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

Rating:
Summary: Incisive Social History
Review: An incisive combination of music journalism and pathbreaking social history about the city, people and circumstances that gave rise to, participated in, supported,and finally watched the physical exit from the Motor City in the early '70s of Motown Records. A vivid and unforgettable study of the roots of an important facet of American cultural history. Excellent.

Rating:
Summary: Szatmary, Amazon's reviewer, is a bit "naive" himself.
Review: Professor Suzanne E. Smith' project *Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit* is a well-written and fascinating work of revisionist, myth-busting history. For perhaps no other musical institution has been given such a large free pass for (mis)representing its founder's ideology as the company's actual history.

The story of Motown is usually told as the early story of Berry Gordy, a member of an Black entrepreneurial family who borrows $800 from his other family members and ends up the king of a musical empire, thus proving the Horatio Alger myth that anyone (even an African-American) with a little grit and determination can succeed in America. But such a story fails to account for much of the instituional, and ideological factors that made a specific type of entrepreneurial cultural production possible in Detroit, Michigan. Along with churches, temples, businesses, newspapers and activists, we are treated to a history of Motown that is deeply inscribed in an underclass familial net of relationships and social networks, given a boost by black media and a history of both jazz production and humanistic training for songwriters and musicians in the Detroit educational system. Not in the least, there was the automotive industry, which was both a source of Black humilation, frustation, and yet inspiration for adapting technologies and industrial processes of streamling and assembly-line production. Motown literally manufactured its artists using the same separate teams for songwriting, backup production, etiquette and image cultivation for all its artists. As the business grows the model remains, although soon Motown is a multi-million dollar international industry, and no longer a small paternalistically run family operation.

Throughout it all, Motown is given a both a special place in the Black community and a difficult role in attempting to market its product to a larger white (and mostly teenage) audience. Indebted to the civil rights ideologies of Booker T. Washington and Carter G. Woodson, Motown maintains an ambivalent relationship with the fracturing civil rights movement and its divergent leaders and interests. As the tumultuousness of 1967 and 1968 come forth, the fissures at Motown erupt, as many artists demand a greater profit-sharing, and more creative control over their music and roles at the company. We see and follow the careers and songs of the Supremes, Little Stevie Wonder, Martha and the Vandellas, and well as The Miracles and Marvin Gaye. Smith builds a woven patchwork of cultural history and its emergent politics around several different themes, such as the rise and ultimate failure of Black capitalism to remain tied to its original community, the uses or Motown for the greater Detroit black community, and the role of other Motown among other institutions in ameliorating economic and political hardship for the Black community, both locally and nationally. We get to set not only the production side of Motown, but also the myriad ways that the music was inextricably interwoven and read into the lives of those who held it dear to Detroit' heart.

Methodologically, Smith does all this by using the theoretical perspective of Raymond Williams, who coined the concept "cultural formation." In Williams' view, it is impossible to understand "an intellectual or artistic project without also understanding its formation." Cultural formations are "simultaenously artistic forms and social locations." The relationship dynamic between the two structures the formation that emerges as a result of the synergistic effects of the individual projects, agents, and institutions involved. Each functions as a distinct agent with its own agendas and motivations, constituting a complex mosiac of reactions, relationships, and tensions. This is particularly well suited to an analysis of Motown Records, precisely because of the culturally mythological status it has acheived---an American everyman's music. But even the deep seated agendas and motivations that gave birth to this acheivement of seemingly apolitical universalism are themselves deeply political and reflect political consequences of judgments. These judgments to aggresively pursue a project of Black capitalism modeled on the industrial production of the automotive industrial ("assembly line production" of hit songs) are the efforts of Detroit's most famous "cultural producer," regardless of how the company may have attempted to steer clear of explicit poltical messages in its products as much as possible.

All in all, the book is a significant addition to recent scholarship. In depth for the cultural historian and Motown fan, but very easy and user-friendly for the casual reader. The book has been criticized for its approach to Black capitalism, but Smith's perspective is in no way "naive." Rather, it is solidly based in historical political economy of African-Amercan underdevelopment as discussed by Manning Marable, among others. Her criticism of Gordy is tempered, and is presently more as the inevitable consequence of becoming a large impersonal corporation that still uses paternalistic rhetoric towards its cultural workers and larger community while acting solely in its own self-interest. If Smith draws largely on black newspaper accounts, autobiography and insider media, it is not because she wishes to avoid "primary" sources, but is instead interested in drawing a picture of the relationships and interactions that emerge at the time among institutions as well as people--something not easily obtainable from interviews and other types of so-called "primary sources" years later. Of course, the political and hermeneutic assumptions inherent in classifying some sources as primary and others as secondary are themselves sometimes suspect. But that is a discussion for another time and place.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book; Great City; A Time Not To Be Forgotten
Review: Suzanne Smith deserves tremendous credit for transforming her love of Detroit, her home; her love of Motown, the soul music of her generation; and her love of historical analysis, the career she has chosen, into a remarkably readable and indeed breathtaking review of a city, a time, and a musical genre that is too often neglected. Sure, the most celebrated heirs of the Motown legend, the Jackson family, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, achieved fame and fortune. But Barry Gordy's Motown -- the Motown of European-Americans like Suzanne Smith, and the Motown of all of Detoit's people of color, needs to be remembered often and with affection. That Suzanne Smith can tell the story of Detroit in the turbulent 1960s with such style and grace, is a testament to her skill as an analyst of culture and her skill as one of the next generation of honored historians. Presently at George Mason University in Virginia, look for Professor Smith to soon teach from a tenured chair in Ann Arbor, Michigan; New Haven, Connecticut; or Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Rating:
Summary: Come And Get These Memories!
Review: This is Motor City history from the inside outward, and if you know the REAl city, from the Graystone Ballroom to the Chit Chat Club to WJLB and the City Wide Dry Cleaners, then you KNOW what I'm gettin into. A beautiful job of history that moves like the music of Hitsville, U.S.A. did. You go, girl!