The Final Blog Post

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 19 February 2015.



Cold weather day today.

I'm hitting a wall, something between busyness on the one hand and my thoughts about the project on the other.

Mostly, I'm losing the vision. Maybe the current vision is too much for me to bear. I know that it's always been outsized, but I feel like a sun who becomes a red giant just before collapsing in on itself.

The day to day, week to week, month to month of the blog is taking its toll. You may have noticed that I've started trying to use freely usable, properly attributed photos recently, replacing or deleting old, unattributed ones. Finding good freely usable photos--which I think is par for the course with a blog--is time consuming and usually a step down from the images I used to find. YouTube videos, which don't need to be attributed, don't automatically post on the various platforms; they need to be posted each place manually. Every photo and video I use needs its dimensions changed in html to fit properly. I've considered other ideas like snapping my own photos using my kids' dinosaurs and action figures, but that sounds even more time consuming.

On top of this, the blog is not taking off much. We've had some big spikes at times, like the Ferguson post, which probably just pissed a lot of people off. But the number of visits usually hovers between 5 and 20 pageviews per day. And if I don't post for a few days, that number goes down to zero. This is discouraging given the amount of work it is.

Moving on to the music, I get overwhelmed any time I consider what it's going to take to get anything off the ground. It was hard enough with you in Lansing; I get tired just thinking about what it will take with you in Traverse City. And although I'm a lot better at playing than I was 2 years ago, I still make so many mistakes even just practicing at home. I started writing stories and poetry at a young age, but my serious interest in music didn't start until my 20's when neurons were almost myelinated. I don't have a "high ceiling" when it comes to music. When I'm on stage and everyone's watching me I make even more mistakes.

I think the following is true:

1. I'm a pretty good songwriter
2. I'm a piss-poor guitarist
3. I'm a piss-poor keyboardist
4. I'm a piss-poor singer
5. I'm a piss-poor performer

I've heard #1 from enough people to believe it. #2-5 are true, but the fact that I can do all four of those things has been moderately impressive to people, rendering me a little less piss poor overall.

My goal with the project now seems to abandon it in the best possible way. I want to cue up the Concert for Iceland so that it could still happen if conditions were to become more favorable.

What does that mean?

Well, at the bottom-left corner of the blog's front page, there is a small orange period. Click on that and you'll see what I've been working on, what I consider to be my final goal regarding the project. I want to get this all linked and set up and, at that point, I want to withdraw to a much lower level of involvement. Actually, even getting this all set up is going to be quite the accomplishment. It will take some time; my guess is that I won't be done until summer at the earliest.

Best case scenario moving forward? I write songs and others perform them. I feel like the Concert for Iceland is a coherent group of songs, a good place to stop.

What might that look like? We've thrown out a few ideas:

1. Augustine White's band
2. Arthur White Memorial Concert/Album (dead, catatonic, presumed dead?)
3. Rock Star: INXS-type thing
4. Find someone to play Arthur White

So honestly, what am I going to do about this? I think I'm going to devote all my energies to completing this hidden page. The remaining blog posts will be any remaining Basement Songs and then my Influences for each song. Okay, I might also get in some of the last few email exchanges too. The Benefactor/Leif Ericsson idea can't be forgotten!

Maybe this email that I'm typing right now will be the final blog post. I guess this is kind of sudden, but it's actually going to take a long time to accomplish.

Hate It or Love It

The following is an excerpt of a 17 February 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

As much as I love how cerebral the project is, I still think the main entree for most people is going to be how amazing your songs are.

I love "Tokyo Nights." I think it illustrates your ideas about the personal leading to the universal. Somehow I feel like a Japanese girl took me to go see a shrine, so somehow in my past there is something that resonates with some version of Tokyo that is not Tokyo, some version of the strange girl who is probably not Japanese, and some version of a shrine that wasn't a shrine.

Art:

I'm glad you like it. My theory is that we like specifics because our own lives have specifics--not even specifics that are necessarily similar! A great example of this that comes to mind is "Hate It Or Love It" by 50 Cent and The Game. Please listen to this song! 

I'm from Compton, wear the wrong colors, be cautious
One phone call'll have your body dumped in Marcy 

Before Rap Genius, I didn't know where Marcy was, but it didn't matter. 50 Cent and The Game pile up the specifics in this song and you would think they were running the risk of creating a very narrow in-group for whom this song makes sense.

Paradoxically, the opposite happens: it was an international hit in 2000 and one of my favorite rap songs of all time. 

What an amazing first line: "Coming up I was confused, my momma kissing a girl." Thank you, 50 Cent! 

Never experienced that. But I have experienced things that are similarly particular, specific, painful memories--experiences that have separated me from my fellows, left me desolate and alone. 

These memories do not fit into a metaphor of a broken-winged bird, like Mr. Mister. I vibe much more 50 Cent and The Game way more than Mr. Mister, with whom I probably have a lot more in common. 

This phenomenon is counterintuitive and paradoxical. It shouldn't happen this way. Particulars should exclude, not include. Perhaps it's witnessing someone who has had their mundane, incoherent experiences transfigured in art. Perhaps it gives us hope that we can experience a similar transfiguration in our own life. 

Something that embraces us in all our contradictions and incoherence, that doesn't require us to "burn away" the human, that doesn't hold us up to that Manichean standard.

Canon of Influences: Tell Me Why (You Took Away My Children)

As I thought more and more about your "Canon of Influences Countdown" idea, I realized that I don't have any stand-alone albums that influenced the project. So I'm taking this different approach: explaining my influences on a song-by-song basis.

As you know, "Tell Me Why (You Took Away My Children)" is, first and foremost, influenced by Marvin Gaye's double album, Here, My Dear (1978).

After falling in love in Gaye's music the way most people do--through What's Going On--my college roommates and I soon turned our attention to this flawed gem of an album. The song partakes of the winter imagery of "Anna's Song" ("Dear, did you notice the snow started to fall"). Gaye's "I Want to Come Home for Christmas" (1972) and Stevie Wonder's "Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)" (1972) also seem to have influenced my choice of winter as tragic backdrop for divorce. This setting is also utilized in my songs "Bird's Eye View," "Agnieszka's Song," and "After the Fall."

Additionally, Gerald Levert's "Taking Everything" (1998) was popular at the time I was writing the song and directly influenced some of the other content, including its title. Finally, the song's excesses partake of the kind of dark humor found in B.B. King's "How Blue Can You Get" (1964):

I gave you a brand new Ford, you said 'I want a Cadillac'
I bought you a ten dollar dinner, you said 'Thanks for the snack'
I let you live in my penthouse, you said it was just a shack
I gave you seven children, and now you want to give them back

Overall, when it comes to lyrics I agree with Henri Nouwen's statement, "That which is most personal is most universal." I love the mention of specific details in songs even if the world they describe seems completely alien to me. Specific details--as opposed to vague, general sentiments or hackneyed symbols--far from making me feel excluded, paradoxically give me my existential point of access.

The song also finds musical inspiration in Here, My Dear. I've always loved Gaye's juxtaposition of traditional, euphonic elements with strange, discordant, overwrought instrumentation (mostly on his albums Here, My Dear and In Our Lifetime?). Layered synthesizers are suggestive of disordered, unnatural psychological states brought on by the horror of divorce.

The off-putting opening musical figure of the song sounds vaguely like something from Yes, but I haven't been able to place it. Suffice it to say anything weird is welcomed as denoting some kind of rarefied emotional state. Strangeness against the backdrop of tradition (say, of a traditional chord progression) is far better than strangeness alone, which has no backdrop against which to recognized as strangeness.

As for the end of the song, I've always loved the two-chord vamp. Favorites include Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage" (1965) and Kool and the Gang's "Summer Madness" (live version, 1976).

Spotify link: http://sptfy.com/ccy

An Open Letter to Iceland

Kæru Íslendingar mínir

Í fáfræði mína, takast ég þér, og vona eftir svari. Það er erfitt að lýsa því hvernig þetta byrjaði allt.

Í grundvallaratriðum erum við að búa til goðsögn um 70 er lagasmiður heitir Arthur White, sem var fæddur til að vera dýrlingur en afl með fjölskyldu sinni til að verða Rock Star. Til að gera langa sögu stutta, tónlist feril sinn nam engu. Hann féll undir ráðum Cult leiðtogi, Carlton Farthington, sem sannfærði hann um að leiksvið a endanlega ávinningi tónleika fyrir Ísland, sem á þeim tíma var að gangast undir röð skelfilegar eldgos. Farthington spáðu að þessi gos boðberi komandi "turbulent víxlar", sem myndi þíða risaeðlur og leiða í fullan snúist við inertial lögum. Hann hélt því fram að eina flýja var að fara niður í eldfjöll, framhjá reanimated risaeðlur, niður í innri kjarna jarðar. Tónleikarnir gerðist aldrei. Hvort turbulent umskipti átt sér stað er opin spurning háð mörgum túlkunum.

Þar þá daga, Arthur White hefur tekið Raflostsmeðferð og verið á stofnunum. Á undanförnum dögum, þó hann hafi byrjað að sýna hættulega hegðun, klifra upp á stoðin-eins og hlutir og hvetja aðra til að gera slíkt hið sama. Hann hefur orðið að ólíklegt andlegur leiðtogi, ekki aðeins til að náungi sjúklingum hans, heldur einnig til hjúkrunarfræðinga, orderlies og groundskeepers. Læknar hans hafa komið að trúa því að Arthur æsingur stafar af komandi 40 ára afmæli tónleikunum fyrir Ísland, 4 Júlí 2016, og sem, sviðsetning spotta útgáfa af þessum tónleikum, þeir mega vera fær um að koma Arthur frið.

Í þessari viðleitni, Arthur White fylgir bróður sínum, fyrirtæki framkvæmdastjóri, og trommara, Will Witkowski; andlega ráðgjafi, bassaleikari / organisti og her Detroit Public sjónvarpsþáttur All Things New, faðir Bernard; og niður-og-út gítarleikari upphaflega ákveða að spila tónleika fyrir Ísland, Rustyy Kryystyylz.

Og viljum við bæta við nokkrum Íslendingum í fjölda okkar.

Þó að það er erfitt að útskýra, teljum við að Detroit, Michigan, er bein framlenging á primordial anda eyju þjóð þína. Annaðhvort að Leif Ericsson raun uppgötvaði Detroit eða að það er einhver neðanjarðar vatnaleiðum milli tveggja staða. Eða bæði. Við teljum að Leif Ericsson getur samt lifa á bökkum þess neðanjarðar ána, veitta ódauðlegur með boltann hans dularfulla steini hann hrifsa frá hjarta forn íslensk eldfjall.

Við viljum gjarnan að finna hljóðfæraleikurum og bakgrunnur vocalists sem deila sækni okkar fyrir 70 s R & B og blá-eyed sál.

Hvað væri að niðurstöður þessarar tónlistar skipti? Ég veit ekki, en ég hef nokkrar hugmyndir. Einn viljum við vinna í "fjarlægð" getu, kannski að taka smá tónlist eða jafnvel sviðsetning alvöru tónleika í Michigan eða Íslands.

Með kveðju,

Arthúr

The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever (Part 5 of 5)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 27 January 2015.


"ESO-L. Calçada - Pluto (by)" by ESO/L. Calçada - Pluto (Artist’s Impression). Licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Maybe the most authentic Detroiter ever is a super-ancient Icelandic guy!

He probably could be played by Eminem.

He speed raps horrorcore in Old Icelandic. Perhaps he was thawed during an early precursor of the turbulent reversals, which carried him and the lodestone in a flood of ice water down to Detroit. Perhaps Henry Ford had a hatch leading down into the tunnels where he would meet with this guy and listen to his Old Icelandic horrorcore raps while basking in the dark light of the lodestone.

This is so much scarier than global warming!

Carlton Farthington comes to Ann Arbor after reading an ancient manuscript about some underground caverns (now campus steam tunnels) that lead to a network of covered rivers, brooks, and streams. These in turn lead to an underground waterway to Iceland, which in turn leads to a volcano, which in turn leads to the center of the earth.

Somewhere along this path is the fabled lodestone, but what he discovers is that it has traveled to Detroit, where it was responsible for Detroit's meteoric rise and subsequent demise. He also discovers that it has A Guardian.

The Benefactor, aka The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever.

Oh, and while we're at it, I'd like to set the record straight about a few things: (1) dinosaurs had fur not feathers and (2) Vikings had helmets with horns and (3) Pluto is a planet, straying to the far reaches of our solar system before it slingshots back to destroy us all!

We need a bunch of meddlesome scientists who will be shocked by these revelations, people who have spent the last decade or so gratuitously revising everything I hold true.

Farthington is also a scientist, but a visionary one, like Eilert Lövborg in Hedda Gabler. Not one of these meddlers who want to spoil everyone's fun.

Dwarf planet, my ass!

Maybe Leif Ericsson discovered Detroit.

The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever (Part 4 of 5)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 27 January 2015.



There's a thing with German-Americans, too, where they are far more what we think of as German than actual Germans.

I think the Germans we know have inherited German sensibilities from the 1800's--they were stern, hard-working people who told their children stories about how the woods and witches and evil monsters want to destroy you in your sleep or will get you if you are bad, and who basically inherited the tribal ideal that a hero is only a hero if he dies in battle, and even anything you spared from the void in your lifetime will be sucked back in the second you aren't around to fight anymore.

Then you meet actual kids from Germany and the boys are all kind, frail mama's boys who and everyone is really sweet and generous and disturbingly American! So basically, the Germans do a terrible job of being the sort of Germans we think they should be.

I love all your ideas. How about the Benefactor as the subterranean guardian of the lodestone? What is relationship to Farthington, who has absolutely no authenticity?

What happens when a vacuum of authenticity and the most authentic Detroiter ever collide?

You know, I don't think Berry Gordy sat around trying to prove he was more Detroit than anybody else. I think when he went to LA, he worked at being LA. But really, he probably spent most of his time being Berry Gordy. It's funny in a way that Eminem doesn't just talk about Detroit roots--he needs to prove that he is somehow still relevant to Detroit--to cultivate that same sort of thing Bruce Springsteen has, where people think he works for $5 an hour at a car wash in some New Jersey ghost town on the weekends. Hendrix never seemed to go in for that sort of territorial nonsense.

If anything, he tried to show he was from space.

The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever (Part 3 of 5)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 27 January 2015.


"'Journey to the Center of the Earth' by Édouard Riou 38" by Édouard Riou - http://jv.gilead.org.il/rpaul/Voyage%20au%20centre%20de%20la%20terre/. 
Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

I have this picture of my grandma, grandpa, and uncle Val standing outside some kind of brick home in Detroit. Their jet black hair and backdrop of brick bespeaks a level of "authenticity" that I will never approach.

But it's interesting to unpack this candid moment, when they are smiling, languishing, effortlessly radiating their unalloyed Italian-ness.

How is it that these Italian-Americans--people who have "cashed out" their Italian identity by becoming Americans, Michiganders, and Detroiters--seem to brim with authenticity, entirely self-identical? In the case of the people in that photo, existence is identical with essence. But the people in that photo, as well as the existences their smiling, posturing, youthful bodies denote, died the moment the camera closed its eye on their image.

The shocking realization of my Romantic journey to Italy was finding little that corresponded with that ideal. My Italian relatives were, in their so-called essence, less like me than any of my English-speaking relatives, less like me than my friends of mixed European, African, and/or Asian descent. Whatever similarities there were, I came home utterly disillusioned. Italians were lazy, immoral, and duplicitous. They had no rock 'n' roll sensibilities, playing insipid knock-offs of American music.

This may be part of what I express at the end of "Hey Rome": that identity is not a monolithic reality, that it's a cobbled hodgepodge of everything and always has been--like every other thing. And that I hold the key only when I acknowledge the angst of not being able to find inherent value and meaning in anything, even in a city with more claim to inherent value and meaning than any other, excluding maybe Jerusalem.

Detroit has a similar narrative of authenticity, maybe more so than any other city in America.

This is especially painful because of the sickeningly precipitous drop-off between that narrative and reality. Were there any such authentic figure who could claim Detroit's primordial essence as his own, would we even recognize him? I am sure this individual would have had some involvement with the lodestone, since it is "the true power behind the American Dream."

In Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Lidenbrock and Axel come out in Italy after descending into the volcano in Iceland. Could we make the case that a similar subterranean waterway exists between Iceland and Detroit? Is the American Dream a dream of objective purity, of inherent value and meaning, of self-identity? Is it the lodestone that still resonates at the center of our collapsing metropolis, calling-yet-spurning the anguished multitudes, singing its siren song:

Are you a thing of substance? Are you a thing?
Are you substantive? Are you an object? Are you real? 

Is the lodestone some kind of hyper-condensed, collapsed star that now lies at Detroit's center, lulling passing matter onto its event horizon, offering a dream of self-identity, essence, condensed unity, authenticity, purity? And to the extent that this dream thrives, so too does the city decay, collapsing further and further in on itself.

Is this what Richard Wilbur meant in his poem "Beasts"? Are these the "suitors of excellence"

Making such dreams for men
As told will break their hearts as always, bringing
Monsters into the city, crows on the public statues,
Navies fed to the fish in the dark
Unbridled waters.

And what is the fate of one who has sought an "inner essence" and comes back with a lodestone of supposed authenticity?

The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever (Part 2 of 5)

The following is an excerpt of a 27 January 2015 email exchange between Art and Will.

The Descent of Aeneas into Hell

Art:

I'm imagining someone born on the banks of the Savoyard River-turned-sewer beneath the ruins of Black Bottom, now beneath the surface facade of the Chrysler Freeway.  

Is this your "true" Detroiter? Do we need to invent a character who has this kind of claim to authenticity? Whose existence is equivalent with Detroit's primordial essence? Someone who lived in this dark world, who haunted all the bombed-out ruins of Detroit, traveling through its underground network of rivers, creeks, and brooks, used first as open sewers then covered over by the French? 

Is this The Benefactor? Is he the one, emerging from the depths as a modern Berry Gordy of sorts, who engenders a renaissance in Detroit music?

Will:

The cult of authenticity is a very postmodern thing, and I love the idea of making The Benefactor the most authentic Detroiter ever. He should be a descendent of Cadillac, have some Native American roots, and be hundreds of years old. Also, we should use him to mercilessly satirize what Spike Lee called the Magical Negro stereotype. 

Actually, maybe he is beyond race...maybe he wears many faces. I see a hooded cloak. 

Also, he should turn out to be an Autobot.

The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever (Part 1 of 5)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 27 January 2015.



Still there is still something that smacks of Camusian suicide in having to go back to Detroit.

Maybe it's just to be around better producers, better collaborators, etc. But it also seems wrapped up in this issue of identity. And this seems to be one of the central preoccupations of our project. Our entire identity is fabricated.

As I read through the rapper's bio page, I begin to sense something more than just factuality present. There's the conscious construction of a history, an identity. Of course, this has to happen with everyone: even with someone like Eminem, you get the sense that he's become a narrative that is way more streamlined and distilled than the original experience. When his partner from Detroit says "Em's from Detroit proper," I have a hard time even placing what that means. Did he live in one of the bombed-out buildings where they filmed "Detroit vs. Everybody"? Did he and his mom construct some kind of shack in the middle of a parking lot? What is Detroit proper?

I assert that, sifting through the rubble beneath that statement, you find absolutely nothing that meets the criteria.

This all bumps up against Sartre's central existential doctrine, existence precedes essence: "man, first of all, exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world--and defines himself afterwards" (Existentialism and Human Emotions).

That process of defining of oneself--whether as a rapper, as a Detroiter, as Sartre's famous waiter, as a 60's rock legend, or as the city of Detroit itself--always involves some inauthenticity, some deliberate suppression of complexity, of contingency--ultimately of one's native subjectivity and transcendence.

I have to acknowledge the rapper in question for allowing his bio to be somewhat more complex than most, but still, there is a deliberate selection of detail in service of cred.

This is suicide.

Our project makes a joke about suicide.

Born and Raised in Windsor, Ontario

The following is an excerpt from an email sent from Will to Art on 24 January 2015.



So, it looks like that rapper lived in Detroit until 7th grade. That's probably long enough to identify with Detroit as one's hometown. Also, the alternative is saying he's from Howell. He might have been fronting more to say he was from Lansing!

My dad moved from Detroit to Melvindale when he was five. By the Birmingham scale, Melvindale is just downriver Detroit, but my dad always tells people from Michigan that he's from Melvindale. He tells people from Germany and usually people from other states that he's from Detroit, because most people from metro Detroit don't even know where Melvindale is. I think he actually says it as a point of pride. The closer you get to Detroit, the more you identify with your neighborhood: Allen Park, Hamtramck, Oak Park, etc.

Also, what you were saying about people who try to superimpose their understandings of other cities on Detroit...the best example is that terrible Journey song, which romanticizes South Detroit, which anyone who looks at a map knows is called Windsor, Ontario.  But, yeah, I guess a lot of people in Michigan can't conceptualize the idea that Canada is south of Detroit and that Detroit has no south side.

I took a really cool class for my MA on Detroit Architecture--actually, that one and my Italian Renaissance class were both offered through CMU and met at the Scarab Club by the DIA, and they were both taught by a genius named Mike Farrell. Anyway, Professor Farrell always insisted that Detroit is basically Rome, and the guy knew Rome and Detroit inside and out, so I trust him. He lives in an old manse in a burned-out neighborhood behind the DIA. I think six houses are still standing on his block. I guess he and his neighbors have removed most of the ornamental features from the outsides of their houses because people from Ann Arbor keep stealing them and selling them at their architectural resale stores.

Anyway, I think that's what I mean by the Forbidden Zone comment.

Detroit is America at an accelerated pace: it lived America's history more quickly and more intensely than the rest of the country, so going there is like studying a thousand years of US history even though the US has only produced a few hundred years everywhere else. Detroit has to be dismissed as misguided and cartoonish because the alternative is to see the future of the whole country.

Lansing is the avant-garde of American mediocrity. My students always said Lansing was ten years behind.

I said it was 30 years ahead.

A Fly-Over Zone

The following is an excerpt of an  email sent from Will to Art on 24 January 2015.

Yeah, I probably should have just said "pattern" instead of "trope."

With the Detroit thing, I was just talking with some colleagues about how Malcolm X went by "Detroit Red" when he was a gangster, because nobody had ever heard of Lansing, let alone Mason, MI. Part of the Detroit thing is convenience in conversations with people who don't know Michigan's geography. I probably told you about that party I attended in DC. A congressman's aide asked me where I was from. I said Lansing, Michigan. He said never heard of it. I said it's Michigan's capital city. He said well, that's super. An affiliated problem with the idea that nobody gets Detroit is that it's the Michigan city they know best.

Basically, the rest of the country considers us a fly-over zone.

Also, I think people may say they are from Detroit not just for the street cred, but because most suburbs of Detroit lack an urban center. There's a downtown Birmingham, but no downtown Troy, Bloomfield Hills, West Bloomfield, Wixom, Sterling Heights, Huntington Woods, etc. So you have a ghost town at the center of a sprawling population with basically no concept of downtown life. Ferndale has a main drag, but it's not quite a downtown. Hamtramck has a downtown, but most people wouldn't walk it. So do Royal Oak and Birmingham. Most metro Detroiters whose families go back a few generations know that Detroit was the anchor for the family when it first came to Michigan, so it's sort of every suburb's downtown, except, as you pointed out, it's weird compared to most downtowns.

I also agree that rewriting one's own personal history for street cred is lame, and probably the fastest way to jeopardize street cred.

Jack White grew up in Mexican Town, but it's not like that's where he gigged when he was a kid. Goober and the Peas was definitely a suburban band. I know he went to a Catholic elementary school, but he went to Cass Tech for high school. Eminem counts, too. But yeah, Kid Rock is Romulus. Still, what is downtown Romulus...the airport? So I get why he says Detroit. Of course, I'm from Birmingham, and I think on the scale of Detroitness, Romulus is more Detroit than Birmingham. Incidentally, I am also a poseur. I say I'm from Birmingham because when I was a kid, my mailing address was Birmingham. When I was maybe in middle school, it changed to Bloomfield Hills even though we didn't move. It's easier to relate to Birmingham than Bloomfield Hills because Bloomfield Hills doesn't have a downtown. But my deep, dark secret is that I'm really from Bloomfield Township. Also, I thought I could escape the lie in Traverse City, but really, I live in Garfield Township. Oh, the humanity!

Anyway, you and I aren't pretending we're from Detroit. We've created fictional characters who are from Detroit, and they flee Detroit, end up in Lansing, and at least Will still claims to be a Detroiter even though he actually could have done quite a bit to protect his corner of Detroit instead of cashing out and leaving. Also, his Dad is part of the reason why Detroit became such a difficult place to live, so he follows the pattern of a lot of the people I grew up with, who made all their family money in Detroit, led so many of the self-interested policies that crippled Detroit, then pulled all their money out of Detroit and put it into the suburbs, other states, or overseas. And then still had the gall to think of themselves as Detroiters, and to blame the fall of Detroit on people who didn't have the power to call the shots.

Really, Will Witkowski is heavily shaped by my vantage point growing up as someone who didn't fit in very well in Birmingham and resented a lot of the wealth and privilege that surrounded me. My dad was born in Detroit and grew up in Melvindale, and my mom is from a small town in Ohio. It doesn't make a ton of sense that we ended up in Birmingham. Really, I see it as a great blessing: my sister and I got to go to Country Day for 10% of the tuition thanks to my parents' working there, and we got the sort of education that is reserved for the ruling class. But really, we're not ruling class people; my parents were both teachers. You know how it is for teachers and their families: we had all the benefits of wealth, but none of the money.

Anyway, I was a strange fit for my hometown, and it's easier to evaluate it from afar if you're on the outside looking in. And I could never look at the wealthy suburbs of Detroit without looking at Detroit and examining correlations and causalities. I don't know...in a weird way, I feel like setting Will as a Detroiter isn't about my trying to pretend I'm from Detroit as much as it's expressing my teenage frustration with Birmingham, so in my own deranged way, I'm representing Birmingham.

Although, again, I'm from Bloomfield Township, and maybe it's not representing if you are ripping on it. And Will doesn't flee to Birmingham, he flees to Lansing, which is my way of representing Lansing. But it's probably not representing if my vision of Lansing is a place where a 70's legend and his brother could drop off the map, although I do think that's an accurate representation of Lansing.

A Depressingly False Facade

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 24 January 2015.



Okay, if we're talking tropes, how about the trope of white people in Michigan saying they're from Detroit or, alternatively, moving to Detroit and "establishing residency"?

I was reminded of this by a local rapper whose career has been gaining some traction recently. In the last year or two online, I have noticed him go from being a local rapper here to being a Detroiter. In his videos and the couple interviews I've seen, he implies or straight out says that he's from Detroit. He never mentions having lived here.

This kind of thing rubs me the wrong way.

And yet, we are definitely doing the same exact thing. The same thing happens with New York City and Los Angeles. I've recently seen two non-West Coast rappers--one from Michigan, one from Conneticut--go out to Los Angeles and totally revise their identity to fit this mold. Now, to be fair, these ones admit they did it. They make frequent allusions to their life back home. This local rapper I mention seems to want to wipe out any memory of having lived here.

I think it's true to say Eminem actually came from what we consider Detroit. It would be interesting to run through the white artists who identify as Detroiters and determine how many of them--and I'm talking post-riots--actually grew up within city limits and went to public school. Also witness all the people who have the huge Old English "D" on their car or "Detroit Against Everyone" T-shirts.

Why do I want to say to these people that you're a bunch of a-holes?

I guess it's because this mentality strikes me as so mid-20th century and I'm annoyed that we're still doing this kind of thing. I think this is a big trope for us to grapple with since we have--perhaps unwittingly--fallen into it ourselves.

I definitely identify as a Michigander. I do feel some pride that my dad grew up in (pre-riot) Detroit and attended public schools. I do feel some vicarious pride that Detroit is our state's big city and I think that some of those qualities of grit and toughness extend to our state as a whole. For example, it has often been said that our sports teams need to be "blue collar" or nothing. We can't have a "glamorous" team like the L.A. Lakers. This extends as far west as Izzo and Dantonio's Spartans. I say that some of that spirit comes from our collective ownership of Detroit.

In a real sense, Detroit is the heart of Michigan.

But what I witness in this white, local rapper is disturbing, embarrassing, maybe even unmanly.

Why not put your current city--with its virtues, its shortcomings, its tragic and comic aspects--on the map? I understand that there is greater opportunity in those bigger, higher-profile places, and maybe that's all it is.

But that's not all that's at stake with Detroit obviously. It may be that Detroit is seen as the nearest portal to fame that has opened up (again) the last decade or so. If you can "establish residency" there, you may have a chance to make that leap, much more so than in some other, smaller city. But establishing residency in Detroit is always going to be associated with credibility, with grit, with hard knocks, and so it is going to involve a good amount of deception to capitalize on that opportunity.

I also think that how we collectively portray Detroit to the rest of the world is deception as well.

People don't understand how Detroit doesn't feel like a city, or at least that there is no coherent urban experience like there is about every other major recent hub of music, like Seattle or Pittsburgh. They don't understand, that instead of bustling sidewalks, we have a lonely monorail threading its way between buildings. Instead of continuous neighborhoods, we have parking lots, vacant lots, and wide freeways that essentially make it impossible to experience anything that could be termed "urban life." People assume that all cities possess a kind of "condensed unity" and indeed most other cities do. They assume that the experience of Detroiters is like that of the inhabitants of other cities, just more gritty and intense. They don't realize how much time you spend driving from place to place. They don't understand how diffuse and incoherent Detroit is.

To present it to the world as a monolithic concept is presenting a depressingly false facade.

A Series of Head Removals

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 21 January 2015.



I hear you, Art.

I was more curious about some of the things you've hinted at in terms of exploring themes of racism and white entitlement. I'm cool with the idea that Arthur is just making his own music and that the there is something in the tone of both the church organ and Marvin Gaye that somehow unlocks Arthur's own voice.

There's a type of commentary on race relations that comes from just not dealing with the question at all.

It does make sense that as Will is amassing musicians that he doesn't leave his own comfort zone and never notices or scrutinizes any of the implications of who he chooses as a musician or how he treats a musician. If we peel back Will's lack of perceptiveness just a little bit, that may be all of the commentary we need, although it would be very subtle. Maybe if we pile up a family tradition of this lack of consideration, including the damage the family business does as it paves through Detroit without any eye toward effects on neighborhoods, that's enough. Entitled white guys just don't really think. That would stand in contrast to Arthur, who has a mystical connection to truth and channels it in ways that defy common sense and propriety.

Or maybe we need to go stronger.

I saw a documentary on Soul Train in which Don Cornelius was talking about Gino Vanelli. I guess Don Cornelius was talking about the importance of featuring black artists and Gino Vanelli said yeah, but I'm not black. Don Cornelius said, "I see you as off-white."

I was watching those videos some of those videos in a little more depth. The Gino Vanelli one on Soul Train is interesting to me because the song is just so intense and political and theatrical. It's a little too disturbing to dance to, and it has these elaborate 3/4 sections that resist dancing. Also, the band has strange instrumentation: no guitars of any sort--not even a bass--but three keyboards, drums and percussion, and a vocalist with musical theater moves.

What really hit me, though, was the Ambrosia video. What if we made a video just like that, but then slipped in costume changes so sometimes it's the 70's band and sometimes the band is in scrubs? What if when they superimpose the singer over the band in a special vaseline-smeared frame, we have a bunch of character faces? I could see the Sea Devils costume, and we could have a series of head-removals, in which we see Farthington's face, Arthur's face, Steffi's face, Will's face, Fr. Bernard's face, etc. Just take that very typical sort of late 70's/early 80's performance video, but stack it with imagery from our story but no narrative outside of the lyrics of the song. It would be pretty disturbing.

I think this video also influenced my vision of the Ambrosia video. Have you seen this yet? It's called Too Many Cooks, and all I'll say about it if you haven't already seen it yet is that Cartoon Network put it on Adult Swim at 4:00 a.m. when the infomercials are usually running.

No prior warning, nothing to let audiences know it's coming.

Light Years Beyond Madonna

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 22 January 2015.

David Bowie performs "Heroes" at Marc Bolan Show in 1977.

I think we interpreted "tropes" a little differently.

I was going with the idea of "here are different types of lineups." I intentionally left the implications of the lineups out, for a variety of reasons. They all conjure different types of baggage for everybody, and it's always hard to know what anyone's intentions are for their choices, anyway.

I think there are sub-tropes within every trope I delineated. For instance, in the all-white groups, you could have the Pat Boone thing, which is whitening a black sound for commercial acceptability; the Elvis thing, which is directly ripping off a black sound and using his whiteness as a way to profit from it; the tribute thing, which happens when a white group is profoundly influenced by black artists and finds its own voice through black music (Hall and Oates maybe); or the novelty act, in which there is a gimmick behind the idea that the white band sounds so black (Wild Cherry, The Average White Band).

Of course, through all this discussion, I'm aware of many of the countless problems in using terms like "white music" and "black music." Arthur's music is genuinely his own and I don't think there is anything exploitative in the influences that show through in his music. But then there's Will, who reflects the American Way of doing business and turning art into product.

It's easy to go overboard in crying racism when looking at pop music.

It's also easy to let artists we like off the hook. I love Bowie, too, but he might be the king of a British colonialist approach to music. Nearly all of his career is about taking American raw materials, finishing them with British sensibilities, and selling them back to Americans at an inflated price. Even his Berlin period began because he followed Iggy over there. I'm not calling him a colonialist to dismiss him. I think he's a genius and love his music, and I think he has the best sense of how to turn appropriations into something new and interesting out of any artist I can think of...he's light years beyond Madonna.

Pick a Genre, A-holes!

The following is an excerpt of email sent from Art to Will on 21 January 2015.



I felt most uncomfortable at the following moments:

• When Gino Vannelli was talking to Don Cornelius
• When Elvis Presley approached his black backup singers and made them flinch (what the hell?)
• The whole time during Paul Simon
• The whole time during Justin Timberlake
• The whole time during Eric Burdon
• My favorite, of course, is the Sly and the Family Stone one. Don Cornelius felt the same way.

The Rolling Stones and Duran Duran is just run-of-the-mill exploitation, like Pink Floyd, Steve Winwood, Madonna's "Like a Prayer," etc.

I don't feel comfortable with any of these tropes.

The one I feel most comfortable with is Bowie, who has his "blue-eyed soul" periods as well. First of all, unlike all these other ones, he is the lead singer. He has the most interesting voice of anyone up on stage. The six backup singers know it too. His voicings and phrasings cut through everything. I think the thing with Bowie, too, is that you never think you're listening to blue-eyed soul. It's just too weird. Bowie's inimitable persona is at the center of every song. There's no song that needs any help from a gospel choir. The background singers are complementary elements; they are not making up for some weakness (as they are now in the case of Mick Jagger).

Bowie is just a connoisseur of music. He wants to try making different kinds, running it through his strange interpretive channels and seeing what comes out. At the same time--and, for me, this one of those signs of genius--he is the furthest thing from that most profane of all descriptors, eclectic. À la Current Magazine every single weekend in 90's Ann Arbor: "an eclectic mix of reggae, funk, jazz, etc., etc."

Pick a genre, a-holes!

I don't think we want to pick any of these tropes. I think we just want to do our thing and try to get it as close to what we're hearing in our heads.

Although I've said it at times, I don't think I'm trying to do black music. That's just part of the landscape of things I love.