Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit
Suzanne E. Smith
Harvard
320 pp. $24.95

If you've ever leafed through an old high-school yearbook, you're well aware that memory is myopic, fogged by a soft-focus optimism that renders the past happier and more enjoyable than it probably was. But as Suzanne Smith concludes in Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, "history is nostalgia's worst enemy." The statement is at once a conclusion and an impetus for Smith, who attempts to trace the rise of Motown while placing it in a larger historical context. In Dancing in the Streets, Motown is less an independent aspect of Detroit's history and development than a necessary result--a legacy-in-motion that played a tripartite role in the plaited braid of labor, race, and culture that defined the city in the '60s.

The publication of Dancing in the Streets is an interesting one for an academic press; there's no shortage of general audience books on the famed soul label, and other books have plumbed the immediate political ramifications of Berry Gordy's family-loan-tumed-empire. But Smith aims not to glorify Motown as a can-do parable of black business, but to define it whollyÑas a flawed microcosm of Detroit as much as one of black America. At once symptom and synecdoche, Motown is in her eyes the inevitable sum of its influences that somehow reenacted Detroit's external snuggles on its own Grand Street stage.

As Smith points out, Motown artists "always negotiated, rather than transcended, their racial identity. No matter how often they conquered different musical genres and appealed to new audiences, they always contended with larger cultural assumptions about race and music." These larger forces became manifest in numerous ways, both from outside and within: car companies threatening to pull advertising money from The Ed Sullivan Show for featuring black musicians; Berry Gordy, Jr.'s reluctance to play up socially or racially conscious "message music"; even United Way's muzzling of a promotional video that featured members of the Supremes walking through housing projects No matter how many millions of records were sold to mainstream America, the battle to cross over was predicated upon the ceaseless production and promotion of innocuous, "non-black" music.

This is the crux of Smith's exploration. Detroit, as an urban industrial center of the North, occupied a unique position on the political-cultural playing field of the time. While the civil rights movement gained divisive momentum (with nonviolent integrationists clashing rhetorically with more radical nationalists), the black worker came to a similar but economic split, with relatively high wages battling the alienating monotony of the assembly line. Motown's development mirrored these larger developments, tying together the fight for financial independence, labor equity, political empowerment, and mainstream commercial viability. As a young black entrepreneur sought to build and maintain his dream, his artists confronted the reality of inadequate royalty and publishing agreements. There was an undeniable parallel, as black employees of a record company and an auto plant both struggled in the face of assembly-line culture.

Dancing in the Streets is a study of parallels that paradoxically touch. Smith presents an intricate system of interrelated links, all of them elastic and fragile. If the web holds, it does so most precariously. In fact, every one of the web's strands is charged. Take the tenuous relationship between Motown's management and its talent--a nervous subversion of the master-slave dynamic and an all-black recasting of the Karl Marx All-Star Revue. Take the unspoken tension of quantifying "blackness" in black music--as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye struggled to find their voice as black men in the midst of a hit machine. Take the juggling act as Motown sought to pacify corporate America, white America, and black America. And there were, of course, the larger struggles--between police and black citizens, between Detroit and America, between auto worker and the automated means of production, between the nonviolent civil rights movement and Black Power--that found resonance in Motown's music

But Smith's web can only stretch so far; it lacks tensile strength at two different levels. First, her insistence on interconnectivity relies on a discreteness that doesn't necessarily exist; she goes about departmentalizing the '60s and Detroit as though they can be arranged on an x-axis It's not that the phenomena she discusses didn't existÑit's that they interacted synergistically rather than rationally. You can throw the auto industry and Malcolm X into a teapot, but you don't necessarily get a wildcat strike. But the shakiness is due as much to Smith's dependence on chronology as to her assumptions of connection. An overlap of three months (in a period known for its pace and upheaval) is as good as simultaneity for her when she seeks to illustrate a parallel. Still, this doesn't act to her excessive detriment; Dancing in the Streets is perhaps more effective as a schematic than as a point-to-point correspondence.

At bottom, Dancing in the Streets is a quasi-Marxist work. In seeking to go beyond previous readings of Motown and race, Smith focuses on the repercussions of a black-owned business in an age of automation--and finds that green beats black at every turn. Motown made what was considered "black" music; its aims were no different than those of any other record label. There were occasional releases aimed specifically at the black community--a Martin Luther King, Jr. speech, a Poets of the Revolution compilation (although its release was delayed for seven years)--but Motown the corporate entity was careful to distinguish its commercial product from its niche product; it even went so far as to form a sublabel (the underfunded Black Forum) for its "conscious" efforts. And when the time came, the company had no qualms about leaving its cultural roots for a Los Angeles office building. When Motown left Detroit, the Motor City was fast entering a phase of stagnancy and divisiveness (despite the election of its first black mayor). Smith ultimately finds the core of the Motown fable in this abandonment: that "capitalism cannot be bound by racial agendas or community concerns." The legacy of economic and political empowerment that Motown inherited became its prime downfall as well.

In 1999, Detroit's music scene again received media attention. And again, it was for a platinum-status music infused with the struggles of working-class America. This time, though, it wasn't young black R&B musicians who were topping the Billboard charts. It was the hip-hop and hip-hop-influenced rock hybrids performed by Eminem and Kid Rock, two white Detroit natives who became the bards of a dreary postdepression Detroit. Gone were the days of a Cadillac in every artist's driveway; as Eminem says with bitterness on "If I Had," "I'm tired of not having a phone/l'm tired of not having a home to have one on in if I did have one on." Meanwhile, Motown "[enters] the twenty-first century as a wholly owned subsidiary of a white-owned corporate conglomerate." The struggles of young artists never change; it's our perspective that does. So middle-aged Americans continue to beam when they listen to the Big Chill soundtrack, or when the Supremes come on the radio. They're not smiling because Mary Wilson made $20,000 from a million-selling record. They're smiling because the music reminds them of times past. They're smiling at a music derived from a formula that Berry Gordy, Jr. created--created and sold.