Page 185 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 179

copping an attitude about this in terms of which moment in the dialectic is or
isn’t ‘authentic’ or musically creative: I am simply arguing that there are,
numerically, thousands of bands in my position for every single band in Ray’s
‘ratified’ position. The importance of Jarrett’s essay is that it allows discussion
of these categories to proceed not as value-laden aesthetic judgments, but rather,
as descriptive developmental stages along the arduous path towards popularity
(which is, regardless of what they tell you, what every musician either openly or
secretly longs for).

Saturday, November 4th
The drive from Chicago to Detroit was a five-hour unguided tour of the rust-belt.
We drove through the smoggy shadows of the giant steel mills that tower over
the abandoned neighborhoods of Gary (a city that claims the highest per capita
murder rate in America), around the boarded-up factories that ring the crumbling
bypass in Toledo, and then on into the eerie, post-apocalyptic never-land of
Detroit, where nuclear power plants linger on the horizon, glass towers glitter
blindingly from the armed enclave of ‘downtown’, and mangled, rusted thickets
of steel and concrete encircle the bombed-out ghettos. Amidst the decay, nestled
amongst the forgotten homes that must have been tributes to ‘progress’ back in
the 1950s, we came upon the fabled ‘Cass corridor’, a loosely knit neighborhood
of artists, poets, squatters, musicians, activists, crackheads, and missionaries. We
were scheduled to perform at the Trumbull Theater, a community reclamation
project that presents poetry readings, live music, and experimental theater. The
organizers were nowhere to be found when we arrived, so half the band napped
in the van while the rhythm section played catch in the abandoned lot next to the
theater. When we finally got inside the ‘theater’ we found puddles of rain water
on the stage, no PA, and a pre-historic heating unit that probably hadn’t worked
since the Lions left town for Pontiac.
To make a long story short, we eventually scraped together a PA, salvaged the
stage, put on extra layers of long-johns, plastered the room with political papers,
had ourselves a swell community dinner of pesto and tea, and had a damn fun
show with Roberto Warren (a local African poet who brought along five
percussionists), The Blanks (a Detroit punk band whose drummer doubles as
editor for the anarchist mag, Fifth Estate), and The Yell Leaders (a band from
Milwaukee featuring a fantastic female percussionist/vocalist). By the time we
took the stage the entire band was bundled in so many clothes that we looked
like floats for a rag-tag parade; the audience was forced to dance, however, just
to stay warm, so once again the music took over, the strange erotics of sound and
dance crept through the hall, and, by the end of the night, it all somehow seemed
strangely ‘worth it’. I guess the point here is that while everyone involved lost
money and caught a cold, we also produced a remarkably multiracial, cross-class,
artistic and political smorgasbord that doubled as a playful community meeting
space within which to dance, politick, or simply enjoy the company of