motown and the cultural politics of detroit

8/14/2019 Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit

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Motown and the cultural politics of Detroit

Berry Gordy's soul music label and the civil rights movement.

Dancing in the Street - The study by Suzanne E. Smith, HUP.

Suzanne E. Smith, assistant professor of history at George Mason University, examines the

relation between soul music's hit factory and the politics and culture of Motor Town, USA, in

Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit.

The author refers to the British press which asked Martha Reeves (of Martha and the Vandellas)

if she was a militant leader and ifDancing in the Streetwas a call to riot. The query was absurd

because, as she later remarked: "My Lord, it was aparty song." It was associated to historical

events (e.g. the Watts uprising) taking place at the same moment which the record company

could not control. Other such songs wereNowhere to Run and Shotgun. But Suzanne E. Smith

argues thatDancing in the Streetwas "never just a party song". According to her, the Motown

songs (and other tunes as well, of course) "clearly illustrate how the sounds of Detroit's streets

could articulate the needs of African Americans." The Motown sound was the most celebratedand famous of the 60s. The company transformed the American popular music scene. "Never

before had a black owned company been able to create and produce the musical artistry of its

own community, and then sell it successfully to audiences across the racial boundaries."

"Record companies first began marketing "black" music as "race records" in the 1920s in

response to the popularity of blues singers such as Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith.

Billboardmagazine monitored these records on its "Harlem Hit Parade", which eventually

became the "Rhythm and Blues" chart." Other labels such as Don Robey's Duke-Peacock label in

Houston and Vee-Jay Records in Chicago succeeded in the R&R market before Motown, but it

was Motown which brought down the segregation of the music industry when its records began

to sell outside the traditional black markets.

Berry Gordy Jr. founded Motown in Detroit in 1958 with an $800 loan from his family. From the

small house on West Grand Boulevard, which the staff quickly dubbed "Hitsville, U.S.A.",

Motown's soul music was to conquer America and the world. According to Suzanne E. Smith, it


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was the civil rights movement which "created the environment in which broader cultural

integration - as typified by Motown's wide appeal - could occur." Many have argued that Detroit

is notcritical to understanding the Motown phenomenon which could have happened anywhere -

at least in others cities with a large and vital African American population such as Chicago, New

York, Pittsburgh or Cleveland. These people "emphasize individual ambition rather than

community life, urban geography, economic structures, or race relations as factors in Motown's

rise to the top of popular music."

Suzanne E. Smith does not stress Motown's crossover success to white audiences, but its

relationship to African American audiences, and specifically to black Detroit. Motown had "a

distinct role to play in the city's black community, and that community - as diverse as it was -

articulated and promoted its own social, cultural, and political agendas" which reflected the

"unique concerns of African Americans living in the urban North". They responded to and

reconfigured the national civil rights campaign.

The author's analysis is based on "the theoretical concept of cultural formation to understand the

role of the black commercial culture in the development of a black urban community."Dancing

in the Streetstarts with Motown's founding in the late 1950s and its dominance on the popular

music charts in the mid-1960s and ends in 1973, when Motown left Detroit and its decline

already had begun.

Besides Motown, African American Detroit of the late 1950s and 1960s produced a series of

cultural, economic, political, religious and historical institutions such as the Broadside Press (one

of the first black-owned publishing houses), the Concept East Theater (the first black theater

company in the urban North), WCHB (the first radio station built, owned and operated byAfrican Americans), the Booker T. Washington Trade Association (one of the largest chapters of

the National Negro Business League) and the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement which

became the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

The author writes that Berry Gordy Jr. was "extremely wary about affiliating his business with

any organization or movement that might negatively influence his company's commercial

success. Nevertheless, both Motown's music and its entrepreneurial acumen emerged from an

urban black community that regularly asserted its "politics" through cultural and economic


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means." Like Nat King Cole, Gordy believed that "cause" music did not sell records and avoided

it at all costs. But there are also exceptions such as Stevie Wonder's rendition of Bob Dylan's

Blowin' in the Windof 1966, Aretha Franklin'sRespectof 1967,I Care about Detroitby Smokey

Robinson and the Miracles from 1968 and Motown's hiring of Junius Griffin and and Ewart

Abner in order to promote black causes. Motown vigilance is reflected in the fact that the

company did not dare to let The Temptations sing the Whitfield song War, but gave it to the

relatively unknown Edwin Starr. The song reached number one on the American pop charts in

the summer of 1970.

motown and the cultural politics of detroit

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