The new Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris single, “We Found Love,” is as promising an album opener as one could hope for. For starters, the last single from the previous album, “Cheers (Drink To That),” was still tooling along nicely. It’s also the closest she’s come to the pre-Chris Brown-assault optimism of “Umbrella” and her previous hits: “we found love/in a hopeless place” is an opening statement as encouraging as Rihanna’s “Russian Roulette” was discouraging two years ago.

“We Found Love” is also the prettiest of Rihanna’s uptempo singles. It’s almost delicate, at least until about fifty seconds in, at the end of the chorus, when producer/U.K. hitmaker Harris unleashes the stuttering drums and “vroop, vroop” power-chords that have been a staple of techno music for the last 20 years. Ironically, it’s the same sort of “build” that opens Brown’s CHR comeback, “Yeah 3X.”

It’s not news that Mainstream CHR audiences have gotten used to records with strong elements of ’90s techno. “Boom Boom Pow” was, for a few months, a sonic assault that polarized listeners. Now techno’s once-discordant aspects are a regular underpinning of today’s “turbo-pop” sound. Without the powerchords, ACs could probably play “We Found Love” now; instead, they’ll play it in 6-8 weeks, by which time that part of the song won’t sound in any way intrusive. After all, the drum spasm at the end of the break in Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” plays without incident on Mainstream AC now.

In the early ’90s, techno’s breakthrough records struggled to find a place at Mainstream Top 40, or what was left of it at the time. The most influential record from today’s standpoint was probably the Movement’s “Jump.” And the only reason it’s not the apotheosis of early ’90s techno is because there was an actual Apotheosis involved.

For a minute in the early ’90s, techno made dance music almost as underground and as hip as Hip-Hop. When KPWR (Power 106) Los Angeles segued to Hip-Hop around this time, the only dance music it kept was techno—to the point of sponsoring a station rave. But ’90s techno was short-lived on the radio. Its poppiest distillations were 2 Unlimited’s “Get Ready For This” and Reel 2 Real’s “I Like To Move It,” which became much bigger in the years to follow, and AB Logic’s less enduring “The Hitman.” And when none of those songs were home-runs, techno was dismissed as a fad by already-skeptical PDs.

The key exception was WBBM-FM (B96) Chicago, where most of those songs were hits, along with L.A. Style’s “James Brown Is Dead” and “I’m Raving.” Shortly thereafter, Eurodance took a turn back to the melodic (Captain Hollywood Project, Snap, Culture Beat, LaBouche, Real McCoy, Haddaway, etc.). The less melodic techno eventually searched out a home on the Alternative rock side (e.g., the Prodigy’s “Firestarter”), cultivating an uneasy relationship that still waxes and wanes today. Not surprisingly, Underworld’s “Born Slippy,” did best in Chicago, becoming a big record for Alternative WKQX (Q101).

It’s accepted now that nobody under fifty is particularly fazed by Hip-Hop elements in pop music, or even country. Similarly, even if you’re well into your thirties, “vroop, vroop, vroop” (just an extension of Hip-Hop’s scratching, if you think about it) has been a subliminal part of your pop music vocabulary for years. In other words, the sound that’s “so three-thousand-and-eight” is actually an almost-comforting twenty-year throwback.

It’s unlikely to actually happen in today’s more-chart-driven-world, but you could make a case for making “Jump” or “Born Slippy” as bring-backs, since they certainly don’t sound like 20-year-old records. They have the qualities of most songs that become huge years later—particularly in that nobody in the U.S. had the opportunity to get sick of them.

At the very least, I hope that Moby gets to enjoy this a little. Trashed in song a decade ago by Eminem and assaulted on the street by strangers, the DJ/artist/producer lost his radio footing at a time when he was still making good radio singles. Now, it would be interesting to hear what Moby would do now with some of the assignments that are going to Harris, Benny Benassi, David Guetta, and the like. But he should at least appreciate the irony of dance music’s dominance at today’s CHR, with Eminem now being one of rap’s few representatives. It’s never really over in pop music’s evolution, but for now, everyone listens to techno.