“And I’ll bring my bazooka,” Eminem says, in a mobbed-up Italian accent. “And ah, I’ll blow up the place. Then we’re good.”
The pizza is eaten and the beer is drunk. The plates are cleared and a round of shots arrive from the bartender.
“OK!” Eminem says. “You gonna drink that, Paul?”
Later, TLC’s “No Scrubs” plays as we walk to the door.
“Hey, Marshall,” says a smiling lady, “I see your video all the time.”
“Hi, Holly,” Eminem says.
“I’m so fucking proud of you!”
“Thanks a lot, Holly.”
“How’s your daughter doing?”
“She’s good,” he says. “Real good.”
“You take care of yourself, Marshall. Be careful.”
Eminem walks across the parking lot, crunching snow underfoot. He strides along an invisible path he knows well, but he doesn’t go to the Dumpster this time; or around the back to where he’d park his worn Ford Tracer. He opens the door to the chauffeured van that is billowing smoke, and he disappears inside.
DETROIT IS AND IS NOT A TYPICAL American city. It is a Midwestern metropolis with all that entails: the full spectrum of neighborhoods, from no-frills, working-class life to suburbs as plush as executive pay can buy. But Midwestern small-town quaint resides next to burned-out factory wasteland; country clubs and crack houses lie within short miles of each other. As a great flat bastion of conservatism, the Midwest screams organized homogeneity lacking in character, while Detroit flies the bird.
It is the fuck-you cousin of the Midwest, if not the country. Safety after dark in metropolitan Detroit is a legitimate concern; a trip to a downtown club can be on par with taking your life in your hands. People raised in Detroit have their stories involving random acts of violence or scenes taut with threat. They relate them with a mix of pride, nonchalance, and Midwestern economy. There’s a tactile air to Detroit, like New Orleans or New York—a permeating mood. Detroit feels dead yet electric, animated in rigor mortis. Like New Orleans’s mausoleums, the decay is above ground, among the living. There’s regret in Detroit, a tangible loss echoed by the vacant fortresses of industry. The city feels closed, resentful, unconventional, and conservative. There is an unstable yet exciting energy to Detroit too, perhaps born of listlessness, lawlessness, and the overlap of dreams and decrepit memories.
Wee Shady: As a toddler Eminem was shuttled across the Midwest, eventually landing in Detroit. (Picture from 1974.)
Detroit has proved itself to be America’s most racially divided city despite an all-encompassing business that blurred the barriers. Auto-industry economics made the factory line color-blind, but the county lines within the city have been painted black and white for centuries. Detroit celebrated its three hundredth birthday in 2001, with little but hope to celebrate, even though times have improved: It is a stagnated city that hasn’t seen a population increase for most of a decade. The city’s fortunes have peaked and dipped with that of the auto industry since 1908; it is an American dream that did not come with a warranty.
Detroit’s juxtaposed soulfulness and divisive delineations have, however, made for unique cultural crossbreeding. In its rifts, self-hate, and innovation, it is our most American city. It is a city founded by French fur traders, where freed Southern blacks migrated to stake their claim next to whites; a city where unions made equality a question of class and racial prejudice ignited more upheaval than in any other city in the nation. Detroit is a city divided from within and in identity is divided from the rest of the country. But more American cities become like Detroit each year, eroded by economic downturn, the loss of manufacturing dollars to overseas vendors, the high cost of living, and in some cases an influx of immigrants and state governments that are more sympathetic to the suburbs. The poverty gap between rich and poor is growing steadily wider in America, as income has shown growth only in the richest ranks of the private sector. Many more American metropolises, like Detroit, are being stratified further along racial lines: Poor minorities generally remain in the cities while poor whites are able to move to affordable outlying areas. It has been so in Detroit since the sixties, if not earlier; now cities such as Newark, New Jersey; Miami, Florida; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Cleveland, Ohio; and New Orleans, Louisiana, are facing similar circumstances. No state exemplifies America’s increasing class divide better than Connecticut: According to the 2002 census, that state was ranked richest in the union, but its capital city, Hartford, was ranked the poorest.
The government’s 1990 census ranked Detroit as the ninth largest city in our country, home to more than 200,000 residents. It was also ranked first in poverty: One-third of the population in the metropolitan area lived below the poverty line. In 1990, there were more single-parent households and more residents on public assistance there than in any other major urban area. Detroit adults were second to last in the top seventy-seven cities for the percentage of who had earned college diplomas. The average worth of a home in metropolitan Detroit was about $25,000, whereas similar homes in Boston were worth close to $160,000, or in Los Angeles, $240,000. The year 1990 was a low point not seen in the Motor City for twenty years.
The history of Detroit reflects the history of the auto industry—and the river running through its rifts. Henry Ford put Detroit and the mass-produced motor car on the map in 1908 and the automobile has remained, aside from housing, Americans’ primary expenditure (consider the number of auto ads shown during an average hour of network TV compared with those of other products). In one fell swoop, Ford’s production-line system gave the city of Detroit a purpose.
The two World Wars established Detroit as the throne of vehicular industry. When World War I broke out in 1914, Detroit’s factories churned out trucks and honed their production capabilities. In the years between the wars (1919 to 1938), America expanded its roadway system and drove it like mad. In the 1920s, the auto industry grew faster than any other industry in the country, and Detroit swelled to meet the needed output. But the city did not grow organically as it should have; it became a residential auto plant. No other industries moved in, no colleges or cultural centers were built. It was the equivalent of an Old West mining town for the motor age.
Eminem as a teen in the car his mother gave him (1992). Proof called it “the stinkin’ Lincoln,” and it was depicted as less-than-reliable in 8 Mile
In the twenties, the largest wave of Italian and Eastern European immigrants came to America, but very few moved to Detroit. Immigration laws kept most of them out of the auto industry, leaving Southern workers to man the lines. In these years, the black majority moved into Detroit—and remained: African-Americans account for 23 percent of the city’s population today, almost double the national average.
In the 1930s Detroit redefined the life of the American worker. The establishment of auto unions to defend workers’ rights laid the groundwork for what we now call the middle class. The auto unions were well organized and became, at the time, the country’s most powerful, able to halt production at a factory successfully enough to send profits into the basement if their demands were not met. The unions broke down barriers for black workers, more out of necessity than due to any moral stance: Union leaders realized that if the black labor majority was left out of the unions, they would be called upon to replace the white workers if a strike were declared. The auto unions ensured equal pay and equal rights for black members, an unprecedented move at the time, securing Detroit the most integrated industrial workforce in the country.
During World War II, Detroit was dubbed the “Arsenal of Democracy”—its factories provided the Allies with a massive supply advantage. The war necessitated high-volume production and forced industry into the suburbs in order to churn out planes, tanks, and trucks at larger, newer factory sites. After the war, returning soldiers moved to Detroit in search of a fair, blue-collar slice of the American dream. The modern plants located in the suburbs eclipsed the older ones in the city when producti
on reverted back to automobiles, and gradually the nexus of the industry moved out of the urban hub. The older factories, like the neighborhoods around them, began to decay.
White workers followed the newer facilities and management positions in a flight out of the city and into the outlying townships, closer to the new factories. For a while, the unions kept wage rates high and the quality of life stable for their members, but when the market began to slow with the onset of the Vietnam War in the sixties, many auto manufacturers cut costs by subcontracting work to factories in other states or overseas, out of union jurisdiction. In the 1970s, the industry took a major downturn, crushed by efficient, well-made imports from Germany and Japan, and due to an oil and gas crunch that did not bode well for gas-guzzling American luxury cars. The auto manufacturers further trimmed operating costs by automating production and eliminating employees. Automated assembly lines translated into more management positions, however, to oversee operations, while unskilled laborers, a major percentage of urban Detroit’s workforce, became unemployed. The move to automation favored white workers, who, on average, had attained a higher degree of education, and management-level jobs were more accessible to them.
These changes in the auto industry deepened the existing racial divide and doubled it along economic lines. Blacks who moved up the economic ladder encountered prejudiced opposition when they tried to move into the better, predominantly white neighborhoods. Open conflicts were common in the fifties, as black and white city neighborhoods began to overlap. Whites yielded, moving out of the city to take advantage of federal development grants, while the black population, for the most part, remained. The line along 8 Mile Road, metropolitan Detroit’s east-west artery, was permanently drawn. To the north side of 8 Mile Road is Warren County, the city’s first suburb; on the other side is the city of Detroit. Warren runs the gamut from run-down trailer parks to middle-class homes, and it is overwhelmingly white. The city side of 8 Mile Road, or at least sections of it, looks identical to its counterpart to the north, but it is predominantly black and lower class. The surrounding neighborhoods closest to 8 Mile on both sides are poor and crime-ridden. Still, if the road manifested its symbolism to Detroiters, instead of a road it would be a wall. It is a true divide between the classes and the races, and the two sides do not mingle much. Residents in Warren, for example, removed basketball hoops from the township’s public parks to discourage Detroit kids from crossing the road to play there. Predictably, suburban police are more plentiful than city cops along 8 Mile Road. Though the statistics were worse a decade ago, the reputation of what lies south of 8 Mile Road in the Motor City—and the communal suburban anxiety about it—remains: lawlessness, robbery, and murder. In the film 8 Mile, the road was a metaphor to the same effect: Dividing black from white and rich from poor, it symbolized the hurdles between Eminem’s character Jimmy Smith Jr. and his dream, the border he must find a way to cross.
Since this country was founded, federal guards have been called to Detroit four times to quash black-white violence: twice in the twentieth century, twice in the nineteenth. A telling statement on Detroit race relations came from George Edwards, a liberal police commissioner in the sixties who tried to increase sensitivity to the racial divide among the city’s police force. Edwards concluded that a “river of hatred” ran between the city’s whites and blacks.
The Civil Rights Movement slicked that river with oil and torched it. The Movement was zealously supported by Detroiters and the Detroit United Auto Workers Union. Prior to the March on Washington, Detroit sponsored what was at the time the largest public display of support for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: a 1963 parade down Woodward Avenue. Nonetheless, in 1967, a four-day racial riot occurred that claimed forty-three lives.
Today, Detroit attracts few new residents, even among the country’s newest immigrants. The U.S. Department of Commerce estimated in 1998 that only one in a hundred Detroit residents were new to the city. The population of Detroit’s suburbs has dropped as well. These towns, however, are still not poor. There is a ring of mostly white counties in which the yearly income ranks seventh in the country out of cities of similar size. In a study done in 1997, the income of Detroit households in the well-to-do suburbs averaged about $56,000 a year, about $10,000 more than metropolitan families in New York and L.A.
While the suburbs are generally white and rich, the central city majority is black and poor. The 2000 census states that the city was 76 percent African-American, with only a 5 percent representation living in the suburbs. Of the 76 percent in the city, nearly half of those African-Americans are under the age of eighteen, living in impoverished homes, compared to just 10 percent of kids in the same straits in the suburbs.
This degree of racial and economic division is as close as a major American city gets to the kind of class imbalance found in Third World countries. During the years of the auto industry’s decline, particularly in the seventies, African-Americans were unable to find better housing, steady employment, and good schools. The tense undercurrent in Detroit today is a product of the decline of labor economics, definite unflinching patterns of residential segregation, and a tradition of racial upheaval and mistrust.
As the economies of the seventies and eighties wreaked havoc on Detroit, racial tensions eased a bit as blacks and whites found themselves walking the same poor middle ground. However, negative racial attitudes still prevail. In their 2000 book, Detroit Divided, professors Reynolds Farley, Sheldon Danziger, and Harry J. Holzer conclude from an array of interviews that most African-Americans in Detroit feel that they miss out on better jobs, promotions, and better neighborhoods because of systematic discrimination, regardless of their level of achievement or education. The whites who were interviewed recognized the same prejudice among residents of the city and surrounding areas but feel that it poses less of a practical problem for black Detroiters. They feel that blacks don’t work hard enough or take advantage of the opportunities presented them. The authors concluded that, while blacks see discrimination everywhere, whites seem to doubt their neighbors’ intelligence and feel that they are difficult to get along with, as neighbors or employees.
In the nineties, Detroit along with other Midwestern manufacturing centers bounced back as the country enjoyed the boosted economy of the Clinton years. General Motors opened new plants and the city built a new sports center and casinos that increased the number of unskilled labor positions. In 1992, the unemployment rate in Detroit was the highest in the country. Six years later, it had fallen at a rate more than that of any other city in the country, but still remained well behind the average.
Detroit has always been at the mercy of the hands of industry. The city was not developed with an eye toward infrastructure or culture and in its bountiful times did little to change that. The auto trade’s down years have left Detroit pocked with gaping holes—zones full of abandoned factories and rotting neighborhoods. In these craters, however, cultural flowers have bloomed. An architectural example, rendered more by cost-cutting necessity than design, is the parking structure in downtown Detroit that was used as the setting in 8 Mile for an impromptu rap battle between Jimmy Smith Jr. and Free World, his rap rivals. The garage was built in 1977 into the gutted remains of the Michigan Theater, which in 1926 was one of the city’s largest, most ornate movie houses. The molding and intricate plasterwork of the theater were preserved within the new structure, not to save history but to avoid the costs of removal. The result is a unique, beautiful, and inadvertant statement on the true nature of the city itself.
In contrast to the lack of mainstream culture, a rich musical tradition well outside of the lines of the norm is Detroit’s legacy. Though there is little evidence in the form of celebrated music festivals, such as New Orleans’ Jazzfest, or large museums, such as Seattle’s Experience Music Project, to reflect the fact, Detroit is one of the most influential and least-appreciated cities in the history of American music. From the country-and-western music of plains-states workers
who moved to the city in the twenties to the fertile jazz scene of Detroit in the fifties, local musicians consistently took new turns at developing their own sound. From MC5 to Motown to Kid Rock to Carl Craig—Detroit artists are the innovators in the music culture of their day, alien to the norm and free to create due to a geographical and cultural alienation from the mainstream.
The Bassment: the building that housed the Bass Brothers’ former recording studio on West 8 Mile Road in Ferndale, Michigan. Eminem’s Slim Shady EP was recorded there in 1997.
Some of the richest music of the twentieth century was born in Detroit, nurtured in pockets of a city that has no outlets to support them, in the thick central industrial belt of a country ruled by its coasts. Blues legend John Lee Hooker followed the Southern black migration to Detroit, developing his eclectic take on the craft in the Paradise Valley and Black Bottom sections of the city in the forties. Singer Dinah Washington was raised in Detroit, peppering everything from R&B to blues to jazz with her critically disdained, distinctive, high-pitched grit. The Detroit jazz scene of the fifties gave us innovators such as jazz chanteuse Betty Carter, who shredded convention with radical tonal and time changes, while guitarist Kenny Burrell epitomized cool swing, gracing records by all the greats of his day (Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Milt Jackson, John Coltrane, and Duke Ellington among them). Of course, Detroit is more known for Motown Records, the label that changed the music business in the sixties. Visionary Berry Gordy Jr. founded Motown Records in 1959 in a recording studio housed in a small two-story home on West Grand Boulevard. Gordy made stars overnight—the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas (all Detroit talent)—as well as launched Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder, and the Jackson 5. Gordy was the original hip-hop entrepreneur, nurturing and packaging black urban talent for mainstream consumption and cultural domination. He created the Motown sound: pop with soul, both precocious and innocent. The Motown sound spoke to teenagers because it reflected both sides of teenhood, and the operation became the most successful black-owned company in the nation.
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