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The Michigan Daily | michigandaily.com | Thursday, September 10, 2015
the b-side
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ETROIT — In the last room of a gallery at the Cranbrook Art Museum, a video of
artist Nick Cave dancing in his signature soundsuits at various locations across
Metro Detroit played on a loop out of a TV nestled in a far corner. I sat, transfixed,
for a half hour on a bench in front of the TV, watching the flamboyant giants gyrate
and hop into the air in front of abandoned houses adorned with paintings of unaban-
doned houses, under the crumbling domed ceiling of an art deco theater, in front of
the anesthetic machinery of the Ford Assembly Plant in Wayne. There was something
uncanny in the footage — in the way the faux fur shimmered against the gleaming
white epoxy floor of the Ford plant, in the way the sound of thousands of rattling twigs
swelled and then disappeared amid the chatter of market day on the city’s east side —
something uncannily right. I felt that the suits had to have been made for Detroit: for
its industrial ruins, urban blight and violently persistent vibrancy.
I was reminded of a description of Detroit from the novel “Middlesex” by author
Jeffrey Eugenides, himself a native of the city:
“Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities ded-
icated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and
therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.”
What Eugenides captures so masterfully here is the way in which the culture of a
European world capital like Paris or London — a culture that drags in its wake a sense
of historical continuity, of progress, of the linear progression of time; a culture meant
to last — seems so violently out of place in a city like Detroit, which, money and indus-
try having left it, simply can’t afford the luxury of making a museum of itself.
In the Dark Ages, after the fall of the Roman Empire, medieval Italians built houses
out of marble salvaged from Roman palaces and filled bathhouses in with dirt to make
foundations for Christian churches. This same practice of salvage and reuse, which
you might consider a type of recycling, is very much at play in Detroit today.
But in the Motor City — where the auto industry and the exuberant culture it
helped fund are still fresh corpses — “recycling” doesn’t really capture the feel of
what’s going on. It feels more like cannibalism.
But cannibalism has its culture, too. It has painting, sculpture, photography, the-
ater, religion, sports — and it has music.
The New Guys
In mid-August, I went to one of the newest sites of the city’s architectural autoph-
agy: Tires. Situated on a grassy corner about two blocks away from Martin Luther
King High School on East Lafayette Street, Tires is a music venue and creative space
whose name alludes to the old Lafayette Tires building, which now serves as the ven-
ue’s walls and roof. It has no signage and its massive garage doors are surrounded by
a chain link fence. The venue has no website, but the performance schedule can be
found on owner Mike Lapp’s Instagram account, scrawled in black ballpoint pen on a
series of napkins and yellow legal pads.
I was there to watch a music video shoot for “K9” by Gosh Pith, a duo comprised
of University alums Josh Smith and Josh Freed. The Joshes moved to Detroit in 2013
and quickly became mainstays of the city’s underground arts scene, fitting seamlessly
into a musical culture characterized by extensive cross-pollination of genres, ware-
house and loft parties, heavy bass, industrial and electronic elements and a generally
bohemian outlook. Josh Smith sings and plays guitar, regularly uses “fuck” and “shit”
with an infectious exuberance in the course of conversation, and has a large mane
of blonde-dyed hair. Josh Freed is a producer, has shoulder-length brown hair and
glasses and comes across as the more restrained half of the duo. Both refer to their
music as “tunes.”
While I watched the Joshes direct their music video from the stage at Tires, I
looked around the sizable crowd assembled for the shoot and saw a number of faces
that unfalteringly appear at parties and concerts around the city. There was an editor
from Daily Detroit, there was a DJ I saw almost get into a fist fight over performance
time at the Russell Industrial Center and there were a number of photographers,
directors, graphic designers, promoters and singers whom I hadn’t met but whose
Soundcloud pages and personal websites invariably make their way across my Face-
book and Twitter feeds. I found that this was the way things usually go in Detroit as,
in a phone interview a week later, Josh Smith explained how he and Freed became a
part of the city’s music scene.
“Before we moved down (to the city), everybody went to the same parties and you
just started to recognize familiar faces,” he said. “We kind of just started going to
shows as much as we could, and we were making tunes simultaneously, and so it was
just a natural progression, I suppose. If you go to every party for like two months, you
can book a show just because you know everybody at the show that you just met.”
And Gosh Pith’s reach and success as a band does, in fact, seem to have grown
as quickly as Smith described. Since forming two years ago, they have released one
six-track EP called “Windows,” have another project slated for release later this fall,
and are already capable of booking shows across the country and in Canada. Our
phone interview was conducted on the Kalamazoo leg of a tour that included stops in
Toronto, Milwaukee, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, all
arranged by the Joshes themselves, who have no PR rep or management team.
Their sound, however, is very much grounded in and supported by the Detroit
music scene.
“We want to make shit that’ll sound good on the sound systems that are around the
city,” Smith said. “We want it to bang, we want the bass to hit hard, and everybody in
Detroit is real as fuck so we make songs that are well-written, that are tangible and
have some real emotion about them … (Detroit) informs our music because we go out
and get fucked up every weekend, whether we’re playing or not we go support our
friends, and it just informs our psyche.”
Even Gosh Pith’s cross-genre experimentation is made possible by the city’s unique
musical landscape and tight-knit artist community.
“So many of the shows that go down in Detroit are the most broad-genre shows you
would ever find, I think, because it’s kind of a small music community,” Freed said. “If
you need someone to fill out a bill, it doesn’t matter if they fit that tightly with your
band … It’s cool that our band could have any sound and fit in and do well in that space,
but I think that we have done a pretty OK job of being able to play within the genre
and kind of shift around.”
Creativity abounds in the city, and it feeds off of itself, producing an increasingly
refined, professional sound with each new addition to the scene. But as large as its
pool of cultural history and creative material might be, Detroit and its culture indus-
try are still suffering from fallout left behind by the collapse of the auto industry and
the socioeconomic structure built on top of it. Traditional economic logic holds that
growth requires capital, and, as Smith made very plain in our interview, “There’s not
much money in Detroit.”
The Old Guys
While Gosh Pith’s hustle and talent is clearly a major component of their success,
they’re also operating in an artistic community that is still essentially in its infancy,
particularly in comparison with the music industries of larger cities like New York,
Nashville, Atlanta or Los Angeles.
Since Motown Records relocated to the west coast in the early ‘70s, leaving a mas-
sive dent in the city’s profile as a culture industry, maybe a dozen Detroit artists —
including J Dilla, Eminem, Jack and Meg White, Dej Loaf, Kid Rock, Big Sean and
Danny Brown — have managed to achieve national recognition while maintaining
their identification with the city as an essential part of their artistic personae. On the
one hand, the diversity of those artists’ styles and portrayals of what it means to be a
Detroiter reflects, on the one hand, the real diversity of a city whose popular image
became, thanks to the ascendancy of the Big Three and Motown, a flattened carica-
ture of something akin to an assembly line spitting out Model Ts full of Stevie Wonder
records. At the same time, however, the vast range of artists and styles operating in
the city over the last 20 or 30 years also belies a fragmented cultural consciousness, a
city riven by population decline and competition for scant resources.
Visiting Detroit’s underground music venues this past summer, however, “frag-
mented” would have been the last word on my mind. During our interview, the Joshes
pointed me in the direction of a number of artists and bands that supported them
when they first arrived in the city — the weirdest of which was, perhaps, Lord Scrum-
mage.
Alex Lauer and Conor Edwards, two members of this loosely organized experimen-
tal act, moved to Detroit and began making music in 2006, the beginning of Kwame
Kilpatrick’s second term as mayor of the city and just a year after Ford and GM stocks
were downgraded to junk status. It was also the year Detroit hosted both Super Bowl
XL and a significant portion of the World Series. The Detroit Institute of Arts, Orches-
tra Hall and Fox Theatre were all undergoing major restorations. Detroit was making
a bid to rebrand itself as a tourist destination at the same time as lifelong residents
of the city decried the funneling of resources toward the Midtown and Downtown
areas and away from communities suffering from crumbling infrastructure, crime
and urban blight.
Detroit’s New Underground Music
By Adam DePollo
Managing Arts Editor
Cultural
Cannibalism:
Photo by Virginia Lozano / Design by Francesca Kielb and Shane Achenbach
See DETROIT, Page 2B