In the late sixties and seventies, Detroit was duly dubbed Detroit Rock City. During that time, it birthed Grand Funk Railroad, Ted Nugent, Bob Seger,? and the Mysterians, and the original American punk rockers: MC5 and the Stooges. These latter two bands eschewed hippie idealism to confront the dark realities of the times, such as the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and nationwide racial unrest. These bands echoed acts from across the Atlantic, from Black Sabbath to the English punk rock scene that emerged by the end of the seventies. As the image of the counterculture was sold into commercialism in that decade, from the shaggy fashions that became mainstream to the appropriation of the hedonistic side of hippie culture in the music scene at the expense of its egalitarian ideology, MC5 truly called for revolution, while the Stooges deflated the bloat of rock and roll and the idol worship begat at the dawn of the arena rock era. In America Iggy Pop and the MC5 did not become widely recognized for their influence for nearly two decades, when their experiments with feedback, distortion, and rhythm were celebrated by alternative rockers. In their day they remained fringe artists; MC5 played their final gig at Detroit’s Grand Ballroom for just $500.
In the 1980s, Juan Atkins sent dance music leagues ahead with just one song, 1982’s “Clear,” recorded with Rick Davis as Cybotron. The pair infused the hip-hop groove of the electro music blasted by break-dancers with a chilly expansive quality as wide and craggy as the bowels of the city. Under a host of names, Atkins and peers such as Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May established a scene that was so underground, early local fans had no clue that the music was even made in Detroit. Through Atkins’s label, Metroplex, and a club, the Music Institute, the scene grew, nurturing techno’s second wave: artists such as Richie Hawtin, Carl Craig, and Stacey Pullen, all top artists in dance music today.
Detroit seems as unaware of its groundbreaking cultural contributions as the rest of the country. There is little remnant of any of these creative microcosms left in the city, aside from the efforts of industrious citizens. Detroit seems to consume its relics with little ceremony, reflecting the city’s roots as an industrial center where the production of goods takes precedence over the production or the development of anything else. The legendary Black Bottom neighborhood, where the city’s rich blues and jazz tradition developed, was destroyed in the 1950s to make way for a new interstate. It is now alive only in the re-creations of a museum exhibit, the memories of those still around to tell about it, and a short list of books. The Motown studio and headquarters on Woodward Avenue are boarded up and vacant, as they have been since Gordy moved the company’s headquarters to L.A. in the 1980s. The only echo of the mighty Motown is the Hitsville Museum, originally a very modest affair that opened in 1988 and comprised two houses on West Grand Boulevard where Gordy lived and worked in the early days of the label. Finally, in 1995, Ford Motor Company donated $2.7 million to renovate the Hitsville Museum and install a permanent Motown exhibit in the Henry Ford Museum—located in the rich and white suburb of Dearborn. Detroit techno thumps on, though much of it is recorded in Chicago and L.A. and is revered mostly overseas.
It means “I love you” in southeastern Michigan: Eminem and Kid Rock at the opening of the Experience Music Project in Seattle, Washington, June 23, 2000.
Detroit music’s innovations are both born of and transcend the race demarcations of the city and the surrounding counties of the southern Michigan industrial complex. In a city where black and white remain separate, a different kind of racial honesty exists, one that only natives truly understand, yet one that is coming into play among a greater number of young Americans. There is a sense of awareness among Detroiters about the role of race in the sociopolitical context of American society, because it is so very visibly central to their geography. In Detroit music, there is a similar honesty, informed by the belief that artistic passion crosses all borders. This innate self-assessment is how Eminem knew he was right to be in rap, because he knew that even if Detroit fans didn’t care for his subject matter, he had the skills, the honesty, and the heart to connect.
“I don’t think you can imagine a single white performer from Detroit—from the era of McKinney’s Cotton Pickers to today—who didn’t want to sound like they were making some kind of African-American music,” says legendary rock critic Dave Marsh. “I don’t mean that they wanted to be black, whatever that would mean. I’m talking about the deepest influence for everyone from Mitch Ryder to Johnnie Ray, to Bob Seger, to the Romantics, to Iggy Pop, to the MC5—you name it, it was black music. Rob Tyner of the MC5 once told me, ‘What all of us wanted was to sound like an R&B singer.’ If you talk to the new garage bands like the Detroit Cobras, whom I know, and the White Stripes, who I don’t, but I would imagine, as dangerous as it is to imagine, that they would agree.”
Marsh should know; he grew up in Pontiac, Michigan, in the fifties, an area due north of Detroit, dominated by the environmental pollution of the foundries in its midst. In a 1971 article, Marsh wrote that the foundry grit on his family’s windowsills is his earliest memory; no matter how quickly his mother would clean it off, it would reappear the next morning. Marsh refers to his part of Oakland County as “Klan country” and recalls that KKK members torched school buses to dissuade local government from busing in black students. “That’s what 8 Mile really means,” Marsh says. “But it means something different now. In one way, that division is much more extreme because the poverty in inner-city Detroit is so enormous. But on the other hand, from a race point of view, it means less, because there are towns like Oak Park, Southfield, and parts of Birmingham that are pretty middle class with very large black populations who fled the city, too.”
The history of hip-hop in Detroit is like an episode of Survivor—a study in isolation, competition, and community among peers. A small scene began in the late eighties, with local versions of popular hip-hop styles and little else, but by the midnineties there was a rich underground, as there was in many cities, of young artists brought up on hip-hop. Dominated by the shadows of the East and West coasts, most Detroit rappers reached for a style that blended the two, flowing East Coast gritty over elastic West Coast beats—a formula that Eminem turned to gold. “I take a piece from everywhere,” he said back in 1999. “A little from the east, a little from the west. The East Coast is mainly known for lyrics and style, while the West Coast is more known for beats and gangsta rap. I kinda blend it so east meets west halfway, which is the Midwest. To me, that’s what it should sound like because that’s where I am. I’m in the middle, so I’m getting shit from both angles.”
Unlike the packed, amped club scenes in 8 Mile, Detroit hip-hop in the midnineties was spartan. “In Detroit, if you were an underground MC,” recalls Paul Rosenberg, “your crowd was mainly other MCs. Eminem would be rapping in front of a room basically of his competitors. But everybody knows who the best guys are and they still become fans of them. The best of that scene are like the rapper’s rapper.”
The scene roved around several spots, and in the tradition of Detroit cultural landmarks, they are almost all gone. Clothing designer Maurice Malone deserves a Detroit lifetime-achievement award for the Hip-Hop Shop, a boutique that turned into a hip-hop cafe on the weekends. “I used to run most of the open mikes and shit around 1993,” says Proof, “because I was the battle king. The Hip-Hop Shop was a place where you could really get your skills off. Motherfuckers came from far and wide to come there because they heard about it. We had people like Fat Joe stop through, Miilkbone, he used to stop in back in the day. Big L fucked the shit out of the Shop one day, just came in there wrecking rhymes, just for no reason.”
Around the same time, the Shelter, a room in the basement of St. Andrew’s Hall (a church turned club), hosted hip-hop Fridays full of local talent. The Shelter was the arena for the rap battles in 8 Mile; however, since it has since been redecorated, it had to be recreated in a warehouse. There was also the Ebony Showcase, another local party. The rappers and fans on the scene supported one anothe
r, but no one else in Detroit did. It was easier for Detroit rappers to get airplay on the radio in other cities than it was at home. In a reaction against the city’s hip-hop station WJLB, the Detroit Hip-Hop Coalition (a collective of hip-hop artists, managers, and local labels) picketed the station and in 2001 sent an open letter to Big Tigger, host of BET’s Rap City: Tha Bassment and the nationally syndicated radio show Live in the Den with Big Tigger:
We are quite sure that you’ve been made aware of the tensions between your new employer (JLB) and many members of the Michigan Hip-Hop community. The differences have now been well documented. For the past several years, your new employer has been very successful in the dual tasks of ignoring, snubbing, or refusing to give airplay to all but a few Detroit- or Michigan-based independent artists (regardless of requests) and offering nominal support to the metro Detroit Hip-Hop community that makes up its listening audience. This situation has become even more exasperating in recent years, chiefly because Det./Mich. artists have generated national and international acclaim.… How can a self-proclaimed “urban music” station broadcast out of Detroit (Motown) yet ignore “significant” Detroit artists? We don’t understand that one either.
In 8 Mile, the characterization of JLB falls under the fiction column, where it was portrayed as a bastion of local support. “You know, that was pointed out,” director Curtis Hanson told the Detroit Free Press. “There were mixed feelings about [the radio station], actually. Some felt that way, some didn’t.” The lack of support or curiosity may be a kind of unconscious Detroit self-hate, or just a test of its artists’ mettle. “I busted my ass,” Eminem says. “I didn’t have any money to go anywhere. There was nothing in Detroit as far as labels and shit like that to get you recognized, unless you put some independent shit out and it happens to blow up, which is rarely the case.”
“Motherfuckers don’t know, man,” Proof says. “Eminem’s song ‘Lose Yourself,’ that line about having one shot—that’s some of the best work he’s done in his life. People don’t understand, in this industry you really only do get one shot because out of sight, out of mind in this game. Detroit gave us that gusto times ten, man. It’s so hard to get a foot in the door that when you do, you fucking do that shit. You know how many people’s asses I had to whup? Niggas would not play your shit for nothin’ in this town, man. I’m talking about for nothin’, no matter what you do or say. They don’t want to support you, they don’t even act like they like you as a person. Now that I understand the music game, I see how radio is controlled by corporate shit, but I still see where they could help locals. They’re doing it more now, because Detroit is like the third biggest music market. The problem lies with Berry Gordy—when those motherfuckers left here, there was nothing to build on. Detroit was in the music industry then, we had radio. But after Motown left, everything here stagnated.”
In the Detroit music hall of fame, Eminem is less of an anomaly than he is in a more mainstream view of pop-music history. Detroit artists from Diana Ross to Iggy Pop have cross-pollinated black and white music and performed across cultural stereotypes in order to express themselves. Like pop performers Diana Ross and the Supremes did, Eminem is the hip-hop artist who has best infiltrated middle America, essentially putting Detroit hip-hop on the map. In 2003, Eminem resembled Diana Ross in another way; the Supremes’ runaway success in the sixties appealed to teenagers as much as it did to adults. But Eminem has more in common with the rebel faction of Detroit music, the vibrant rock and roll that informs his swagger and flavors his music, from his anthemic cadence to his burgeoning production sensibility. Of the icons of Detroit rock, Eminem is symbolically most like punk godfather Iggy Pop. Like the Stooges, Eminem defied the hip-hop mainstream he entered in 1999 in every way, from his content to his color, and was equally infamous before he was famous. Iggy and the Stooges, in all of their smutty glory, defied the prevailing mythology of rock-and-roll rebellion in the late sixties. Iggy eschewed the Dionysian love-god imagery of rock stars such as Jim Morrison of the Doors, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, and Roger Daltrey of the Who, instead smearing himself with peanut butter and blood and diving into the audience rather than remaining above them, enthroned on the stage. Iggy Pop baited his audience; he was reviled and was an anti-role model; he was a punk rock Slim Shady who distilled the paranoia, rage, and angst of his darkest recesses into lyrics and exorcised them onstage.
“It doesn’t come so much out of the black music tradition in Detroit, but there’s this business of attitude and in that respect, Eminem, whether he knows it, is inheriting Iggy Pop and the MC5,” Dave Marsh says. “He is inheriting the whole ‘fuck you’ culture built here in the sixties.” Eminem as Slim Shady embodies the angry-white man stereotype, but in a manner very unlike Ted Nugent, the other Detroit musician who made a career of the same. Nugent, both with and without the Amboy Dukes, was one of the top live acts in the arena-rock days of the seventies and is now infamous for his right-wing politics and his progun and prohunting advocacy. Unlike Eminem, Nugent is entirely devoid of irony or satire. “Both Ted Nugent and Eminem are angry white men,” Marsh says. “Only one of them is the angry-white man stereotype. It’s not a generational difference, which some people might imagine it to be, it is a class difference. Ted Nugent is much more middle class. Ted don’t come from factory workers, he don’t come from poor people. Ted has pretty bourgeois political attitudes, probably as a direct result of his upbringing—there’s a reason he acts like that. I’d say the most bourgeois rocker from Detroit after Ted is Iggy Pop, whose parents were both teachers and still live in a trailer park.”
There is another, unlikely element of Detroit music history that Eminem embodies, and it may explain his brilliance at constructing narrative raps such as “Stan,” from The Marshall Mathers LP, or “’97 Bonnie and Clyde,” from The Slim Shady LP. “Eminem is a great storyteller,” Marsh says. “I think Eminem relates back to the best of the Detroit songwriters. There is Bob Seger, Del Shannon when he wanted to, Holland-Dozier-Holland, and Smokey Robinson—that really puts him up there with the giants. But it is there, you can hear it in the way he thinks to tell a story. I hear Patti Smith in there somewhere, too, both in his attitude and his approach to narrative flow. Though I have to say that Patti’s race politics are terrible where Eminem’s are not. She’s very confused about race. You can tell she’s from here but she didn’t live here. For white people, people from Detroit are relatively unconfused.”
Debbie Mathers-Briggs raised her son, Marshall, in some of the worst years Detroit has seen. She moved frequently, either around the city or back to her family in St. Joseph, Missouri, requiring Eminem to change schools more than once a year, on average. By his mom’s estimate, Marshall attended between fifteen and twenty schools before finally dropping out of Lincoln High School, located north of 8 Mile Road in Warren County, in 1989. In the years between 1995 and 1998, when Eminem tried to move out of his mother’s house, sometimes with girlfriend Kim, he could only (and just barely) afford to rent a house off 8 Mile Road, in the city limits. At the time, Detroit’s unemployment rate was about 4.5 percent, meaning roughly 100,000 people were out of work. There was an average of 450 reported murders and about 20,000 burglaries annually during those years. “There’s nothing to do, so motherfuckers get bored,” Eminem recalled in 2000. “All they got to do is shoot each other and rob. I was coming back from St. Andrew’s club one time a few years back with my boy Denuan—Kon Artis, who’s in D12. This must have been 1997, I think. We were in a White Castle parking lot at the drive-through right across from a gas station, and we saw this motherfucker get popped. He dropped right in the middle of the station. We didn’t even see where the bullet came from.”
Whatever Eminem has made of his family history, now mythologized in song lyrics and captured for perpetuity in court documents, it couldn’t have been easy. The years he lived in Detroit were tough ones in his home and in the city around him. Before his daughter was born in 1995, the low wages availabl
e to him made it tough to afford rent; afterward, the added expenses made it nearly impossible. He lived, like so many young Americans, from paycheck to paycheck, trying to make ends meet in the kind of urban environment that is becoming the American norm.
“I grew up on the East Side of Detroit, but I don’t like to give people a sob story,” Eminem says. “I had a hard life, blah blah blah. A lot of people did and a lot of people do. I didn’t have the greatest upbringing, that’s why I turned to hip-hop and that’s why I love it so much.”
Detroit has served Eminem in the twofold, bisected way in which it exists, a place where division imparts an understanding in a fashion that is alien to outsiders, but becoming less so today. It is a place with very real, very visible racial and class lines and no misconceptions about what those factors mean in American society. The city itself is a constant reminder. In Detroit, abandoned neighborhoods and the ruins of its past industry are everywhere, as easy to eyeball as the relative wealth of a suburb’s residents. Where more financially well-off American cities pave over, redevelop, or preserve their past, turning former factories into loft space and landmarks into museums, so, too, are the politics of race and class often given new costumes. But as more American cities have encountered hard times and economic stagnation, they’re beginning to look a lot like Detroit. There is no denial in Detroit, only an honesty that demands the same, honed over years of economic hardship and fed by the hardiness, hope, and realism of its people. “8 Mile for me was such an affirmation,” Dave Marsh says. “It all goes back to the race thing, and the R&B influence in the past. Times have changed, but it was everything that I thought about the place. Everybody had gotten poorer, but the essence of Detroit, the essence of how people continued to relate to one another didn’t change. What you find out is that it isn’t about ethnic authenticity, but emotional authenticity. It is the gospel message and to some extent the jazz message. It’s not ‘you are right,’ it’s ‘can you get it right.’”
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