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.
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