City scenes is our weekly Thursday feature in which we dive head first into the music scene of a particular city. We’re going through the alphabet from A-Z. Last week for C we looked at Chicago and this we’re driving 4 and half hours down the road into Michigan and we’re looking at Detroit.
Detroit is a city of 4,5 million people in the midwestern state of Michigan, USA. It’s a city with a huge industrial history and a massive musical legacy. Known as the motor city due to the High concentration of car factories in the city that attracted thousands of people searching for work in the great migration that we heard about last week. Detroit is famous for the sounds of Mo-town, Rock Music, Hip Hop and Techno and today we’re going to be taking a glimpse at all of these sounds.
Before any of these genres or scenes existed, Detroit had a huge history of Gospel, Jazz and Blues music, and no doubt that all those sounds informed what came later in the city, but the sound that immortalized Detroit as a legendary musical city is the sound of Motown.
Motown records is one of the most significant record labels in the history of American R&B and soul music. It takes it’s name from Detroit’s nickname of the motor city and it was founded in the 1950s by a motor factory worker called Berry Gordy.
Motown went on to become home to some of the biggest names in Soul Music such as Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross & The Supremes, The Four Tops, Martha Reeves & the Vandellas and The Jackson 5.
Detroit also has a huge legacy of rock music and one band from Detroit that are often cited as being one of the most important rock bands in history, named after their home town, is the Motor City 5 or MC5, a band who spent years playing relentlessly in every venue around Detroit before they ended up getting a record Deal. They were known for their pro-civil rights and anti-establishment politics and heavy rock sound that went on to inspire bands like the Sex Pistols and the clash to create what went on to become punk music.
The genre that Detroit is perhaps most exclusively credited with being the birthplace of is Detroit Techno. By the mid 1980s, the car industry that had seen Detroit thriving in the 1960s had already been in Decline for some time. The deindustrialization of the city, with factories closing down led to a phenomenon called “white flight” with the city’s white middle class leaving Detroit and taking a lot of the city’s wealth with them. The Population dropped to around 800,000 people and the city was full of abandoned houses, factories and warehouses.
This harsh environment however served as the inspiration for what became one of the biggest subcultures in history. Drawing on the bleak visions of a deprived city that surrounded them and inspired by a particularly legendary radio DJ called the electrifying mojo who would play early European electronic music by the likes of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder as well as the funk sound of bands like parliament and the B52s, and the newly emerging electro hip hop sounds of the likes of Afrika Bambaataa, young producers like juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Eddie Folkes and Derrick May transformed the mechanic, industrial and machine driven history of their city into music that was made with machines like drum machines and synthesizers based on repetition and groove. This was the sound of Techno. An early precursor to the sound of techno that bridged the gap between the sounds that the electrifying mojo was playing on the radio and what became techno was the music of a duo called Cybotron.
Detroit Techno went on to be developed and refined to it’s rhythmic essence by legendary producers like Jeff Mills and Underground Resistance.
In this City Scene we heard Motown, rock and techno but Detroit is the birthplace of so many other famous artists and sounds including Madonna, Eminem, Sufjan Stevens, Aaliyah, J Dilla. Carl Craig, Drexciya, Moodyman and many more.