DOC Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit by Suzanne E. Smith in History

Review

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Powerful episodes in a work that dispels Motown mythsBy J-RockMotown is inescapable these days. I was talking with a friend on the phone today and she was mentioning how Michael Jackson was on TV in Tokyo. Motown directly and indirectly has influenced black culture so much and this Dreamgirls moment is a mighty opportunity to peer beyond the veil and see some of the less talked about sides of Motown.Many focus on the content of Motown music but Motown as a case study in Black Capitalism is a more prickly topic. Suzanne Smith chooses to highlight several episodes in Motown's history against the history of Detroit that was taking place behind it. In this book you're getting exposed to some lesser known events in Motown's history along with community history of Detroit. This book will be of greatest interest to scholars in the music business and urban history. I don't feel that this is the best place for those to turn who just like the sound of Motown's music and want to learn more.Suzanne Smith's perspective is that Motown had to be a Black Business due to the nature of its times and the affect that its music had on its surrounding community. In a little bit over 250 pages of text [thorough academic references take up the rest]; it's hard to make a rock solid case for that point. Conventional wisdom is that Berry Gordy was a *family* capitalist more than a black capitalist and Motown was more about making money for the Gordy family than the Detroit community. Motown struggled to scale up when the Supremes hit big at the same time that the nation lost its faith in coalition politics. Rather than go Black Power; Gordy became focused on Hollywood and abandoned the grassroots foundation of Motown. I feel that's more the interpretation in other books that I've read on the topic and this book wasn't thorough enough to overturn that perspective.On the other hand; this book certainly spices that conventional wisdom up a bit. I recently purchased and read Perniel Joseph's "Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of the Black Power Movement". This book offers an effective cultural complement to that work. Joseph talks about Rev. Albert Cleage; father of popular novelist Pearl Cleage. In Dancing in the Street you learn more about the cultural battles that Detroit leaders like Rev. Cleage and Rev. C.L. Franklin; father of Aretha Franklin; were fighting to raise the status of black people in a city that was losing industrial jobs.There are some stories in this book that add complexity to my understanding of Motown. I did not realize that Langston Hughes had recorded for Motown. I did not know that the Supremes had recorded a public service movie for a campaign to raise money for a local charity and that Florence Ballard was included in the movie despite Cindy Birdsong's replacing her to maintain ties to the hometown fans! Like Barack Obama in 2007; Motown had a delicate balance to maintain with national and international ambitions as a goal even as they had to continually convince local talent to be part of the Motown family at submarket wages. I think that this book was written well before the documentary Standing In the Shadows of Motown; and that makes it seem a little hollow at times. On the exploitation of artists; this book focuses more on the Holland; Dozier; Holland suit as an example of exploitation and chooses not to engage in the biographies of the artists as much.I feel that this book would have needed to be more detailed and have more primary interviews with living Motown artists and some new interviews with Berry Gordy by the author to be a highest priority read for Motown heads. As it stands; this is still a good book for those interested in urban history and some of the less frequently told tales of the Motown empire.3.5 stars.--SD19 of 20 people found the following review helpful. Great Book; Great City; A Time Not To Be ForgottenBy David M. KossSuzanne Smith deserves tremendous credit for transforming her love of Detroit; her home; her love of Motown; the soul music of her generation; and her love of historical analysis; the career she has chosen; into a remarkably readable and indeed breathtaking review of a city; a time; and a musical genre that is too often neglected. Sure; the most celebrated heirs of the Motown legend; the Jackson family; Diana Ross; Stevie Wonder; achieved fame and fortune. But Barry Gordy's Motown -- the Motown of European-Americans like Suzanne Smith; and the Motown of all of Detoit's people of color; needs to be remembered often and with affection. That Suzanne Smith can tell the story of Detroit in the turbulent 1960s with such style and grace; is a testament to her skill as an analyst of culture and her skill as one of the next generation of honored historians. Presently at George Mason University in Virginia; look for Professor Smith to soon teach from a tenured chair in Ann Arbor; Michigan; New Haven; Connecticut; or Cambridge; Massachusetts.12 of 16 people found the following review helpful. Szatmary; 's reviewer; is a bit "naive" himself.By Christopher W. ChaseProfessor Suzanne E. Smith' project *Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit* is a well-written and fascinating work of revisionist; myth-busting history. For perhaps no other musical institution has been given such a large free pass for (mis)representing its founder's ideology as the company's actual history.The story of Motown is usually told as the early story of Berry Gordy; a member of an Black entrepreneurial family who borrows $800 from his other family members and ends up the king of a musical empire; thus proving the Horatio Alger myth that anyone (even an African-American) with a little grit and determination can succeed in America. But such a story fails to account for much of the instituional; and ideological factors that made a specific type of entrepreneurial cultural production possible in Detroit; Michigan. Along with churches; temples; businesses; newspapers and activists; we are treated to a history of Motown that is deeply inscribed in an underclass familial net of relationships and social networks; given a boost by black media and a history of both jazz production and humanistic training for songwriters and musicians in the Detroit educational system. Not in the least; there was the automotive industry; which was both a source of Black humilation; frustation; and yet inspiration for adapting technologies and industrial processes of streamling and assembly-line production. Motown literally manufactured its artists using the same separate teams for songwriting; backup production; etiquette and image cultivation for all its artists. As the business grows the model remains; although soon Motown is a multi-million dollar international industry; and no longer a small paternalistically run family operation.Throughout it all; Motown is given a both a special place in the Black community and a difficult role in attempting to market its product to a larger white (and mostly teenage) audience. Indebted to the civil rights ideologies of Booker T. Washington and Carter G. Woodson; Motown maintains an ambivalent relationship with the fracturing civil rights movement and its divergent leaders and interests. As the tumultuousness of 1967 and 1968 come forth; the fissures at Motown erupt; as many artists demand a greater profit-sharing; and more creative control over their music and roles at the company. We see and follow the careers and songs of the Supremes; Little Stevie Wonder; Martha and the Vandellas; and well as The Miracles and Marvin Gaye. Smith builds a woven patchwork of cultural history and its emergent politics around several different themes; such as the rise and ultimate failure of Black capitalism to remain tied to its original community; the uses or Motown for the greater Detroit black community; and the role of other Motown among other institutions in ameliorating economic and political hardship for the Black community; both locally and nationally. We get to set not only the production side of Motown; but also the myriad ways that the music was inextricably interwoven and read into the lives of those who held it dear to Detroit' heart.Methodologically; Smith does all this by using the theoretical perspective of Raymond Williams; who coined the concept "cultural formation." In Williams' view; it is impossible to understand "an intellectual or artistic project without also understanding its formation." Cultural formations are "simultaenously artistic forms and social locations." The relationship dynamic between the two structures the formation that emerges as a result of the synergistic effects of the individual projects; agents; and institutions involved. Each functions as a distinct agent with its own agendas and motivations; constituting a complex mosiac of reactions; relationships; and tensions. This is particularly well suited to an analysis of Motown Records; precisely because of the culturally mythological status it has acheived---an American everyman's music. But even the deep seated agendas and motivations that gave birth to this acheivement of seemingly apolitical universalism are themselves deeply political and reflect political consequences of judgments. These judgments to aggresively pursue a project of Black capitalism modeled on the industrial production of the automotive industrial ("assembly line production" of hit songs) are the efforts of Detroit's most famous "cultural producer;" regardless of how the company may have attempted to steer clear of explicit poltical messages in its products as much as possible.All in all; the book is a significant addition to recent scholarship. In depth for the cultural historian and Motown fan; but very easy and user-friendly for the casual reader. The book has been criticized for its approach to Black capitalism; but Smith's perspective is in no way "naive." Rather; it is solidly based in historical political economy of African-Amercan underdevelopment as discussed by Manning Marable; among others. Her criticism of Gordy is tempered; and is presently more as the inevitable consequence of becoming a large impersonal corporation that still uses paternalistic rhetoric towards its cultural workers and larger community while acting solely in its own self-interest. If Smith draws largely on black newspaper accounts; autobiography and insider media; it is not because she wishes to avoid "primary" sources; but is instead interested in drawing a picture of the relationships and interactions that emerge at the time among institutions as well as people--something not easily obtainable from interviews and other types of so-called "primary sources" years later. Of course; the political and hermeneutic assumptions inherent in classifying some sources as primary and others as secondary are themselves sometimes suspect. But that is a discussion for another time and place.