How Detroit's Working Class Built the Sound the Whole World Stole | Living for the City Ep. 1

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Detroit make they shit.

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

There's a sense of hustle and never give up.

SPEAKER_3 (0:07)

All the genres come together in Detroit.

Hanif Abdurraqib (0:12)

Hi, I'm Hanif Abdurraqib. I am an essayist, a poet and a cultural critic. I grew up on the punk scene in the Midwest. As a kid in Ohio, we would drive across state borders to go to Detroit to see house shows or basement shows or shows in places like the shelter. What I know more than anything is that music comes from somewhere.

When it comes to Detroit music history, most people have the main recognition of Berry Gordy. Some people know Aretha Franklin, and how Aretha Franklin can make a place like the Fox Theater feel like a church.

That history is magnificent, and it belongs to Detroit forever. Well, what intrigues me about Detroit and what I believe is the engine of the city, are these lesser-told stories. The people making beats in classrooms, working day jobs so that they can DJ at night. This series is largely about people, people who made things and who innovated and created and invented. While no one else is paying attention, people who did this, not knowing if it would lead to any great success, but they did it because they cared deeply about this city that made them who they are.

SPEAKER_2 (1:32)

Detroit is like this stamp of authenticity. We know you had to go through some shit to get here, and that gives it almost a purity of purpose.

Hanif Abdurraqib (1:41)

Every episode of Living for the City, we explore a different theme. In this one, it's labor, what Detroit's working class identity built into its music, and what that music owes the assembly line. I talked to Berry Gordy IV, whose father literally wrote songs in the back of a car on his own factory floor before he built Motown. I catch up with Don Was, who played bar gigs for $10 or $15 a night before he became one of the most important producers in the world. I meet Kevin Saunderson, one of the three teenagers who invented techno in a Detroit suburb because there was nothing else to do after school. And I talk to Bill Blackwell, Bob Seger's long-time tour manager, about what it meant to grind it out in a city that demanded you earn it before it claimed you. I know what it is to clock out and spend the rest of your hours trying to find the part of yourself the job didn't take. In Detroit, that part became techno. It became rock. It became Motown. It became hip-hop. It became something the whole world is still listening to.

Belleville, Michigan, 25 miles outside of Detroit, is the kind of place where not a lot is happening, specifically if you are a young high school kid.

You go to school, you get out of school, and you have to find ways to fill the time, which became a miracle scenario for Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, who filled their empty hours with sound.

Kevin Saunderson (3:18)

I met Derrick and Juan's brother Aaron at North Junior High on the football team.

Because I was friends with them in Belleville, there wasn't much to do besides go to school and play sports. So like afterwards, I'll just go over to Aaron's house. So that's really how I met Juan. I would see like keyboards and equipment that I really didn't know whether like a piano, but not a piano.

SPEAKER_7 (3:42)

The early days of just trying to prove all of our parents wrong, was really what we were putting in and doing all that music as we were young.

Right. Because those of us who didn't want to go work at the post office or go work at the plant or go do that stuff, we had to prove that what we were doing was satisfactory in a town of working class people that just think that musicians are degenerates and have this fantasy idea.

Hanif Abdurraqib (4:18)

In the mid-80s, if you were on Gratiot Avenue in Detroit, there was a small stretch of street that held three studios. Juan, Derrick and Kevin all posted up there, their doors open, the future of sound flooding onto the sidewalks.

Kevin Saunderson (4:35)

There was Techno Boulevard right off of Gratiot, which I had my studio. Juan Atkins had his studio and Derrick May had his studio. So guess what? People would go and visit Derrick, then they may go up to Juan's, then they come to me, vice versa. The network and the inspiration from people, our doors would just open and we wanted to also help people.