Movement

Movement

Lights flash over head as bass thumps in your chest, a quick one hundred eighty degree turn reveals that everybody is feeling the music in the rest of their bodies too, the buildings behind them stand silent and illuminated, ignoring the celebration below. Focusing back on the stage, your peripheral vision reveals a young woman snorting a pinch of cocaine off a key right next to a shirtless, older bald man frantically spinning glowing balls in front of his face. The DJ on stage switches back and forth between records, one maintaining the beat the other slowly repeating three words between scratches: Welcome to Detroit.

Memorial Day weekend is a good weekend for the ailing D, as electronic music fans and artists make the journey from all over to congregate in Hart Plaza for three days of dressing strangely, doing drugs and listening to music that defies the moody shadow that hangs over the city the rest of the year.

“Anytime you bring your money to Detroit you are welcome.” Muses a middle-aged Detroit resident. She doesn’t attend the festival but watches the procession with her husband, from the waterfront. “So the festival is definitely a good thing for the city.”

This is true this year more than ever, as the companies that own the buildings surrounding Hart Plaza lobby for government dollars and file for bankruptcy. The pride around old ‘Motor City’ is becoming more and more strained and conflicted, the contrast between the opulence of the monolithic, phallic GM building and the half-burnt outer city where the company’s workers used to live is stark. Detroit’s citizens are becoming warier of the GM logo that stares out like a blue and white eye of Sauran, over the industrial decay creeping ever closer towards it’s glass walls.

“I’d like to offer my condolences to the auto industry,” reports Columbus based DJ RJD2 (born Ramble John Krohn) in the middle of his set. “I’ve got a lot of friends that have been laid off and hurt by the downslide of the big three and that really sucks, man.” He and his fellow visiting artists know the situation and are proud to offer respite from reality, if only for a mere long weekend.

“Mother fuckers have nothing else to do this weekend,” jokes Los Angeles DJ Flying Lotus (Stephen Ellison), whose Coltrane lineage gives him strong ties to Detroit (his great-aunt is the late Alice Coltrane). His music owes a lot to his jazz genes as well as the electronic beats of local legends like the late J Dilla. Donning a shirt sporting Dilla’s name for his stint in Detroit, Mr. Ellison appreciates what the city and its people have done for him.

Even legends like Afrika Bambaataa have nothing but good things to say about the city. “The great Motor City’s got the great Motown, great funky techno, and all the electro, they done gone got their funk on!”

The undeniably diverse and influential music history of the city is apparent at the festival, and many of the local artists show that the movement is still going. But Detroit has had trouble harnessing the power of local artists into a revenue attractor. Motown itself moved to Los Angeles in the early seventies over royalty issues, but some have speculated that less focus on the auto industry and more on other marketable exports of the city could have encouraged Motown to stick around. And since Motown has heavily influenced so much of today’s music, keeping Motown and it’s constituents alive and in Detroit could have made it even more of a cultural hub for tourists and townies alike.

DJ Z-Trip (Phoenix native Zach Sciacca) proclaims during his set, “Detroit has so much musical history it’s incredible, but when people think of Detroit they only think of that building,” he points to the GM building looming disapprovingly over the stage. “Fuck that building, it’s about the music!”

The Tech Fest as it was originally called was a step in the right direction in the opinion of the organizers, music fans, and even city leaders when it was launched in 2000. There were no reported crimes, about a million attendees, and an estimate of $90 million for the local economy. But the huge attendance is generally attributed to one tiny fact: It was free. Subsequent shows were also no charge for entry, but even with almost a two million-person head count for 2001 and 2002, the festival started losing money. In 2003 the local government retracted it’s usual $350,000 fund and after two more years of failing to break even, the original event organizers had to hand the festival over to Paxahau, a record label and booking company based in Ferndale, MI.

Now the cover charge is $45 for a weekend pass if you buy it online and in advance. Despite this revolution in charging practices the line-up this year as well as the crowd, were substantial, energetic, and all were enjoying themselves.

            An older woman sitting on the grass surrounded by people drinking, playing hacky sack and comparing piercings still feels very comfortable. “It’s better than people watching at the airport,” she says, “It’s great here, everybody’s having a good time and getting along.” A man with a knee-length, blood-spattered lab coat walks behind her, his true identity obscured by an equally bloody surgeon’s mask, glasses, and a shower cap. He bumps into a large black man in an LA baseball cap, gold aviators and an oversized red t-shirt. After apologizing profusely they strike up a conversation concerning their respective costumes.