Motor City proves potent engine for popular culture

The nominations are in for 2002, and it’s time to announce America’s newest cultural hot spot. New York? Not this time, paisano. How about Austin? Chapel Hill? San Jose? Nope, none of those gleaming New Economy towns.

The winner, believe it or not, is Detroit, one of the scrappiest, most soulful burgs in the nation -- as well as one of the most complex and misrepresented. Detroit, a.k.a. Hockeytown, where the fans at Joe Louis Arena are as tough as the players slamming each other out on the ice. Detroit, longtime urban boogeyman of the national imagination, where the citizenry used to vent its anger and despair by torching the town on Devil’s Night (Oct. 30) in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Detroit, which columnist Frank Rich of the New York Times, in a profile of Detroit-bred rapper Eminem, recently dubbed “America’s closest approximation of hell.”

Yeah, yeah. For years Detroiters have weathered the slurs and swallowed the bad jokes. Most insults were uttered by people who’ve probably never set foot south of 8 Mile Road, which divides Detroit proper from its northern suburbs.

But culturally speaking, the Motor City has been on a roll lately, for reasons that tend to elude national trend watchers and fashion arbiters. A geographic and cultural anomaly -- it is the only major U.S. city that looks south into Canada -- Detroit is a blue-collar Midwestern metropolis invented by French Canadian fur trappers, then reinvented by Appalachian and Mississippi Delta migrants who came to work in the auto plants.

“Manual labor” isn’t a dirty term in Detroit, whether you’re a stamping plant worker or a guitar player. It’s a place of proud working-class sentiments and long memories, where the populace draws solidarity and inspiration by huddling against outsiders’ negative perceptions. A city where a do-it-yourselfer aesthetic substitutes for the creativity-by-committee approach of corporate Hollywood and its ilk. Former auto worker Berry Gordy brilliantly fused all these local tendencies when he used assembly-line techniques to recruit, train and popularize his Motown music empire.

With its miles of blighted buildings and boarded-up factories, Detroit still has a long, hard road ahead of it. But in its blunt way, the Motor City is showing that cultural vitality isn’t always picturesque. Nor is it usually achieved without hardship and struggle. “Detroit had more than its share of problems,” says Marilyn Wheaton, director of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department. “But get over it. It’s coming back.”

Having worked in downtown Detroit for five years in the early to mid-’90s, I heard plenty of chamber of commerce palaver about Detroit’s “comeback,” which always seemed to be just around the corner. But there are signs that the “Renaissance City” is emerging from its 30-year-long Dark Ages, a period that followed Detroit’s 1967 riots, the worst in modern U.S. history until L.A.’s civic unrest in 1992.

A creative hub

Detroit, a three-quarters African American city of just under a million, is a hub of magnificent Art Deco skyscrapers, elegant parks and grand, if faded, homes. It has given the world the mass-production automobile, the Motown sound, techno dance music, Robin Williams, Tim Allen, Alice Cooper, Aretha Franklin, Jackie Wilson, Francis Ford Coppola and the Coney Island chili hot dog, a confection perhaps only a bred-to-the-bone Detroiter can love.

Today, Detroit neo-garage rock bands like the White Stripes and the Detroit Cobras are kicking out the jams at venues across the country. Last Memorial Day weekend, 1.5 million people attended the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, the largest draw for such an event anywhere, and a fitting tribute to the city where Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson pioneered beat-driven, computer-generated dance music.

“What is the connecting thread with Detroit music? A kind of earthiness, I think, directness, no-nonsense. And also isolation, because we’re not on either coast, so things tend to incubate here,” says Susan Whitall, a writer for the Detroit News and author of a book about the women of Motown.

Several of this fall’s best films use Detroit as their indispensable backdrop. They include “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” an affectionate documentary about the studio musicians who backed up the Temptations, Supremes and other ‘60s R&B; acts; and, of course, “8 Mile,” Curtis Hanson’s gritty biopic about Eminem.

Michael Moore’s documentary “Bowling for Columbine” spends a good deal of time wandering Detroit and his nearby hometown of Flint, trying to fathom the national gun fetish. Though Moore’s depiction of the city isn’t exactly flattering, his movies (including “Roger and Me”) have testified to Michiganders’ resiliency and character. Yet another Detroit-set movie, Joe Carnahan’s well-made, morally murky cop drama “Narc,” starring Jason Patric and Ray Liotta, will open soon.

Alas, like many cities, Detroit sometimes fails to recognize its native sons and daughters until they’re halfway out the door. Sam Raimi nurtured his peculiar talents in Detroit for years before moving to Hollywood and directing this summer’s No. 1 movie “Spider-Man.” Another metro Detroit transplant, Jeffrey Eugenides, author of “The Virgin Suicides,” which is set in Detroit, this year impressed book critics even more with his second novel, “Middlesex.”

Their hometown’s influence can still be felt in their work, however, and many other Detroit artists either have stayed put or moved back home after making their reputations elsewhere. As for the omnipresent Marshall Mathers III -- love him, hate him or simply ignore him -- he has dragged rap music kicking and screaming across the borderline that separated boomers from the hip-hop generation.

It would be dangerous to over-romanticize Detroit, one of the poorest big cities in the country, which only recently landed its first new movie theater to be built in decades. Years of white flight, economic disinvestment and insensitive freeway building have ravaged the city as surely as did the ’67 riots, when tanks were called in to calm the burning streets.

Yet people in “the 313” (Detroit’s area code) somehow keep churning out popular culture that’s as big and durable as a Ford pickup. “I jokingly tell people there’s something in our water,” says Chris Jaszczak, a Detroit native and downtown theater owner. That brew isn’t to everyone’s taste, but it makes for a strong constitution.