Thing is....ghetto tech is popular.....overseas. If you look at the shirts of the dancers in the video they read "Jittin ain't dead". Look who's surrounding the dancers. All white folks! The sound and the dances that went with them aren't being picked up. Shit I remember those dressed to sweat parties and when this shit came on, it was intense! It's like black folks (shit americans in general) looked at techno and said "pass". And I've never really understood how hip hop cats never took to it. Seems like a natural progression to me. And why aren't hip hop artists running to dubstep? The rapper that incorporates dubstep beats into their sound correctly has a chance to upset the market.
There are so many other ways to stay "relevant". Shit Jay created his own lane so I would think he'd be able to really get experimental. This "Ghetto Techno" is not experimental.
You're right about the music being popular overseas. Ghettotech, Detroit and Electro are huge over there. Hell, even the hip-hop/rap subgenres of Miami-Bass, Freestyle, G-funk, mobb music and even NOLA "Bounce" has a better following in Europe than over here.
It seems everyone appreciates or supports hip-hop related or derived artforms except us (unless it's making money). We were all about electro-hip hop in the early to late 80s. It was the dominant sound in the west coast and in the south (in the form of Miami Bass). We left electro hip-hop for greener pastures instead of preserving that part of our history.
In Europe, the kids picked up on that part of culture and ran with it. That's why the Egyptian Lover can do a show before a huge crowd (many of whom weren't even born when "What is a DJ if he can't Scratch" came out) in Paris, Rome or Berlin and make a gang of $$$ while doing it. If he did a show in the states, the turnout wouldn't be nearly as huge, and the crowd will consist mainly of old fools like myself who used allowance money to purchase "My House on the Nile".
I really shouldn't complain though. There is an underground scene which isn't afraid to experiment. There are also rappers like KRS-One who weren't afraid to spit over a DnB track (I think Zion I experimented w/ DnB as well). That's another thing . . . alot of these black 90s babies don't even know about Jungle/Drum&Bass and are quick to dismiss it as "white music".
I'm just not feeling the new Jay-Z track because it still sounds too close to the pseduo-electro/pseudo-techno fruityloops trance presets w/ auto-tune that's all the rage these days. I really wish Jay had gotten with the true heads such as Juan Atkins or Derrick May. Not only would there be some authenticity for Jay's track, there would a chance for the Detroit cats to get some well-deserved shine.