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Musical production can be a means of fostering community-based economic ­development. This chapter examines Detroit techno music production and the Submerge collective in its fostering an economic model reflecting community-based theoretical work/interventions conceptualized by Martin Luther King, Jr., William Bunge, and James and Grace Lee Boggs, which connected the global and local in addressing the problems of America’s deindustrialized inner cities. Techno music production in Detroit, in part an artistic response to deindustrialization, can be seen as social in nature, caught in what King (1963) terms “an inescapable network of mutuality” that built the catalog and its worldwide reputation. In light of the limited opportunities for city youth given deindustrialization and the defunding of public schools (particularly its arts programs), Detroit’s techno community also has been active in building a model of musical production that would foster current artists as well as the next generation of musicians while producing a critical alternative to mainstream urban music that glorifies violence and programs failure. Unlike Richard Florida’s-inspired cool cities initiatives in Detroit and Michigan, which focus on attracting and keeping footloose creative workers who have individualized, temporary commitments to place, Detroit’s globally recognized techno musical production represents a creative and mutually supportive community that has long been part of the city that has provided them with inspiration and to which it is committed.

8.1 Beyond Economics, Embracing Community

The health of the black working and middle classes has been interconnected with that of U.S. manufacturing, and in particular, that of Detroit’s automakers. Henry Ford offered the then-unheard of $5 a day wage to both black and white workers. Even though blacks were often relegated to unskilled jobs such as sweeping the floors and pouring hot steel in foundries, these wages helped fuel the Great Migration from the U.S. South. As a result, from 1910 to the 1930s, the city’s black population increased by more than 600%, a rate four times faster than Chicago’s (Dzwonkowski 2009). Good factory wages also bolstered African American home and car ownership as well as black businesses catering to auto workers. Detroit became home of the most affluent African-American population in the U.S., with the largest percentage of homeowners and the highest comparative wages (Mahler 2009). The auto worker was therefore an embodiment of success in the black community. Gwendolyn Warren, who headed the Infernos, the teen club of Detroit’s Fitzgerald neighborhood, and later the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), characterized the black “eligible young bachelor” as the guy who “has got a gig at the factory and you know damn well he is going to get a check every Friday.” In contrast in the white community, she thought the eligible bachelor might be the guy with a college education (Warren 1971:10). However even by the 1960s, growing automation, business slumps and periodic waves of unemployment and strikes in the auto industry that employed her neighbors, negatively affected Fitzgerald (Bunge 1971). The flight of manufacturing, capital, and population (Table 8.1) from Detroit to its suburbs compounded the impact of the cyclical nature of the auto industry on employment for Fitzgerald and other African-American residents of Detroit. From 1950 to 1956, 55 of the 124 manufacturing firms located in the suburbs had moved out of Detroit (James 2004). Additionally all 25 of the plants the Big Three automakers (Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler) built in the metropolitan Detroit area between 1947 and 1958 were in suburban communities. Most were located more than 15 miles from the center city (Sugrue 1996), which curtailed job opportunities for many black Detroiters, who, unlike whites, could not move with the jobs to the suburbs given lower incomes and housing discrimination. Black youth did not have seniority in the plants and saw automation curtailing their future by eliminating the factory jobs that blacks had struggled for (and won) at the beginning of World War II. They thus rebelled in 1967 against both the automation that made them expendable or in Vietnam, and against the police force which many black Detroiters ­considered a white occupation army in an increasingly black city (G. Boggs, Interview, May 25, 2008).

Table 8.1 Detroit’s population, 1940–2010
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In the face of the economic and social crises facing urban African-America, theorists and activists proposed community centered alternatives. Stemming from his involvement in the Fitzgerald Community Council, which was organized to maintain high-quality schools and fight block busting and slum expansion as the residential color line fell in Detroit, William Bunge increasingly focused on the concerns of youth who he saw as key to the future and building community. Using innovative and politically charged mapping, he argued for safer play environments by highlighting the deaths of black children along routes used by white suburban commuters and for improved school districting and increased local control of Detroit Public Schools (DPS), which had a growing African-American student population, but were controlled by a white school board. Bunge also indicted the schools, defunded by the auto industry which pressed for decreased taxes during the recession of the early 1960s by threatening to move to lower tax areas in the U.S. South and Canada, and by angry white voters defeating millage increases, for preparing youth for factory jobs of the past (Bunge 1971). They did not impart technical expertise needed for the industry’s future work. In contrast the DGEI, which Bunge initiated by bringing together academicians and neighborhood activists, would provide a more participatory, practice-oriented education experience that would also facilitate neighborhood decision-making and transformation. In the DGEI, local residents would identify the research orientation that would address community problems and needs, while academic geographers would impart the technical skills and the theory to connect local experience, thinking, and action with national and global challenges such as deindustrialization, which had had such devastating local impacts. In the DGEI educational process, community benefits would be emphasized, rather than those of the university or individual, thus better fitting the traditional group orientation in African-American neighborhoods (Horvath 1971).

The DGEI’s educational aims could fit well into Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Beloved Community concept. In his 1967 “Where Do We Go From Here: Community or Chaos?,” King recognized that the post-Selma, post-Voting Rights Act Civil Rights movement needed to further structural, systematic changes to eliminate poverty and unemployment in the U.S. and abroad. He argued for a revolution of values involving a shift from a “thing-oriented” to a “person-oriented” society in order to restore communities, noting “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered” (Boggs 2007). King envisioned a Beloved Community, an interconnected community bound together by agape, a love that would encompass understanding, goodwill, and restoration. Community development, rather than individual materialism, would be emphasized. The Beloved Community concept which drew from his earlier civil rights work in the South as well as his concerns with economic problems and segregation in northern cities such as Detroit where he gave his first “I Have A Dream” speech that Berry Gordy released on his Black Forum label would go beyond capitalism’s emphasis on the market, individualistic competition and profit maximization. It would incorporate social and economic justice principles while recognizing needs of the economically oppressed in the U.S. and worldwide (Inwood 2009).

Given their involvement in Detroit for over 50 years, autoworker James Boggs and his wife Grace Lee Boggs, various left, labor, Black Power, and environmental activists, most fully implemented theoretically-informed, youth-oriented, community-based formulations. The aftermath of the 1967 riots highlighted the distinction between a rebellion and a revolution for them. While Marxism had been based on the idea that when the social forces became more militant, they would sweep away those in power and the workers organized and disciplined by the process of production would be ready to take over and create a new society, it was obvious to Grace Lee Boggs (Interview, May 25, 2008) that the young people who rebelled were not going to create a new society. The Marxist tradition that she had been working in and whose ideas and ideologies had been adequate for the industrial epoch were no longer adequate for the new epoch they were entering. The Boggses began a critical reinterpretation of Marxism with an emphasis on the grassroots. While supporting the election of Coleman Young as Detroit’s first black mayor in 1973 and his subsequent integration of City Hall and the police and fire departments (G. Boggs, Interview, May 25, 2008), they were critical of Young’s considering the problems of deindustrialization, disinvestment, mass unemployment and the crime/crack ­epidemic of the mid 1980s as solely economic. He minimized human and social relations (Boggs 1998). As such, Young addressed them by using tax abatements and developer-driven megaprojects (i.e., Poletown and the Renaissance Center), which failed because they were “based on the illusion that we can bring back the good old days when Detroit was the auto capital of the world, and hundreds of thousands of workers came to the city to do manufacturing jobs at the decent pay which had been won through the organization of the union” (Boggs 1988). Given outsourcing and high-tech, which reduced the number of workers needed to produce goods and services, and their opposition to Young’s casino gaming solution to unemployment which he argued would bring 50,000–80,000 jobs, the Boggses proposed small-scale development based on redeveloped, redefined, self-reliant, sustainable multicultural communities (Boggs 2008). James Boggs argued that Detroiters have to “begin developing our own small enterprises growing our own food, creating our own businesses, developing a community and making that rather than economic growth the purpose of the society” (Boggs 1998). This alternative to casino gambling and reliance on the auto industry would involve a new model of production based upon serving human and community needs, rather than upon the free marketplace and large-scale industrial jobs. Such small enterprises would enhance human skills in conjunction with new technologies and constantly readjust to serve the needs of local consumers. This new model would also require reconsidering the purpose of cities such as Detroit. Instead of being places one migrated to for jobs with large paternalistic corporations, cities would be places “based on ­people living in communities who realize that their human identity, love, respect and responsibility for self is based on that for others than on material wealth and not as existing to make capital for production or dependent on capital to live” (Boggs 1988). The Boggses’ reformulation of cities, communities, and economic enterprises strongly mirrored King’s Beloved Community.

In Detroit, the Boggses put their ideas into practice for youth in ways that also echoed the DGEI. In a focus on the youth made redundant by deindustrialization and susceptible to the drug culture, James Boggs and other activists initiated Detroit Summer, which echoed the Civil Rights era Mississippi Freedom Summer in calling for university students to work with local youth as part of “an Intergenerational Multicultural Youth Program/Movement to rebuild, redefine, respirit Detroit from the Ground Up.” As with the DGEI, learning would come from practice. In contrast with school systems following the “command and control” model created 100 years ago to prepare young people for factory work (Smith 2008), Detroit Summer would foster youth decision-making, self-confidence, skills in working with one another, and activities such as planting community gardens, painting public murals, rehabilitating houses, repairing bikes needed for alternative means of transportation, and organizing and participating in workshops, youth-led media arts projects, community-wide potlucks, speak-outs and intergenerational dialogues (Boggs 2006). While the Boggses were not aware of Bunge’s DGEI and King’s Beloved Community when establishing Detroit Summer (Boggs 2006), all these theorist-activists’ formulations stressed youth and the community as the basis and focus of education, direct action, production, and transformation in the deindustrialized city. In this chapter, I argue that Detroit techno music production is an artistic response to deindustrialization, unemployment, and the drug crisis, as exemplified by the highly-influential second-wave musical collective, Underground Resistance (UR), and Submerge Distribution founded by UR’s “Mad” Mike Banks, and operationalizes ideas put forth by King, Bunge, and the Boggses in their emphasis on youth, community, and the social. Instead of being driven by individualistic economic motives, Detroit’s African American techno musicians have built a beloved community in Detroit and beyond.

8.2 Techno Music and Building a Beloved Community in Detroit

Years before Toffler’s “Third Wave” and the birth of Techno, Detroit has been known as a vibrant music community. John Lee Hooker, George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic, the Electrifying Mojo, and of course Berry Gordy’s Motown left a deep legacy of Black musical history to America’s Seventh City, a dying and largely discarded monument to the age of industry and mass production. Initiated by the forward musical visions of Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May, influenced by Detroit’s rich urban soundtrack, and inspired by the futuristic sounds of Prince, Kraftwerk, Georgio Moroder, The B52’s, New Order, and Depeche Mode, over the last 10 years a legion of ‘techno rebels’ have spawned a Black musical revolution that has shaped a generation. Detroit techno is about taking the pure essence of human emotions, soul, mixing it with technology, and putting it on wax; an ultimate depiction of Toffler’s future shock manifesto in its fusion of man and machine (Detroit: Beyond the Third Wave 1996).

Detroit techno flowed from a music-rich environment where industrial production built, then largely abandoned the city. The influential DJ The Electrifying Mojo’s free-form mix of European instrumentals, new wave, funk, rock, soul, and anything that fit the “mood-mat,” not a radio format (Mojo 1995), helped shaped techno. Instead of letting radio be an instrument of divisiveness (i.e., the white and black radio stations prevalent on the dial), Mojo’s shows connected listeners and genres of music including the funk and electronic music respectively embodied by Parliament Funkadelic and Kraftwerk that young African-Americans heard and melded into a sound all their own. In addition to opening minds through music, Mojo also spurred listeners of his 1980–1990s radio shows to think about the future and present-day social events, economic problems, and also potential solutions ­facing African American youth in Detroit and other urban areas. Given the dramatic decline of auto work in Detroit resulting in the city having half as many manufacturing jobs in 1982 as it had in 1963, a number which was halved again by 1992 (Boyle 2001), and the deadly rise of crack cocaine, Mojo (1995:433, bolded and italicized as in the original) stressed in his prelude to “Where Have All the Dreamers Gone”:

One of the most pressing problems in African-American communities today is the high and unacceptable rate of adult and youth unemployment. The gross economic deprivation of the inner cities all across America coupled with a massive proliferation of drugs and guns in these communities have resulted in violence, bloodshed, unprecedented hopelessness, and near anarchy. There is a need for a strong, forceful, evangelical wave of entrepreneurship to sweep through the inner cities and provide decent jobs at decent wages. … As much as children are encouraged to become lawyers, teachers, and doctors, they should also be encouraged to become business owners, manufacturers, designers, and distributors. We have raised too many children to silently join the consumer class without the vision to become part of the producer class. Perhaps it is time for parents to refocus their children from dreams of being participants in the consumer spectrum to visions of being prolific on the producing-side of the economy.

Influenced by Mojo’s music and ideas, Detroit’s young techno pioneers set out to map a new music-based, entrepreneurial future for themselves. With a DIY ethic like the punks, they utilized inexpensive technology such as the Roland TR 808 and 909 drum machines and the TB 303 Bassline costing $1,500–2,000 (Berk 2000) to create music and what became a global industry. Watten (1997) argued that by developing an industry based on music that utilized references to machines, mass production, and automation in a city where more people were losing jobs due to automation, Detroit techno’s African American creators’ use of computers was a radical cultural reconfiguration. The falling cost of technology which facilitated machines’ substitution for labor also facilitated the Detroiters’ use of machines to create music, become recording artists, and out of necessity, become record label owners. Juan Atkins, techno’s “Originator,” pressed a 12-in. record himself when his demos were rejected by other labels. He started his Metroplex label in 1985 in order to release “No UFO’s,” in which he sang of the possibility of seeing UFOs, despite the denial of their existence. In addition to the DIY ethic, Detroit techno also embodied an earlier African-American self-empowerment philosophy (Rubin 2000) as well as musical traditions, which linked the future, transformation, liberation, technology, and pan-Africanism (Connell and Gibson 2003; Williams 2001), and that expressed their living conditions and what could not be spoken (Smith 1997). Atkins explained the aesthetic that drove him saying: “To me, the system is bent on keeping people in despair, hopeless, not wanting to achieve anything, so if you keep your head up high maybe you’ll start realizing things that you never thought possible, and seeing a UFO is probably the ultimate impossibility” (Rubin 2000:116). First-wave techno artists and high school friends, Derrick May (the “Innovator”) and Kevin Saunderson (the “Elevator”) similarly dreamed, created music, and started labels (Transmat and KMS respectively). Like Atkins’ Metroplex label, they had studios located on a section of Gratiot Avenue in Detroit that was called ‘Techno Boulevard’. Musicians in close proximity to another fostered a community of mutual learning and creativity as they remixed each other’s material (Sicko 1999).

Detroit techno was also noted for its unique sound and products. Second wave techno artist Jeff Mills, who was known as The Wizard on Detroit radio due to his turntable and mixing skills, and Mike Banks co-founded Underground Resistance, the music collective with a name that reflected their parents’ backgrounds of having supported the ‘resistant’ Dr. Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement and anti-war campaigns (Von Thülen 2007) and that was/is responsible for some of the most innovative sounds and products. Jeff Mills and UR developed the digital innovation of the ‘locked’ circular instead of spiral groove that was featured on UR’s Discovers the Rings of Saturn X-102 EP (Sicko 1999). The album’s 14 songs, named after the planet’s rings and moons, had track lengths and widths on the vinyl copies that corresponded to the actual sizes of and distances between the celestial bodies (Sicko 2010). Working with former Motown sound engineer and veteran record cutter Ron Murphy to bring out the bass, or the bottom end, UR records would be mastered so hot that the needle would almost jump off (Copeland 2004). Messages were also etched into the records, furthering mystery and distinctiveness. The records by UR and every major Detroit techno artist then were pressed at Archer Record Pressing, one of three to five such facilities in the U.S. and eight to ten worldwide (Aguilar 2009). Marrying affordable, accessible technologies with human skills and innovation, Detroit’s techno producers did not have to maximize selling as many copies as possible of one record as the major labels did (Gebesmair 2009). By developing a competitive niche in the music industry that exported mainly to Europe and Japan, where techno exploded, Detroit techno thrived as a small enterprise alternative.

Submerge Distribution, which was founded by UR’s Mike Banks in 1992 to handle the day-to-day business functions (pressing, mastering, invoicing, wholesaling and retailing including via mail order) for Detroit techno, in particular embodied the Beloved Community alternative to profit-maximizing, large-scale production. Learning from Juan Atkins, who shared his experiences with licensing, shipping and selling records, and distribution (Copeland 2004), Submerge developed a new, networked collective business model with its own means of manufacturing, distributing, and promoting recordings and merchandise from many local techno artists’ labels (McCutcheon 2007). In bringing the best talents on different labels together under a collaborative umbrella, Submerge made Detroit’s underground (and above ground) techno community an economically viable, artistically independent one that permitted experimentation (Sicko 2010). As a one-stop shop where one could buy all the Detroit techno music, it supported the creative community by enabling artists like Kevin Saunderson who were frequently performing overseas to continue recording on his KMS label while distributing through Submerge. Submerge exported about 80% of the city’s electronic music labels to retail customers (Casper 2004). It has expanded to serving the global techno community by distributing labels like Final Frontier (Italy), Diaspora Records (Ireland), Sud Electronic (London) (Copeland 2004). While Submerge largely profited from sales external to the city and thus differed somewhat from the Boggses’ emphasis on an enterprise serving local consumers, Submerge represents a community-building small-­business model (McCutcheon 2007). That it fostered the development of the entire techno community in Detroit and abroad, not solely on maximizing profits, fits the Beloved Community enterprise model. Its Detroit-based business also helped support the wider community, providing needed jobs in Detroit, as anywhere from 30 to 50 people were attached to a single record, from the UPS man, the mastering guy, the label printer, those at the pressing plant, etc. (Copeland 2004).

Submerge has continued to support the Detroit techno community as it has broadened to an entertainment company with a focus on Detroit electronic music. In handling recording, management, distribution, licensing, and publishing for Detroit’s techno artists, it has introduced them to new audiences via products such as video games. Mike Banks brokered a deal with Rockstar Games that in return for getting Submerge on the soundtrack for its popular street racing video game, “Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition,” required Rockstar to include both long-time and younger Submerge artists, feature Detroit streetscapes and muscle cars, and make a $5,000 donation to the Detroit Youth Center located down the street from Submerge headquarters. Although the licensing fees just covered the cost of setting up the deal with Rockstar Games, the arrangement involved building relationships for and increasing public awareness of the Detroit techno community (Carter 2005).

8.3 Saving and Fostering Detroit’s Youth Through Techno

I shall no longer hold my peace and watch my community be dismantled one block, one house, one brick, and one person at a time. … I pray that I never sink to such a tragic and abominable level that many in the radio industry have found themselves. … Those of you who can sit back and watch all of those young boys being murdered, you just let the music play. Take your commercial breaks – feeding time – please!

The Electrifying Mojo (1996:xxix) on music he considered a soundtrack to genocide.

For The Electrifying Mojo and the Detroit techno artists he influenced, music was not just about generating jobs and revenue, but on sustaining life and a ­community by saving its youth. Music as they conceived it would allow listeners to imagine or dream, not glorify the negativity and violence of the drug culture. Given the explosion in crack cocaine sales and associated killings through the early and mid-1980s in Detroit, the association of drugs with techno in Britain was troubling to many in Detroit’s techno community (Sicko 1999). To counteract the poison of drugs and to defend the community from “aural and visual land mines programming people for failure,” Mike Banks and UR aimed to “bring futuristic music into the ‘hood to inspire people to have a future, to think about a future, to imagine” as Mojo had done for them. Coming from a military background, Banks explained his position:

There’s many, many things in the ‘hood designed to crush you. Me coming, I like the military background, I admire the crush. I admire you put 40 ounces in the neighborhood and every weekend 3, 4 hundred mugs shoot each other up, just off some beer. I admire that you use some of the most beautiful women in our culture to advertise some cheap ass wine like MD 20/20. I think that’s genius and I’ve noticed that genius around the world. I’ve noticed it in Aborigine camps in Australia, I’ve noticed it in Irish neighborhoods in England, I’ve noticed it on Indian reservations. These are simple tools of colonization that have worked for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years to keep mother fuckers blind. I don’t know how else you’ve got to tell people to avoid this shit, but they keep on messing with it. So I think the tool is a hell of a tool, but the one I didn’t see, I mean because I could see the billboard signs “Drink this beer,” “Smoke these cigarettes,” all you poor motherfuckers who don’t got no money, play the lottery, maybe you’ll win three million dollars. The lottery ticket never falls in Detroit. All the vices that you live in and walk in and see. OK, I was fortunate. I had a father, he pointed them out, he said look, these are all land mines (Fig. 8.1) to catch your ass so you don’t succeed and you end up in prison or dead. Either you see them or you don’t. But the one I didn’t get was the one coming through my ears. And when they started shutting down PE (Public Enemy) and stuff that I thought that I needed to hear, I was mad, I was real mad. Because I understood then that the radio was just another enemy. In fact one of the big, programmers, they was programming us for failure, no kind of success. And I still believe that’s what they’re doing now (M. Banks, Interview, June 4, 2008).

Fig. 8.1
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Visual land mines in Detroit (Photo by Deborah Che)

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With the consolidation and corporatization of radio station ownership, radio has declined as a medium to air local issues and artists and to transmit music that would challenge and open young minds to possibilities. According to Banks (Interview, June 4, 2008), when his partner Jeff Mills was on Detroit radio during the 1980s, he was told by a “so-called” black radio station in the city not to play Public Enemy, the influential and political rap group, or he would be off the radio. He refused to go along with this demand and quit. While being cited by nearly every first and second wave Detroit techno artist as well as ones from southern Ontario as a major influence, the Electrifying Mojo’s refusal to adhere to radio formats or musical genres led to his having to move from no fewer than six Detroit-area stations since the mid-1970s. At one point he had to offer content over the phone at 976-MOJO (Sicko 1999:88). Although self-described as “ageless” and alive (as of 2011), Mojo is no longer on the air. In contrast, music glorifying violence and drugs from which violence results can readily be heard on the radio. Submerge has promoted hip hop alternatives to this poisonous music. Some of Detroit’s well-respected hip hop, most notably Natives of da Underground’s “Pack da House” produced by J. Dilla went global on the Submerge-distributed UpTop Entertainment. Additionally to ­counteract the sonic warfare of radio that programs people in the same way you program a computer – garbage in, garbage out (C. Harris, Interview, June 4, 2008), UR released The Other Side of Bling, which featured songs such as “Hunting the Program Director,” “Kill My Radio Station,” “Toxic Broadcast,” “Death of My Neighborhood,” and “Technology Gap.”

Through their presence in Detroit, UR and Submerge build community by giving a sense of possibility beyond the drug economy. Submerge has stayed in the city, combating the prevailing belief that “making it” in the inner city equates with moving out. Banks explained that youth “need more examples of success than just the dope man, so we sit tight. You know I got offers to go to this country or that country to put my business wherever, but Detroit made me, Detroit made all the artists that come through it, so I mean I think keeping your original catalyst is very important.” While staying means providing a role model to youth, the city also is key to the artists’ creative processes, providing a raw element unique to the Detroit techno sound (Copeland 2004). Although Banks and second wave artist Carl Craig keep their businesses (Submerge and the Planet E record label respectively) in Detroit, their careers illustrate how techno offers mobility and possibilities of seeing the world beyond it (beyond the ‘standard 2-year stint in the military’, or the “Baghdad Express” as one UR song puts it). Banks tells the young athletes and musicians he works with to ask the local drug dealer to pull out his passport and ask him how many stamps he has in it. Likely the drug dealer will not be able to produce a passport because “Part of what they don’t tell them, part of what they should say in a rap video, when you sell a certain amount of drugs, what country wants you? You don’t get issued a passport, you denied. So if you’re going to be a criminal genius, before you start, you should get a passport. Because once you get caught selling drugs, you not going to get one. So you can’t even make an escape like in the movies” (M. Banks, Interview, June 4, 2008). In contrast, Banks can show young people his passport containing stamps from the many countries UR has performed in, evidence of the much respected, global reputation the group has and of the possibilities for transcending local land mines.

In addition to providing concrete examples of young minority men creating businesses and a global industry from scratch, Detroit techno artists have worked actively to nurture the next generation of Detroit techno artists and to maintain a Beloved Community centered on music and creativity. UR performed a rare live set, “For Those in the Know” (Fig. 8.2) to benefit Detroit Summer Youth Space, an independent youth media center in the Cass Corridor offering workshops and studio space to the community in order to foster the use of art and media for creative expression and social change, and to promote independent media and youth voices (Detroit Summer n.d.). The benefit funded infrastructure improvements targeting computer literacy (Casper 2004), critical given the growing technology gap inner city Detroit youth face. Like the DGEI, Detroit Summer would strengthen technical skills with the aim of developing community and serving human needs, but through enhancing computer and internet literacy, music production, song writing, independent ­journalism, website design, and event production (Detroit Summer n.d.). Likewise, Carl Craig, whose 20-year old Planet E record label shipped nearly 20,000 vinyl records in 2010 to customers outside the city, 70% of them to Europe (Glasspiegel 2011), has been also been active in nurturing the next generation of Detroit techno artists. In the past he distributed free techno tapes to kids, exposing them to the music which could not be heard on commercial radio (Rubin 2000). Most recently he organized the week-long “The Future is Now – When Techno Meets Contemporary Electronic Music Seminar” during the tenth anniversary of Detroit’s Movement (Electronic Music) Festival (2010). The youth seminar included daily themes such as engineering and production, business, and music theory as well as panel discussions led by classically trained, electronic and hip-hop musicians, singers, sound engineers, and entertainment promoters and organizations. Craig’s foundation, which presented the seminar with the Detroit School of Arts, aimed to “expose urban youth to all genres of music in the belief that inspiration can come from anywhere and anyone can be a muse” (Backspin Promotions 2010). Such efforts by Detroit techno artists to foster the development of a creative, people-oriented ­community, which depends on the health and well-being of its youth, are even more important now given the DPS’ $327 million deficit, subsequent school and program closures, a state emergency takeover of the district, and most recently the creation of a state-run school district which would take DPS’ worst performing schools and put them under control of principals, parents and teachers (Chambers 2011).

Fig. 8.2
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For those in the know (Source: Underground Resistance 2004)

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8.4 Developing a Global Beloved Techno Community

Given the global nature of techno and following King’s conception of the Beloved Community, Submerge has extended its music and expanded the Beloved Community globally. While industry representatives from major labels have attributed declining recording sales to downloading and peer-to-peer file-sharing via the Internet (Gebesmair 2009), for Submerge downloading in less affluent markets is not a major issue. Downloading has expanded its fans in these new markets. In one African country, all music had to be shipped through France, which made it so expensive no one could afford it. Due to the lack of sales, the artists also were not making any money. Via downloads, people could access the music which then gave Submerge artists the exposure and opportunity to perform and earn money from shows there in the future. Likewise in Brazil, where the number of customers buying music on Submerge’s mail-order was limited, downloading extended its fan base as evidenced at a festival UR performed at in Sao Paulo. Despite the limited sales, out of seven acts on the lineup, 44% of the attendees polled said UR was the main act they came to see. However in markets where people could afford the music, fans supported UR and Submerge by buying the music on CD or vinyl (C. Harris, Interview, June 4, 2008).

For UR and Submerge, fans connected through electronic media are critical to building a global community that cares about the music and Detroit. When a proposal called for the Cass Corridor neighborhood where its old headquarters was located in to be bulldozed for a new Detroit Tigers stadium (since built elsewhere), Submerge appealed to supporters online for help in fighting outside developers and City Hall by showing them the neighborhood was more than “decayed buildings, drugs, and crime” (Sheridan 2001:170). In response, one supporter from Portland, Oregon wrote city officials to explain the importance of techno as a homegrown musical form that had become an international phenomenon and of Submerge as an example of “neighborhood self-development with global impact.” Stressing the importance of such community-based enterprises advocated by the Boggses, he wrote, “It is a matter of changing the concept so that those small, family-operated efforts become a full partner in the effort to rebuild the city, alongside the larger enterprises all the way up to Ford and General Motors. If there is one lesson I learned from my visits to your city in the last 2 years (for the Detroit Electronic Music Festivals), it is that mega-development along the lines of the Renaissance Center is virtually irrelevant to the future of Detroit as most people would want it” (Sheridan 2001:171). Similarly when corporate adversary Sony BMG released a note by note, reproduced version of the club hit “Knights of the Jaguar” by DJ Rolando (Rocha) when UR would not license it to them, UR’s supporters, its “digital killer bees” offered legal help (McCutcheon 2007). The ensuing controversy engendered publicity and support that helped make “Jaguar” an international hit. According to Banks (Interview, June 4, 2008), techno is one of the rare forms of music where connected fans give back, providing Submerge with technological advice and software updates.

In furthering the global community, Submerge and UR have also used fans’ connection with the music to raise awareness and concern about the challenges the city and its residents face as well as to combat negative stereotyping and media images. During interviews with UR, some European and Japanese media negatively portrayed Detroit as a ghetto where people were living in shacks, Robocop, the Third World, or the Wild West. One interviewer even asked Banks how it felt to live in the ghetto. Banks noted, “You know, you don’t tell nobody they live in the ghetto. I know where I live. I don’t need to hear it from you where I live at. Ghetto is in your mind. You know, my mother kept a clean house. We didn’t have a roach or a rat in it. But down the street it might be a different story. Maybe they don’t own their house. Maybe it’s a suburban dude that owns their house and he don’t keep his damn property up” (Copeland 2004). To offset the negative images of Detroit as well as to familiarize fans with the city’s issues and character, UR made records that could only be purchased in Detroit. When those overseas visitors came to buy the records, Banks would take them on his tour of Detroit (Fig. 8.3), which included (1) Indian Village and Sherwood Forest, upscale neighborhoods where home owners took pride in keeping up their properties and thus combated broad brush views of Detroit as a ghetto; (2) Belle Isle, the largest city island park in the U.S.; (3) the Motown Museum; and (4) the urban environmental art Heidelberg Project, in which artist Tyree Guyton incorporated cast-off, abandoned objects to provoke thought about problems like blight, abandonment, declining neighborhoods that were largely ignored by the city in favor of high profile developments downtown, homelessness, drugs, racism, and child abuse. In addition to combating negative media stereotypes, UR is selective when determining its concert schedule, aiming to play for people who are “sincerely concerned about some of the issues or, or the intensity of what this music represents” (Copeland 2004). In this way, UR has acted as ambassadors for Detroit, raising awareness of the city and its music, both of which draw strength through adversity, and creating a beloved global community of those who care.

Fig. 8.3
figure 3_8

Counteracting negative images: UR’s alternative tour of Detroit (Clockwise – The Heidelberg Project, The Motown Museum, Indian Village house) (Photos by Deborah Che)

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8.5 Fostering a Creative Community, Not Merely Attracting the Creative Class

In response to deindustrialization and population loss, particularly of the young, college-educated, and influenced by Richard Florida, Michigan and Detroit haveseen the arts and creative industries as avenues to rejuvenating the economy. According to Florida, cities should be transformed to enhance their diversity (­openness) and their coolness as measured by the availability of cultural and nightlife amenities in order to attract the ‘creative class’ (i.e., individuals such as artists, engineers, writers, and entertainers who create for a living), since such places will thrive in a post-industrial economy dependent on their talent (Florida 2002). Michigan thus kicked off the Creative Cities Initiative in 2004 and Detroit introduced a new “D. Cars, Culture, Gaming, Music and Sports” brand ad campaign that portrayed the city as cool, trend setting, and forward moving. The press also touted the low cost of housing in Detroit, which has attracted artists from Chicago, New York, Boston, Germany, and the Netherlands who have bought houses in some of the city’s edgier neighborhoods for $100 to a few thousand dollars (Hodges 2009), as well as one-bedroom lofts in Midtown Detroit, which is (relatively) booming with investment and employee housing incentives offered by Wayne State University, the Henry Ford Health System, and the Detroit Medical Center which can be had for $150,000 vs. $500,000 for comparable properties in Boston (Neavling 2011a). As Detroit Mayor David Bing sees attracting young professionals to Detroit who bring “creative ideas, fresh energy and investments with them” as key to revitalizing the city and improving the economy, he plans to improve services in Midtown (Neavling 2011b), despite the fact that Detroit continues to lose population in many other neighborhoods (Table 8.1).

Florida’s creativity thesis however is not without its critics. Peck (2009) found the creativity thesis fitting into the neo-liberal agenda, with the government’s only role being to create the artsy, “24/7 plug and play” neighborhood environments the creative class favor. Additionally since the creatives are mobile, hold weak social attachments, and “value place for only as long as it facilitates their self-actualization,” they are likely to pick up and move to cities that offer more attractive professional and lifestyle opportunities. While Florida asserted that Detroit could succeed in attracting and retaining talent by valuing its creative assets in a presentation during a 2-day transformation workshop there that referenced the White Stripes and Eminem (Peck 2009), he recently used Jack White’s move to Nashville to illustrate the shift of the music industry from formerly dominant regional and traditional crossroad centers unable to respond to new genres such as Detroit to new locations such as Nashville, which Florida asserted had a broad range of sounds, talent pool, infrastructure, and genres that Detroit did not (Florida and Jackson 2010). Thus to Florida, Detroit despite its historical and current production of jazz, rock, techno, rap, and hip-hop fell short on creativity and diversity, which contradicts how his well-packaged creativity argument supposedly fits all cities, including Detroit (Peck 2009).

Moreover in Detroit, the creativity thesis troublingly focuses on making the city cool in order to attract, retain, and nurture creative class newcomers from the suburbs or other cities, states, and countries, and not valuing the creative people already in the city. While Detroit Summer co-founder Shea Howell (2010) felt Florida’s ideas on the “4 T’s,” attracting Talent with Tolerance, Technology and amenity-oriented Territorial assets could spur the state to address its intolerance, lack of investment in technology, and the squandering of its natural resources, the press and corporate and government leaders have instead simplistically concluded from Florida’s findings that Detroit is a blank canvas waiting for young artists. Mike Banks (Interview, June 4, 2008) wryly noted that “there’s been people that come and try different projects in the urban inner city. … People love this environment because this is capitalism gone wild. This is the end of the run. This is the boomtown gone bust and people love the iron, the rot, the decay, they love that shit. As my man said in the movie (Apocalypse Now), it’s like napalm in the morning, it smell like victory. You know, they love this. They love to see us struggle.” The creativity thesis as applied in Detroit not only fit the neoliberal agenda, but also tapped into a common narrative of Detroit as a dystopic frontier that needs to be reclaimed – after the 1805 fire that destroyed the city, the 1967 riot/rebellion, and now the aftermath of the long-term meltdown of the auto industry. As a dystopic frontier, Detroit is a “wild, lawless, chaotic place; a world turned upside-down and inhabited by others against which the Self can be defined and valorized” (Sheridan 2001:46). However in trying to attract urban pioneers, Detroit has not fully recognized its own creative residents who stayed committed to the community, and in the case of Detroit’s techno artists created a global industry while remaining largely unknown at home.

Small enterprises that foster economic development and community such as techno are needed, but are not a total solution to Detroit’s challenges. Building a Beloved Community as part of business development should not be interpreted as everyone can lift themselves up by their bootstraps, leaving the government with no role. From his experiences of travelling and performing in Tokyo, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Barcelona, etc., Banks felt for Detroit to have any urban revitalization, to be a “world class city” as former mayor Dennis Archer called it, the city needs mass transit. The connectivity would decrease how people are alienated or locked into their own neighborhoods and ways of doing things (M. Banks, Interview, June 4, 2008; Copeland 2004). Mass transit is also especially needed in the Motor City where a third of the residents do not have cars. Only the government, which built the interstate highways facilitating flight from America’s cities, can provide this infrastructure. The government is also needed to fund schools and programs providing a safety net for Michigan’s children who have borne the brunt of the state’s economic problems, with childhood poverty and neglect increasing in the state’s lost decade. William Bunge (Personal communication, May 3, 2009) expressed concerns that the suffering of Detroit’s children would increase with Chrysler’s and GM’s bankruptcies, while “the money for Detroit’s schools, health care, unemployment for their parents is drained away by endless and unwinnable war.” Given the drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, resources for needed infrastructure and services may be available. A resolution from the U.S. Conference of Mayors has called for using the money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan for needed social services, to promote job creation, and to redevelop cities’ infrastructure, schools, and roadways (Naylor 2011).

Regardless of the amount of money being spent for the military conflicts that is redirected to urban infrastructure, schools, and social programs, given local, state, and federal government budget deficits and the inability to rely on large corporations to create the needed jobs in the U.S., Detroiters need to develop their own small enterprises, create businesses and build community like Detroit’s techno founders did. While some of Detroit’s techno artists have left, having opportunities for extended residencies in clubs overseas that are unavailable in Detroit or have relocated to Berlin, the current center for techno, others have stayed attached to the community, musicians, and the key infrastructure. Detroit can remain a center of techno music production in the changing music industry given the death of distance through the Internet that brings people and their networks together and given the new opportunities that video games, film, television production and new mobile technologies and production provide (Bloustien 2009:455). Micro-businesses and medium-sized enterprises such as Kyle Hall’s Wild Oats label can thus still become key players in the creative knowledge economy. Hall, a teenage DJ, producer, and label owner who was mentored by Detroit electronic music giant Mike Huckaby, has been called Detroit’s electronic future. Although Hall is often touring Europe or Asia, he runs and maintains his label from Detroit (Metro Times 2010). By staying in Detroit and supporting youth like Kyle Hall who can then create businesses and institutions as they did two decades earlier, Detroit’s techno musicians created an industry and a Beloved Community, not an assemblage of creative class individuals. Through such a community Detroit techno can continue to innovate and prosper in Detroit as Submerge label manager Cornelius Harris says, “The key with being able to function in Detroit is not to look at what it is, but to understand what’s possible and to move from that place. People in music do it all the time. They do it every day, which is amazing to me. You’ve got this thing that doesn’t exist and you bring it into existence. That’s the definition of magic” (Glasspiegel 2011).