Can't Forget the Motor City!

Headed to Detroit to spend a week with Ma Dukes and shoot some footage for Raise It Up For Ma Dukes and it's got me thinking about the history and culture of Detroit. Now a days when you hear about Detroit the media seems to equate the collapse of the auto industry to the collapse of the city.When I tell people I am making a film in Detroit they make jokes about it being such a terrible city that I wonder if any of them have actually ever visited. The Detroit that I visit is a fantastic city and the people are so warm that I love coming back. There is so much culture and history alive in that city that I am often amazed that people don't see the motor city that way.

As I get ready to head to the city that I love so much I thought I would leave you with a piece of history that I think shows the importance and the resonance of Detroit's culture. Of course we all know about Detroit's rich musical history from Motown to Techno, from John lee hooker to The White Stripes, the city is alive with music. Dilla was a student of music and he is well known for incorporating everything he could get his hands on to create his sound. But just like Motown, the Sound of Young America in the 60's, Dilla is both a product of and an agent within the unique, and distinctively urban, cultural landscape of Detroit. It is impossible to understand an intellectual or an artist without understanding their formation. The cultural history of Detroit is just as much a part of Dilla as it was of every artist who hailed from that city before or since.

So back to Motown. On July 23, 1967, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas were performing at the historic Fox Theater when they were alerted to the fact that a riot had erupted in Detroit. They addressed the audience telling them to get home safely and they ended the concert. They left Detroit and traveled to Newark, NJ arriving just as the 1967 riots erupted there as well. Eventually they finished their tour in London where they were asked if Dancing in the Streets was a call to riot to which Martha Reeves replied "My Lord, it is a party song." Of course the song was a party song, even today it's infectious and makes you want to jump up and dance. But one year later at the Chrysler plant in the Hamtramck section of Detroit, a group called the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement, a group a black auto workers who formed a union to fight for the needs of black autoworkers, which were being overlooked by the larger union, it was Dancing in The Streets that blared in the parking lot as DRUM members staged a picket in the parking lot. Sure the song was written as a party song, but "Dancing in the Street" performed in the eye of Detroit's worst urban uprising and again as workers fought for their rights could no longer be seen as just a party song. The song was a symbol of a time when people could use the streets to dance but also to gather, march and struggle for a better life. Detroit has given us a lot, and to love Dilla is to love Detroit.



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