2B — Thursday, September 10, 2015
the b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

But, talking with Edwards and 

Lauer about the music scene in the 
city, I couldn’t pick up on any of 
that drama.

“It was a lot smaller then, I felt 

like,” Edwards said.

“In the beginning we were just 

like, ‘Hey, we’ve got a big loft here, 
let’s just have shows here.’ It was 
what we were doing in our parents’ 
basements and stuff before, so we 
just kept it going on a different 
level,” Lauer added.

They painted a picture of a 

group of friends and creative 
acquaintances, making music and 
art, essentially to entertain them-
selves, with little to no interest in 
expanding into an industry.

“It was never like a business 

thing. It was more just friends 
getting together and organizing 
events; it was never really a big 
moneymaker 
or 
anything. 

It 
was 
just 

doing 
things, 

and 
things 

started 
to 

come together 
naturally,” 
Edwards said. 

And 
that 

model of artis-
tic production 
seems to have 
held sway in 
Detroit for the 
better 
part 

of the last 10 
years, encour-
aging 
the 

development 
of 
talented 

semi-profes-
sional 
artists 

and 
quality, 

artist-run ven-
ues dedicated 
to good times 
and communi-
ty engagement. That ethos largely 
continues today — in nearly every 
interview I conducted for this 
piece, the “Detroit ethos” came up 
either explicitly or implicitly — but 
at some point over the last couple 
of years, things began to change.

“I’d say a couple of years ago is 

when I really noticed it,” Lauer 
said, “and that was when I met 
Kash and Martez (Claybren) and 
Takayla (Patterson), and they 
were putting these shows together 
that were like the Teklife people 
from Chicago, all of that footwork 
music and a bunch of local hip hop. 
And then the shows, it was all the 
genres in one show, and then those 
guys all started making music 
together.”

The KushMan

In the interest of full disclosure, 

I will say that Martez Claybren 
is a friend of mine. But he’s also a 
friend of just about every artist in 
Detroit, it would seem, including 
Ka$h Tha KushMan, the youngest 
member and most recent addition 
to the Bruiser Brigade — a Detroit 
rap collective directed by and sty-
listically organized around the 
music of Danny Brown. Brown 
is, I would argue, the best rapper 
Detroit has ever produced (with 
apologies to Eminem), and with-
out question the most innova-
tive, blending EDM, hip-hop and 
its British iteration, grime, into a 
menacingly surrealist product that 
fits the landscape of Detroit like 
a glove. And unlike other Detroit 
rappers like Big Sean or Eminem, 
Brown seems legitimately interest-

ed in producing a school of Detroit 
hip-hop that is both stylistically 
distinct and large enough and to 
assert itself as a legitimate chal-
lenge to the West Coast, Atlanta 
and East Coast varieties.

With rap wunderkind chops, 

Martez’s connections with the 
Chicago footwork scene and offi-
cial support from the elder Bruis-
ers, who started sneaking him into 
clubs around the city when he was 
14 years old, Ka$h seems poised to 
create a body of work as technical-
ly strong and stylistically innova-
tive as Danny Brown’s. I met him 
for an interview with his manager, 
Takayla Patterson, at a coffee shop 
on Grand River in Downtown 
Detroit. Ka$h arrived late with a 
tattoo-covered blonde girl who I 
was not introduced to and sat at 
a separate table, eating Chobani, 
for the entirety of the interview. 
He kissed Takayla on the fore-
head before sitting down and then 
explained that he was tired, hav-

ing been up all night tripping on 
acid. He was eating a muffin.

Detroit’s hip-hop scene has 

always been underground, essen-
tially, and would continue to be 
so were it not for J Dilla, Danny 
Brown and, to a lesser extent, 
Eminem. As Ka$h describes it, 
that scene is just now beginning 
to move past a schism created by 
Brown’s unconventional style and 
 

eventual rise to fame.

“I just know, back when Danny, 

when he was early starting, his 
voice is so weird that a lot of the 
cats in the city were like ‘We don’t 
really fuck with it. We don’t like it,’ 
” Ka$h said. “And later in the years 
when it evolved into the Bruiser 
Brigade, we separated ourselves 
because those people were trying 
to kick it with us all of the sudden.”

But Detroit’s rappers clearly 

have ambition — Brown, Dej Loaf, 
Big Sean and Eminem are all proof 
that the city has the ability to pro-
duce national stars. And as I talked 
to Ka$h, it became clear that he 
sees the city’s underground hip-
hop scene shooting to the forefront 
of its national counterpart.

“The artists start to realize 

that doing it by they self, they’re 
not gonna make it as far,” he said. 
“That’s why the city of Detroit 
doesn’t have as many big stars as 
Atlanta or California — it’s because 
there, even through their beefs, 
they still unify when it comes to 
the music. So I think Detroit is 
finally just seeing that and saying 
that they need to set aside all the 
B.S. and just make it work.”

And, while Ka$h can under-

stand why the city’s hip-hop scene 
has the history it does, he sees the 
younger generation of rappers — 
rappers who feel as home in the 
city’s hip-hop community as they 
do in the generic melting pot that 
characterizes the rest of its under-
ground music — are doing the 
work necessary to move toward a 
unified community of artists.

“Me, personally, I’m trying to 

kill that, because like, that was 
then, that was 10 years ago. We’re 
all pretty much in the same posi-
tion now, we need to get together.”

The (Business)man

After the Joshes told me there 

was no money in Detroit, they 
backpedaled a bit and said that I 
should look into Assemble Sound.

I googled Assemble and found 

an article in Crain’s Detroit about 
Garret Koehler, a 28-year-old 
entrepreneur from Chicago who 
moved to Detroit to work on an 
unsuccessful bid to bring the X 

Games to the 
city. 
After 

the bid fell 
through, 
he 
decided 

to 
stay 
in 

Detroit 
and 

start Assem-
ble, what he 
describes 
as 

“an organiz-
ing body for 
musicians,” 
which 
pro-

motes 
col-

laboration 
between the 
city’s under-
ground 
art-

ists and helps 
connect them 
with 
mon-

eymaking 
opportunities 
like 
licens-

ing contracts 
and 
institu-

tional grants. 

I e-mailed him and we set up a 
meeting at Assemble’s headquar-
ters — a repurposed German Prot-
estant church located a block away 
from the Detroit Central Station.

I arrived early, and Koehler, 

who looks and sounds like an 
enlightened frat bro, was making 
himself a chicken salad sandwich. 
He took me on a tour of the build-
ing, which is currently in the midst 
of massive renovations which 
is being funded by the artists 
involved in the project. He’s also 
seeking private investment and 
has entered the project into con-
sideration for a number of institu-
tional grants. The redesign plans 
call for three studios and a shared 
live room on the church’s second 
floor, with more studio space and 
a performance area on the ground 
floor.

Koehler’s office is coated with 

posters of Chance the Rapper, an 
artist who, he explained, serves as 
an inspiration for the entire proj-
ect.

“Inspired by what I saw in Chi-

cago with Chance and the Save-
Money crew, I got interested in the 
industry trends and sort of, I guess 
the change in power, if you will. 
The democratization of music and 
distribution, and what that meant 
for music,” he said.

And Koehler’s vision for how 

democratized music could look in 
Detroit is, indeed, inspiring.

“Artists move to Nashville or 

L.A. because they want to be in 
proximity to industry, it incentiv-
izes artist development and gives 

By DANIELLE RAY

Daily Arts Writer

Three years ago, Matt Cloutier, 

then a Music, Theatre & Dance 
freshman, stood in his dorm room 
in South Quad twirling a shoe 
horn, trying to imitate then drum 
major Jeffrey McMahon’s baton 
twirling techniques.

Today, Cloutier, a senior, stands 

in front of the entire band and, 
soon, the entire Big House, having 
graduated from his self-described 
“really long shoe horn” to a baton. 
He takes off his hat and begins to 
bend backward, initiating himself 
into the Michigan drum major 
position (pun intended), all eyes on 
him. He has arrived.

***

Cloutier began his musical 

journey 
in 
fifth-grade 
band, 

playing the trumpet. He continued 
playing throughout middle school 
and his time at Grosse Ile High 
School, where he joined the 
marching band, but never had a 
desire to be drum major.

“The drum major role here is a 

tad different than it was in my high 
school,” he said. “By a tad different, 
I mean a lot different. Here, it’s 
more of a performance role as 
opposed to a conducting role. I 
saw what the drum major did my 
freshman year, and I was like, ‘Oh 
wow that’s pretty awesome.’”

At the University, the drum 

major’s responsibilities have much 
more to do with what happens off 
the field than on it. During Band 
Week, which is actually between 
two and three weeks during 
the summer depending on one’s 
position, the drum major teaches 
the fundamentals of marching 
to the band for six to eight hours 
a day, first teaching all the new 
staff, then the new members, then 
returning members.

“I really enjoyed getting to learn 

about the teaching component,” 
he said. “It was really interesting 
over the summer; it’s so much 
more in-depth than I thought it 
would be. There’s so much more of 
a science to it.”

While Cloutier worked full 

time at AdAdapted, a technology 
platform, this summer, he went 
to Revelli Hall almost every day 
after work to practice his twirling 
and 
his 
teaching 
techniques. 

Former drum major Jeff Okala 
joined Cloutier to help with the 
transition, and past drum majors 

McMahon, David Hines Jr., Matt 
Cavanaugh and Gregg Whitmore 
all reached out to Cloutier with 
advice, too.

One of Cloutier’s favorite aspects 

of teaching is acting as a mediator 
between the staff and the band. As 
drum major, band members can 
approach him with any concerns 
they have, and Cloutier will work 
to find a solution.

“The staff’s not intimidating; 

they’re very nice, but it’s nice to 
have another student that’s a bit 
more approachable that they can 
come up to with any concerns 
or anything they have,” he said. 
“They can talk to me.”

The second part of Cloutier’s 

job is what he does on the field — 
the backbend, the twirling and the 
halftime performances.

“The twirling is fun because it’s 

the most creative,” he said. “You 
literally just make up whatever you 
want, and, as I’ve learned more 
twirling, it’s fun now because I 
can make stuff up more on the 
fly and just improvise my own 
little routine. That’s what I’ll end 
up doing during the halftime 
performances. There’s really not 
drill written out for me. Myself 
and the twirlers make up our own 
routines.

“During the twirling, I want 

to put some of my own personal 
flair into it and do some funny 
little dance moves and facial 
expressions,” 
Cloutier 
added. 

“It’s funny; a lot of the past drum 
majors have been really big, big 
guys, so that comes across. A lot 
of the stuff they were doing was 
really intense, but I’m a little 

smaller of a guy — a little bit more 
goofy of a personality — just being 
able to show that in the halftime 
shows.”

But, 
let’s 
talk 
backbend. 

According to Cloutier, the first 
drum major to do the backbend 
without his hat on was Matthew 
Pickus back in 1993. Since then, 
it was off and on (again, pun 
intended) 
with 
which 
drum 

majors would keep their hats on or 
take them off until the early 2000s, 
when taking off the hat became 
more standard.

“Within the last 10 years it’s 

kind of become an unwritten 
rule for the student section,” said 
Cloutier. “They want to see the hat 
off. Before that, most people did it 
with the hat on; that gives you an 
extra two and a half feet.”

And Cloutier is a people-pleaser 

— he’s going to do the backbend 
without the hat, because he knows 
you want to see it.

“I want to bring an insane 

amount of enthusiasm for the band, 
for Michigan and for everybody out 
there in the Big House, too,” he said.

***

Approximately three years ago, 

a freshman Matt Cloutier stood 
on a volleyball court in the IM 
building trying to imitate then-
drum major Jeffrey McMahon’s 
backbending skills. And for the 
first time, he succeeded.

Today, 
the 
senior 
Cloutier 

stands in front of the entire band 
and, on Saturday, The Big House. 
He takes off his hat and begins to 
bend backwards, all eyes on him 
as the top of his head reaches the 
ground. He has arrived.

ARTIST
PROFILE

IN

VIRGINIA LOZANO/Daily

Matt Cloutier will take the field for his first game as Drum Major Saturday.

them access to the people that you 
feel like you need to have access to 
to develop,” he said. “But what’s 
weird is that the whole industry is 
changing right now; it’s more about 
artist direct to consumer, direct to 
their audience, building that rela-
tionship, figuring out ways to mon-
etize your work to the extent that 
you want to. So we were less inter-
ested in, like, importing industry, 
because I don’t even know what 
that industry looks like anymore. 
More so, this is just a group of art-
ists that are just like ‘Let’s not be so 
siloed and fragmented, let’s try to 
be really intentional about building 
a more collaborative and coopera-
tive ethos in Detroit underground 
music.’”

He plans on developing edu-

cational programming for musi-
cians — like bringing copyright 

lawyers in to discuss the way roy-
alties function — and a residency 
program where artists exchange 
unlimited access to studio space 
for working as collaborators on 
other residents’ projects. A num-
ber of artists are already making 
use of Assemble Sound’s facilities 
— when I visited, one of the mem-
bers of Passalacqua, a hip-hop duo, 
was in the studio working with 
members of rock group Flint East-
wood on a track that was going to 
be licensed to ABC — and others, 
like Ka$h and Gosh Pith, certainly 
seemed interested in the arrange-
ment. But it’s hard to say what 
effect groups like Assemble might 
have on the city’s underground 
scene, and whether this coopera-
tive arrangement, inspired by the 
city’s cooperative ethos, could 
hold its own against traditional 
music industry model, as Koehler 
explained.

“Our idea was to have a cross-

genre, cross-generational space 
that’s all about championing cre-
ative cooperation and economic 
cooperation as a foundation for 
success. Not only for local musi-
cians, but also for the broader 
scene to represent,” he said. “So, 
we don’t know if, like, that actually 
is a true thing — if being collab-
orative and cooperative actually 
leads to success. It’s just a belief we 
have.”

Tires

I came back to Tires at the 

start of September to talk with 
its owner, Mike Lapp. In the two 
weeks after Gosh Pith’s music 
video shoot, the warehouse had 
been transformed into a film set, 
and a small tech crew was work-
ing on preparing for a scene from 
an adaptation of Ovid’s “Art of 
Love.” A few plaster busts were 
spread around the concrete floor, 
which was separated by 20-foot-
tall walls that had not been there 
at the time of the shoot.

Lapp, a native New Yorker, 

moved to Detroit from Brooklyn 
five years ago and opened Tires 
seven months ago, after pur-
chasing the building from his 

mechanic. He has since, with 
the help of his team, turned it 
into a professional venue that 
hosts concerts in a range of 
genres, serves as the set for film 
and music video shoots and, 
more generally, serves as a place 
where the city’s underground 
art community and business 
and political classes can meet 
and interact, on the artists’ 
terms.

Tires is, like much of Detroit, 

on the cusp between legitima-
cy and disaster, suspended in 
the tense middle ground cre-
ated when a city survives off of 
the remnants of its own recent 
past. It’s an infinitely interest-
ing moment — perhaps Ka$h’s 
ambition, blended with Assem-
ble Sound’s collaborative busi-
ness model and the cooperative 
ethos created by long-time art-
ist/residents like Lord Scrum-
mage could catapult Detroit’s 
art scene to the forefront of the 
nation’s producers of cultural 
capital. Or, maybe not. The 
ruins are standing all around 
— the price of failure is literally 
tangible, even in the paint peel-
ing off the side of Tires’ walls.

But it’s an infinitely beauti-

ful moment as well, and with 
pressure put in the right places, 
Detroit’s underground culture 
might become one of those cul-
tures built to last.

For Lapp, though, the city has 

to come to terms with itself and 
let its culture come out of its 
own shadow.

“Everywhere 
across 
the 

world there are these beautiful 
late night cultures that the cit-
ies can make money and tax and 
have a good time, and everyone 
respects it, so why do we have 
to hide in the shadows and be 
afraid?” he said. “There’s fund-
ing out there for artists, there’s 
funding out there for film, 
there’s funding out there for all 
of these things that are from 
9 to 5 p.m. and my question is, 
‘What about everyone else? 
What about all of the others?’”

VIRGINIA LOZANO/Daily

Gosh Pith’s Josh Freed and Tires owner Mike Lapp direct a music video shoot.

DETROIT
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