In Vogue 4: True People? Detroit, Michigan, USA

No hope. No Dreams. The only escape is underground. UR: Somewhere In Detroit. 3.29.95

Talking in Musik of the Detroit composers who licensed tracks to the React compilation True People, Lawrence Burden of Octave One/430 West Records put it quite nicely:

I don’t want to knock any of those guys for doing what they did, but they only did it for the money…. React flashed a lot of cash around… and what they got was a bunch of B-side material… I can’t jeopardise what I do for cash.

No one is pure enough to know other people for trying to make a living, maybe some will think Burden, who refused to give tracks, is grouching, but before you even hear the record you know something is fishy. Although True People is an introductory compilation that could wean some people off indie-shit, Burden definitely has a point and , via his music, he has been able to express this in a mainstream magazine.

Although those music makers featured on True People are bringing an autonomy approach that can’t really be hyped as “Detroit”, these composers are in a weird position: Hyped to mythic standards by the European press they are virtually unknown throughout the States. This mythologising is make up from the media’s modernist lust for origins and originals (Detroit is where techno began?) coupled to that packaging of city-scene vibes (Madchester) that speaks of the search for homogeneity: If the hacks can’t have their personality journalism then the next best thing is wild generalisms.

Those composers who feature on True People are caught up in this web and when they were interviewed by Muzik as the “biggest names in Detroit techno”, some of them speak as if they are weighed down by the irreality of the myth. Many points were raisedthat made interesting reading in such a conservative magazine: The wider dynamics of music making as a corporate enterprise and the counter tradition of black economic self-sufficiency… the superficiality and rampant commercialism of the majors and the challenge held up to it of a non-personality driven music linked into co-operative clusters.

It is as if these composers are on the fringe of something, so near and yet so far from Europe, isolated from the money but suspicious of what it can do, what it could do to their own definition of “Detroit”, how it could easily compromise the music.

Antony Shakir, who has been making tracks from way before the myth kicked in (check Sequence 10), takes the words out of my mouth:

there are other people making tracks here with a completely different approach, because nobody over here is trying to lick dick trying to be in that fucking magazine. and radical is determined by the listener anyway.

Those assembled by Musik for that interview would be well aware of teh onese who were conspicuous by their absence: on the one hand, Carl Craig and Derek May, on another the Submerge collective of UR, Red Planet, 430 West/Direct Beat, Utensil, Sold in Detroit, Matrix etc, and on a third hand, the Drexciya connection of Dataphysix, Interdimensional Transmission and Chesire (Plus 8 are from the Canadian suburbs).

Of the first two, May has been threatening an album through R&R for years and Craig has just re-released his early Psyche/BFC material. Even with Saunderson out of the picture and despite Mills and Hood moving back and the latter re-issuing Hard Wax stuff, the myth of Detroit cloys most closely to Craig and May and to a certain degree it sounds like they swallowed their own press.

Craig’s latest endeavours are veering towards the pop-edge and both his, May’s and Hood’s trading off “classics” rather than trying new, simultaneous directions must be seen as a bogus pampering to the “Detroit” legend pumped out be the press.

Without interviewing all the parties in the equation and building up a microscopic picture of connection and rupture it is possible to surmise that what links the refusenik labels to the composers who participated in True People is an underlying sense that if you drift away from collective connections you can become more susceptible to having that group generated autonomy undermined, to become seduced into compromise because that’s what the music business is, that is what’s expected.

When you start trading from a myth, records start to sound like “Detroit” records (check Dave Clarke’s Red Series, then check Tronik House on KMS, check the overhyped Dave Angel).

The Europeans flock over there for a taste of “authenticity”, but there are Detroit composers who collude in the making of “Detroit” records (check the tired Model 500 LP on R&S, check Craig’s Landcruising, check the easy listening ‘electronica’ Kenny Larkin calls techno).

What happens when the myth takes a hold is that composers lose touch with what inspired them in the first place, they become ‘professional musicians’, the become detached, they want to hang out with the ‘names’, they become thoughtless. What this means for the music is interviews with hacks and the formulaic approach.

This isn’t to infer that every track produced independently is somehow superior. That would be to operate some kind of quality-control, to be too judgemental. What’s as important with the independent labels over there and over here is a feel you get that’s linked to this sense from the music that you are liktening to people who are trying to be autonomous, to do their own thing on their own terms.

This partially marks out the terrain between the refusenik labels and the ones who dealt with React. Of the Submerge collective Burden talks in glowing terms: They helped pull everyone together, to introduce a real level of unity. Is this a myth, is the UR mystique a form of counter-promotion? It may well be, but at least there is some kind of rooted/integrity that gnaw at the sellouts, at least there’s strong supportive musical vibe, an hallucinated history of what’s personally close and shared (why did UR split, was it location, was it the BMG/Ariola money?).

Just because some composers lack in ambition to become a success on other people’s terms doesn’t mean to say that the music can’t be ambitious. Too often it’s the other way round. Submerge and the other underground labels in Detroit keep their own conception of Detroit going: There’s an ever persisting sense of black cultural roots among these labels cf Terrence Dixon’s Unknown Black Shapes with its cool graphic of a moon stepping astronaut in silhouette; the American Indian theme of Red Planet 6; Octave One naming an EP Conquered Nation; the persistence of electro in the black clubs. Submerge materialise infrequently – the visible tip of an underground iceberg.

Even so, an article like this that focusses on Detroit can also bolster the myth. It’s a question of checking out every scene, of not upholding Detroit as the centrepoint, the hub around which everything depends. It’s had an influence, it has inspired us, but so has early industrial, disco, avant-garde shit, so has punk, free-form jazz, funk, so have books and movies. Let’s talk of a proliferation of margins that move and criss-cross between each other, of the margins being a centre that doesn’t even exist! The myth of “Detroit” comes into operation when others hold out its “classics” as yardsticks we should all imitate. Fuck that kneeling toward Mecca, let’s interview ourselves and wait for the connections to slowly develop. Your subconscious is a scene and the underground is your shadow-city. Let’s take it from there and see what happens. No Stars Here Comes Everybody

Flint Michigan & Preston Lancashire

• Other texts by Flint Michigan on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of content of Break/Flow 1

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