James Adams

History 579

Suzanne E. Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambrdige: Harvard University Press, 1999)

Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit provides a rebuttal to the popular and, according to author Suzanne E. Smith, erroneous view that Motown’s success was little more than a triumph for the can-do American attitude. Smith reconnects the rise of Motown to its roots in black urban Detroit. She argues that the historical and geographic contexts of the company are inextricably linked to its story. Her book centers on Motown’s ambivalent cultural and economic relationship with the community from which it sprang.

In her first chapter, Smith details the contrast between perception and reality in Detroit race relations and begins to describe Motown’s role in those relations. She points out that Motown explicitly endorsed black civil rights by recording and reproducing Martin Luther King’s “Great March to Freedom” speech, given in Detroit. She also notes that Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr.’s purchase of the white-owned Graystone Ballroom for Motown performances symbolized black resistance to the displacement Detroit’s “urban renewal” projects had caused. Motown’s example led Martin Luther King to see Detroit as a haven for positive race relations. Yet the race riots of 1863 and 1943, as well as modern racial injustices such as the murder of a black prostitute by white police, offer compelling evidence that white tolerance and black advancement in Detroit were quixotic at best.

In her second and third chapters, Smith examines Motown’s role as a beacon of black entrepreneurship and black culture, respectively. According to Smith, Motown’s success vindicated the black economic self-empowerment movement’s goals. Yet Motown’s aversion to explicit political activism was a necessary part of its business practices, and it often failed to support black political movements. For example, the company neglected to record Malcolm X’s Detroit speech shortly after it had recorded Martin Luther King’s. Though its reinvestment in the surrounding community was limited, Motown inspired others to rally for black employment and an increase in black-owned businesses.

The profit motive also circumscribed Motown’s role in Black cultural dissemination. Smith describes the “assembly line” method of song creation at work in Hitsville, U.S.A to demonstrate that the record company saw good business as its primary function and assisting in the preservation and production of black “art” as a secondary goal. The delay that black poets with politically relevant messages, such as Langston Hughes, experienced in Motown’s release of their recordings is further evidence that Motown’s responsibility to civil rights and the black community could be easily superseded by business interests.

Ironically, Motown was presented as distinctly “Afro-American,” representing the goals of the black community despite rifts between the record company and the community it ostensibly represented. In her fourth chapter, Smith explores the elements that made many Americans see Motown’s music as “Afro-American Music without Apology.” Motown was recorded in black Detroit, specifically in a cramped basement studio that produced a warmer sound than did the more sterile top recording studios. Indeed, Smith claims that he sound reflected the cramped living conditions of the ghetto in which it was recorded. The players who produced the funk sound on Motown recordings were all heavily influenced by Detroit jazz, giving the instrumental tracks a distinctively sophisticated feel. As Smith points out, even the expansive concrete hallways of Detroit schools and civic buildings provided acoustically ideal practice areas for Motown’s vocal groups.

In part because the black community vociferously claimed ownership of Motown’s sound, Motown groups were unable to transcend racial barriers, despite crossover success. The Supremes, one of Motown’s most successful groups with an interracial audience and one of the most successful musical acts nationwide, were consigned permanently to the rock n’ roll charts because their black skin trumped their variety of musical genres. When Ed Sullivan warmly welcomed them to his show – one of the first widely televised performances by a black group – he received complaints from show sponsor Ford that his relations with black performers were too friendly.

Whites were not alone in racializing Motown’s content; an increasingly militant black community interpreted Motown music as their call to arms. The deaths of Malcolm X and Nat King Cole in 1965 inaugurated an era of racial violence in which lighthearted Motown songs like “Shotgun,” which opens with a gunshot, took on ominous undertones. Articles such as “Rhythm and Blues Music as a Weapon,” which implored its readers to rise up violently against repression to the strains of black music, showed that for some black activists, popular music was intimately connected to the struggles the black community faced.

Motown and its artists’ presentation of Detroit as a theatre of tolerance ultimately could not obscure the reality of racial tension. In chapter five of Dancing in the Street, Smith chronicles the lead up to and aftermath of the event that Detroit blacks considered the “July Rebellion” and the media labeled the “Detroit Riots of 1967.” The violence was not altogether unexpected. Smith points to two events whose discordant ramifications belied notions of racial harmony in Detroit. The first was the failure of the Supremes to help solicit donations for a charity called the Torch Program. Smith attributes this failure to an overestimation of the Supremes’ rapport with a white audience, and in turn an overestimation of Motown’s ability to break down racial barriers. Events at the Second Annual Black Arts Convention also foreshadowed impending violence, as a tone of dissatisfaction and vengeance pervaded the remarks of SNCC leader H. Rap Brown. Less than a month later, looting, destruction, and rioting riddled Detroit’s black community. Throughout the violence and in its aftermath, Motown consciously removed itself from the surrounding turmoil.

In the last chapter of her book, Smith chronicles Motown’s exodus from Detroit and its abiding ambiguous relationship with black politics. In some ways, Motown displayed a renewed interest in civil rights. A new branch of the company, Black Forum, emerged to showcase black art and advocate black political goals. Motown artists such as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye sang indisputably political songs such as ‘Living for the City” and “What’s Going On?” – records which, conveniently for Motown, sold very well in the protest atmosphere of the late ‘60s. Yet despite this surface attention to issues of black welfare, Motown’s move to Los Angeles essentially robbed black Detroit of its most successful and powerful black-owned entrepreneurial power base.

While other authors have focused on Motown’s unprecedented achievements and positive implications for the black community, Smith argues that the story of Motown is better understood as a testament to capitalism’s inability to be tied to a racial agenda. Smith’s cover choice, the Vandellas sitting in a half-assembled Mustang, refers to the idea that Motown’s black art and culture were ultimately tied to the rhythm of the assembly line.