Jacqueline Caux

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DVD La Huit – EDV 1489 – www.lahuit.com. distribution@lahuit.com. Additionaly with an interview of Laurent Garnier and his live music performance “Crispy Bacon”.

This 57 minute-documentary film aims at telling about the social and musical destiny of Detroit. Within the maze of this city, which bares the marks of its different periods of peak, decline and rebirth…, with “ The Electrifying Mojo”s itinerary, the passer, the brilliant unifier of all styles, the creator of techno philosophy and Mad Mike the legendary creator of the first independant label Undergound Resistance.

As early as the mid Seventies, “Electryfing Mojo” had a regular program on the famous WJLB. Downtown, next to the demolished premises of this radio, where “Electrifying Mojo” was on air with his program “The Midnight Funk Association”. His voice is recalling us the art of this mysterious character, of whom there is only one photograph, showing his face hidden by a shadow!

And this is when the fifth cycle of the Mental Machine” develops: that of techno music, after the Blues, the Gospel, the Rythm and Blues with Motown, and jazz. First generation (Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, Jeff Mills, Mad Mike) as well as second generation musicians (Carl Craig, Plastikman, Kenny Larkin…) worshipped him. Why is it here, in decadency, decay, violence and isolation, that a counter-culture, ignored, even refused by the city and the whole USA has, sprung and spread worldwide? It is probably the lack of hope acting as a sort of exorcism which nourished these artists and a strong machine catarcis .

As early as the 1910s, the daily 5 $-wage offered by Henry Ford’s factories widely contributed to attract to Detroit thousands of black workers trying to flee the rural poverty of the South. Henry Ford was not afraid to declare: “The black man is a human being capable of integrity, loyalty, preoccupied with his prosperity and his family well-being”!

The 1929 Depression as well as the increase of mechanization in the cotton fields, brings thousands of black families towards Chicago and Detroit. Henry Ford’s assembly lines alone soon employ two thirds of the Afro-American workers of the local car industry. The Blues becomes urban and thanks to continuing modernization, the guitar, like the one of John Lee Hooker who had come to Detroit in 1943, becomes electrical.

Detroit community goes through an unusual expansion. Nevertheless there are tensions in the workshops and on assembly lines, especially with the white proletariat also coming from the South. Antagonisms intensified by the Depression years end up with, in the summer 1943, onto the first bloody riots.

At the time of what I would call the second musical and social cycle of this “Mental Machine” that Detroit is for me, Reverend Franklin – Aretha’s father – is on a local black radio program through which he delivers sermons. Detroit quickly gains a reputation of a city of great predicators and soon Gospel is broadcast on radios. By 1952, thanks to Leroy White and Bill Randle Rhythm and Blues programs, WJLB has become the city‘s first black radio. I find it easy to imagine they might very well be Electrifying Mojo’s precursors…

At the same period, Reverend Franklin, Reverend Gates from Atlanta and many others… sell the records of their sermons by mail-order thanks to the distribution network of Chicago Chess Company over black America. At the time, the black community massively bought their 78 … and soon their singles. Together with the development of the recording tape and cheaper recording sessions, dozens of small records companies emerged. Would that already be the start of independent labels later developed by techno musicians?

In 1955, a great number of blocks, including those of Hastings Street, the main street of “Black Bottom” (the black ghetto of Detroit, ironically knick-named “Paradise Valley”) were razed to be replaced by the Chrysler freeway. The Afro-American community of the car capital, with 300 000 souls, is the fourth one in the US, after Harlem’s, Chicago’s and Philadelphia’s. In 1945 after the riots, Joe Von Battle, another emigrant from the South, had opened the “Joe’s Record Shop” at 3530 Hastings Street among greengrocers, hairdressers, fried chicken shops, pawnbrokers. The shop was near the New Bethel Baptist Church where Aretha Franklin recorded her first Gospel record in 1955 at the age of 13.

On WJLB the “Rock with Leroy” program bridges the gap between Gospel and Rhythm and Blues. That’s when the third cycle of the “Mental Machine” starts. Soon, Rhythm and Blues is going to develop spectacularly in Detroit around the charismatic personality of a former Ford factory worker, Berry Gordy who, with very little means, started “Tamla Motown”, what was to be a record empire which will become the flagship of the Soul industry. This “Hits factory” launched Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, the Jackson 5, the Temptations…

In the sixties, Tamla Motown’s music was listened to, at home as well as when driving, both by black and white teenagers. Detroit, « Motorcity », the city of taylorism, dreamed by the great three - General Motors, Ford, Chrysler – was the world capital of cars and the symbol of the American way of life.

Then the fourth cycle of the “Mental Machine” burst. The end of the sixties witnessed a period of terrible racial riots for civil rights in Detroit. They took place shortly after the Wattsriots in Los Angeles and Harlem’s in New York. The economical power scarefully reacted by relocating the factories. Liberalism kept all its coherence: protecting capital regardless of the disaster it left behind.
Detroit decline was quicken by the departure of Tamla Motown in 1972, then by the oil crisis in 1973 which gave the final blow, putting a definite stop to the sales of big, oil-consuming American cars. Economic decay added to endemic unemployment lead to inevitable exodus. Those who could started leaving the city, sometimes burning their own house to claim insurance money.

Yet, as early as the mid Seventies, “Electryfing Mojo” had a regular program on the famous WJLB. Downtown, next to the demolished premises of this radio, where “Electrifying Mojo” was on air with his program “The Midnight Funk Association”, we will recall the art of this mysterious character, of whom there is only one photograph, showing his face hidden by a shadow!

And this is when the fifth cycle of the Mental Machine” develops: that of techno music. First generation (Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, Jeff Mills, Mad Mike) as well as second generation musicians (Carl Craig, Plastikman, Kenny Larkin…) worshipped him. With some of them we will try to analyze this stunning paradox: why is it here, in decadency, decay, violence and isolation, that a counter-culture, ignored, even refused by the city and the whole USA has, sprung and spread worldwide? It is probably the lack of hope acting as a sort of exorcism which nourished these artists.

Jacqueline Caux

Press :

> Vibrations - La cité abandonnée - par David Brun-Lambert - n° 116 - July 2009
> MCD - Musiques et Cultures Digitales - July 2009 - n°53
> Films sur la musique, Le Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, July 11 to 28, 2007
> Detroit : ode à une jungle de béton - par Maxence Grugier - mcd (Musiques et cultures digitales) - September-October 2007 - n°42
> > Interview Jacqueline Caux - par Maxence Grugier - Art Numérique - May 2, 2006
> The Cycles of The Mental Machine - Festival d’automne à Paris - September 16, 2006
> La maquette retrouvée de la Nouvelle-Orléans - par Francis Marmande - Le Monde - September 14, 2006 - n°19171
> The Electifying Mojo, Le Socrate Noir - par Jean-Yves Leloup - Trax - - September 2006 - n°98
> Détours par Détroit - par Alexis Bernier - Libération - September 16, 17, 2006 - n°7887
>> Les spectacles vivants - par Vincent Tarrière - Festival d’automne - Vibrations - November 2006 - n°88
> Tsugi - Musiques tendances électroniques - 2006

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