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B1 “The Bar City of the Year”
These days, it can seem like Detroit isn’t America’s 18th-largest city as much as it’s a metaphor for that which is dead and bankrupt—and hoping to be born again. It’s the corpse of the country’s auto industry and the hope of urban renewal. It’s the birthplace of techno and the abandoned home of Motown. Detroit cuts off public services for its citizens as it offers tax incentives for small business owners. Earlier this month, Columbia Journalism Review's David Uberti wrote about how Detroit is perceived and presented by the media:
Recent coverage has showcased Detroit’s “booming bike industry” and a luxury watch company, among other vibrant, if relatively small, businesses. Motown was described as a “culinary oasis” and “The Bar City of the Year.” Such monolithic descriptions of Detroit are similar to reporters’ characterization of Brooklyn, where the artisanal doings in a handful of neighborhoods in a borough of 2.6 million people drive the media’s narrative.
Detroit's musical heritage also fuels this odd narrative. As writer Michaelangelo Matos once noted at NPR: “‘Detroit’ is a byword for high-minded purism, a bulwark against ‘commercial’ dance music.” When I interviewed producer Kyle Hall a couple of years ago, he discussed how Europeans fetishize the music (and his own) birthplace: “They think it’s a techno city here and the party scene is thriving. But I wanted to make a reality check and show a juxtaposition between the two worlds—between the concept of Derrick May driving his Porsche down the street and what Detroit is really like.” Hence his debut album’s cover image of him sitting in a dilapidated speedboat dumped somewhere in his hometown. And when Berlin super club Tresor announced plans to open a club in the city that birthed its sound, it brought up arguments of a much needed influx of income for the city versus yet another example of Europeans co-opting Detroit’s story.
Kyle Hall: "Measure 2 Measure" (via SoundCloud)
In the CJR story, Uberti also quotes Ron Fournier, a National Journal columnist and Motown native, who talks about the differing perspectives of his hometown: “Detroit is undergoing a rebirth, or Detroit will never come back. Life is all about the gray, and journalism is all about the gray. I’ve always seen Detroit just like I try to see politics: It never was as bad as people told me it was. And it’s not as good as they say it is now.”
B2 “Rearranged as Such”
On “Sloppy Cosmic”, Detroit producer Kenny Dixon Jr. (aka Moodymann) delivers a 12-minute interpretation of Funkadelic’s “Cosmic Slop”. A strange chorus of voices starts the track: There are snippets of newscasts, recitation of statistics about the murder rate in Detroit, Desert Storm veterans reported as being killed on Motown streets. A choir intones the original song’s refrain of “I can hear my mother call.” It’s a line that rises like a ghost from knee-deep funk and drifts back to doo-wop, then moves even further back, to sanctified gospel. But George Clinton twisted the line so that the “mother’s call” comes in the night, when she’s prostituting herself so as to support her kids.
“Cosmic Slop” is one of the most poignant songs in Funkadelic’s catalog, found on their 1973 album of the same name, nestled between odes to cunnilingus and nappy dugouts. When reviewing Moody’s take on it last year, I didn’t quite see how everything added up. But after returning again and again to the song following a most turbulent 2014, I realized how wrong I was in that initial assessment. Kenny Dixon Jr. didn’t deliver a party track, but instead a trenchant social commentary. As an outsider listening in, it’s only in hindsight that I can hear the politics inherent in Moodymann’s cover—it is not so much a protest about the problems of the future but about the problems of the present that draws on the music of the past. Or, as George Clinton sings in a weathered-yet-still-vital voice: “Don’t walk so smooth/ Things don’t seem to have changed that much.”
http://pitchfork.com/features/elect...rfare-the-political-legacy-of-detroit-techno/
These days, it can seem like Detroit isn’t America’s 18th-largest city as much as it’s a metaphor for that which is dead and bankrupt—and hoping to be born again. It’s the corpse of the country’s auto industry and the hope of urban renewal. It’s the birthplace of techno and the abandoned home of Motown. Detroit cuts off public services for its citizens as it offers tax incentives for small business owners. Earlier this month, Columbia Journalism Review's David Uberti wrote about how Detroit is perceived and presented by the media:
Recent coverage has showcased Detroit’s “booming bike industry” and a luxury watch company, among other vibrant, if relatively small, businesses. Motown was described as a “culinary oasis” and “The Bar City of the Year.” Such monolithic descriptions of Detroit are similar to reporters’ characterization of Brooklyn, where the artisanal doings in a handful of neighborhoods in a borough of 2.6 million people drive the media’s narrative.
Detroit's musical heritage also fuels this odd narrative. As writer Michaelangelo Matos once noted at NPR: “‘Detroit’ is a byword for high-minded purism, a bulwark against ‘commercial’ dance music.” When I interviewed producer Kyle Hall a couple of years ago, he discussed how Europeans fetishize the music (and his own) birthplace: “They think it’s a techno city here and the party scene is thriving. But I wanted to make a reality check and show a juxtaposition between the two worlds—between the concept of Derrick May driving his Porsche down the street and what Detroit is really like.” Hence his debut album’s cover image of him sitting in a dilapidated speedboat dumped somewhere in his hometown. And when Berlin super club Tresor announced plans to open a club in the city that birthed its sound, it brought up arguments of a much needed influx of income for the city versus yet another example of Europeans co-opting Detroit’s story.
Kyle Hall: "Measure 2 Measure" (via SoundCloud)
In the CJR story, Uberti also quotes Ron Fournier, a National Journal columnist and Motown native, who talks about the differing perspectives of his hometown: “Detroit is undergoing a rebirth, or Detroit will never come back. Life is all about the gray, and journalism is all about the gray. I’ve always seen Detroit just like I try to see politics: It never was as bad as people told me it was. And it’s not as good as they say it is now.”
B2 “Rearranged as Such”
On “Sloppy Cosmic”, Detroit producer Kenny Dixon Jr. (aka Moodymann) delivers a 12-minute interpretation of Funkadelic’s “Cosmic Slop”. A strange chorus of voices starts the track: There are snippets of newscasts, recitation of statistics about the murder rate in Detroit, Desert Storm veterans reported as being killed on Motown streets. A choir intones the original song’s refrain of “I can hear my mother call.” It’s a line that rises like a ghost from knee-deep funk and drifts back to doo-wop, then moves even further back, to sanctified gospel. But George Clinton twisted the line so that the “mother’s call” comes in the night, when she’s prostituting herself so as to support her kids.
“Cosmic Slop” is one of the most poignant songs in Funkadelic’s catalog, found on their 1973 album of the same name, nestled between odes to cunnilingus and nappy dugouts. When reviewing Moody’s take on it last year, I didn’t quite see how everything added up. But after returning again and again to the song following a most turbulent 2014, I realized how wrong I was in that initial assessment. Kenny Dixon Jr. didn’t deliver a party track, but instead a trenchant social commentary. As an outsider listening in, it’s only in hindsight that I can hear the politics inherent in Moodymann’s cover—it is not so much a protest about the problems of the future but about the problems of the present that draws on the music of the past. Or, as George Clinton sings in a weathered-yet-still-vital voice: “Don’t walk so smooth/ Things don’t seem to have changed that much.”
http://pitchfork.com/features/elect...rfare-the-political-legacy-of-detroit-techno/
