourishes. Carl Craig doing something at DIA Beacon, the guys loving fashion. There was fantasy alongside the hardcore reality.
That’s ironic, given that so much of what I associate with Detroit techno is the brutalist, post-industrial environment.
The story I’ve come to appreciate is about change and being able to become different selves through art and music. Techno is alias-driven, faceless. Detroit also loves a good gimmick, whether it’s Alice Cooper, Madonna, or Insane Clown Posse. We love a persona, theatrics.
To me, Moodymann is a persona. And Prince, who is really the patron saint of Detroit techno more so than Kraftwerk. Detroit guys wanted to be Prince. They wanted Paisley Park to be available to any of us.
Downstream of that, Ghostly was trying to do romantic electronic music but also show you could have personality. Matthew Dear’s face is on the sleeves and that was intentional. Not in a pop star way, but we were saying having a brand and persona was lacking in American electronic music at the time, which was post-electronica, the end of the rave era.
1999 was a relatively dormant period for American electronic music, it seems.
Exactly, it was an in-between period. In Detroit too, there was a sort of turnover. Europe had really taken the ball and run with it. We were all sweating Cologne’s Kompakt, Berlin’s Perlon. The UK had Warp, Rephlex, trip hop, drum and bass. Everything was crystallized there. Detroit was chugging along but didn’t really have a new wave yet.
So we thought: how do we present this as a boomerang back to Europe? We’re learning from the heroes before us but also pulling from IDM, drum and bass, picking up influences and shooting it back.
It’s still the same philosophy now. We work in traditional genres, but the artist has to have a slight tilt. The human has to be leading through all the music, the worlds. It’s world-building as integral to the art, not as a marketing idea. Like Kraftwerk, like Devo, like Prince. You need to create a physical or visual space so people understand what you’re talking about.
If you did a blind taste test, you wouldn’t draw a line from Matthew Dear to Ginger Root. But to me, it’s the same. They’ve built their own identities. Ginger Root is a great example of the kind of artists we love working with because even though there’s more surface area with social media, it’s actually harder now. It was easier when it was just a flyer, a record sleeve, and a couple interviews. Now it’s overwhelming.
Ultimately, it comes down to: I like tunes. I like melody. I enjoy the music. We take it for granted that the song is still the elemental thing. We’ve always wanted to be a lowercase-p pop label, so like popular music that people enjoy without needing a degree in whatever genre the artist comes from. I’ve always been proud when we hit those moments.
A lot of people say kids don’t have subcultures anymore. I don’t think that’s true.
You make a concerted point in the book that Ghostly is an Ann Arbor label, not a Detroit one. Why was that distinction important to you?
It’s reverence, partially. Detroit comes with instant prestige and I think it would be disingenuous for me to have claimed it. The community of people around Mike Banks and the Detroit techno scene were the big brothers I had at the record stores and who are still my big brothers. It’s a school of thought, a way of being in the world. It’s hard to explain techno to people who don’t love it or have never experienced it. They say it all sounds the same. And it does, right? But it’s the way techno and electronic music move through the world that means something.
That’s part of being in a community, right?
I think so. The joy of music, especially back then, was you always had a couch to sit on in Berlin or wherever you were. We had a couple records out and could book a tour in Berlin, London, Brighton and see people you loved along the way. It was finding your people.
A lot of people say kids don’t have subcultures anymore. I don’t think that’s true. You just don’t have to commit to it like you used to. You don’t have to put on clown paint to find an identity anymore. Identity is being served around you, shaped whether you like it or not. Also, we didn’t have a number over our head every day showing our value, like "that song only got that many streams.
I don’t think subculture is gone. I just don’t think it serves the same purpose. The way people find their way into culture is still through subculture.
You recognized early how important branding was to a label. Why is design so important for Ghostly?
I finally accepted that record sleeves and record covers are the most important visual art of the last 50 years as far as educating people and creating tangible romantic moments. As much as we all revere fine art institutions, I don’t think there’s a visual artist not already in the pop canon that even a third of people feel is driving the culture, right?
That’s not just the artist’s fault. Fine art is an asset class. Fashion houses, what’s happening with LVMH, that’s more important to the average person than what you’re painting. It doesn’t mean it’s not important. There are certain people like Jordan Wolfson pushing the culture, artists working with AI like Holly Herndon, that’s really important. But most of the fine art institutions have failed to create new popular figures the way maybe the ‘80s and ‘90s did.
The artist-as-celebrity is sort of gone now.
Exactly, especially as the business side became more important.
Designers were always seen as the supplicant of art, like "art but for someone else." But they’re important because they work in collaboration. Peter Saville and Joy Division and Factory Records, or Cocteau Twins and Vaughan Oliver and 4AD, created these little flywheels of culture. Those actual images are now more important than almost any painting since 1977.
I’ve always loved design, but now I feel more emboldened to say that, in my opinion, it’s the most important cultural visual artifact for young people.
Where did your desire to work with fashion labels come from?
It’s the same thing. Your friend group probably has the wine person, the clothes person, etc. It’s a collaborative culture and doesn’t assume we’re the authority on anything other than what we like. We wanted to think about it like, Who is the Ghostly of the fashion world? The brands we work with are the best at what they do, whether they’re small and experimental or traditional.
The collaboration thing is always: how do I talk to someone one lunch table over and learn their thing? I don’t like going to a music industry event and talking about marketing because I already know that conversation. I want to talk to Abe Burmeister from Outlier about how they do drops, how they run their website. Why don’t you do wholesale? Why don’t you have a storefront? My buddy Eric who does Today Clothing in Ann Arbor, I go to them and say, what can I do with you? What is there we can make together?
Being chopped is good.
It seems like you want more people in culture, not fewer even as we talk about how gatekeeping is making a comeback.
Being chopped is good. That’s kind of what I was trying to get after with Herb Sundays. There are always people out there who are going to know more about something than you and you should accept that. It’s about talking to whoever’s doing it instead of assuming we know what we’re doing. We’re a little bit of a lot of different ideas. At least you’ve checked the boxes of research and not being the guy who’s like, "I went to Mexico City once and I know the spots." No. Show up with your head a little low, show enthusiasm. That’s how culture works.
Detroit taught me that. I could go to the counter and they’d be like, "No, you’re not gonna buy that record." A cultural beat-down. "That’s trash." I think that’s a lost art. I’m not saying we’re gonna be the punishers, but you need that in every lane.
I noticed post-COVID there was almost a lack of handed-down knowledge to new people from the old heads at clubs. No one was there to say "keep your phone in your pocket, don’t have those loud ass conversations on the dancefloor." We lost that connective tissue between generations.
Everyone moved ahead five years. The torch was never passed. The elders left. You learn a lot from other guys going out. It’s not didactic or judgmental, it’s how we keep a community going, how we respect one another.
Shawn Reynaldo wrote a good piece about this. If you were 15 during COVID, you’re watching Boiler Room and that’s what DJing is to you. The DJ has always been a star.
I’m curious what you think about the rise of the celebrity DJ, like the people from Bravo or TikTok influencers starting careers.
Techno was a dirty word in America for most people. A lot of square people in the Midwest and beyond saw dance music as something other, or to be feared, with a homophobic layer of course.
The irony and the beauty is that everyone sees we were right to love this stuff in the first place. That DJ lifestyle, traveling the world for music, building community with your friends. There was a time 10 years ago where I felt like maybe I’d lost the plot, that I should have gone EDM. But as things have simmered, we realized there is room for Theo Parrish and John Summit. The surface area of techno is so big now that everyone can have a seat at their own lunch table. The book is sort of a confirmation of that whole thesis.
T.M. Brown has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, GQ, and the Atlantic. He publishes the Substack “Is It Supposed to Look Like That?”
- Written by: T.M. Brown
- Photos: Toaki Okano
- Art Direction: Practise
- Date: November 18, 2025
