Feel Da Noise

A question that has no easy answer is going around a panel made up of musicians, DJs, a promoter and a writer: What makes Detroit area music --which has produced a multitude of internationally acclaimed artists across several decades and genres-- so distinct from that of other regions? Much larger cities like Chicago and New York don't seem to have the same volume of talent or the intensity of expression as does this metropolitan area that stretches from the core of Detroit and its suburbs to Ann Arbor. So why here?    

Faruq Z. Bey, a jazz legend who has been playing music professionally since the 1960s, pounces on the question -with Detroit style, it should be noted.

"Because we like it lean, and we don't embellish," Bey says. "That's the way we live in Detroit, and it's how we make our music. Without thinking about it too much, we just do it."

Bey, now 65, should know plenty about the mysteries of which he speaks. He was inspired to play saxophone after first hearing John Coltrane play the polytonal blues, and he then reached even further into time and space after experiencing the cosmic tones of Sun Ra. His avant jazz-funk ensemble, Griot Galaxy, was active in the 1970s and 1980s and its members played on tracks released on Detroit's famed Tribe label. Despite being slowed by chronic asthma that requires him to take an oxygen tank with him wherever he goes, Bey continues to play with the Northwoods Improvisers and occasionally with the Odu Afrobeat Orchestra.

Questions and anti-questions

Bey was a perfect fit for a panel discussion called Mythological Psychogeographies, held in late March at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). The discussion was part of the Shrinking Cities exhibit, which launched in Berlin in 2004 and opened at Cranbrook Art Museum and MOCAD in February.

The other panelists were Danny Harris — better known as The Blackman — Vince Patricola, who DJs under the name Shortround, MOCAD music curator Ben Hernandez and me. I was asked to moderate the discussion and also gave a related talk at Cranbrook called Sound Effects: Music Builds Community in Shrinking Cities. (Why me? In addition to editing duties at metromode and Model D, I write a column on the electronic dance scene for the Metro Times called The Subterraneans, and I am part of the sonic art collective Paris '68 )

The talk was loose, freewheeling and spiced by my interest in the theory and practice of the Situationist International, from which the lyrical, investigative title of the discussion was lifted. Many of the questions, or anti-questions, about Detroit music came from me; Hernandez also presented questions from the other side of the table. 

But to find out what pushes trailblazers like Parliament-Funkadelic, the Stooges and the MC5, the entire stable of Motown artists, techno pioneers Juan Atkins and Jeff Mills, and countless influential hip hop, jazz, house, noise and rock performers onto the global stage it took even deeper digging by the panel into the psyche of this region. 

The conversation lingered on points well known to many metro Detroiters and music fans around the world, including the fact that music from this region comes without compromise, stripped of pretense and affectation, real to the bone. But it also veered toward practical concerns, like earning respect and money in a place that often appears to have as many producers as it does consumers.

While Harris said the poor economy in Detroit hurts the pocketbooks of local artists, Hernandez said that the lack of money in the region might actually help nurture the talent here. "Artists work at what they do and don't care as much about the reward," Hernandez said. "You can't afford to do that in a place like Chicago." 

Harris said, "but people still have to get paid. When we go out of town, Detroit musicians are treated like stars. Here we can't a crowd down to see what we do live."

Patricola, who does a weekly event called Lounge Defined at Ferndale's Sakana and publishes the Detroit Electronic Quarterly, said the lack of radio play for Detroit's current musical artists means less people will get know about them. "I think we need somebody to set up an Internet radio station that can expose more people to what we do."
 
What all the members of the panel agreed upon was that the national and global ear is picking up the audio signal coming out of this town, and have been picking it up for some time.  In a recent edition of GQ, writer Devin Friedman cited 62 reasons to love America and listed Detroit, and did it with feeling, for its contributions to music:
 
"No other city in the world — that's right, the world! — has cranked out more revolutionary music," Friedman wrote. He was talking about Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, the Four Tops, Aretha Franklin, Steve Wonder, the MC5, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Madonna, Bob Seger, Kid Rock, Eminem and White Stripes among many, many others.

Leaving history      

For my part in the discussion, I proposed the idea, porous as it might appear on the surface, that the best music that comes from Detroit is made outside of history. Artists like Mills and P-Funk's George Clinton — and even panelist Faruq Z. Bey — get their information from a place that that cannot be explained using conventional logic. Listen to an artist talk about artistic process for five minutes and try not to keel over in boredom. Listen to her wordlessly display her dreams on a piano or cello, or with vinyl and turntables, and a much clearer picture emerges. It cannot be explained. Music, which has a life of its own, and imposes its own desires on the musician and the listener, does not want to be.

In Detroit, it appears music seeks longevity, to make an impression that can reach across the physical space of a local club or concert hall, or find the heart and soul of a listener on the other side of the world. 

But why? Does it have to do with the region's industrial legacy, something that lasts even when much of that industry disappears? Is there a weight in the sound produced here that makes an impact by sheer force of will, something that represents the attitude of this place with music better than it can in any other way?

Bey suggested much the same when he summed up the quality of Detroit area music by saying that there is different kind of pressure to be found here, one fundamentally human and omnipresent. 

"People are struggling to exist, the pressure you feel about that is powerful," Bey said. "That pressure goes into the music. You can hear the Detroit pressure everywhere you go. Listen for it. It's always there."