Filed under: Etc.
My fair former home has of late inspired poetic musings by a few fellow expatriates.
Bob Hicok’s “A Primer,” published May 19 in The New Yorker, supplanted this cramped Brooklyn transplant’s homesickness with visions of a corn silk slice of wide Midwestern sky, his words humming like tires, popping with humor and succor in lines like, “The Upper Peninsula is a spare state / in case Michigan goes flat” and “We are a people who by February / want to kill the sky for being so gray / and angry at us. “What did we do?” / is the state motto.”
I highly suggest that you read the poem in its entirety here. I give it two mitten thumbs up.
And chances are if you’ve found yourself here, you have at least a remote interest in Detroit music, in which case you’ve probably already read Jack White’s “Courageous Dream’s Concern,” the urban b-side to Hicok’s “Primer,” published in Sunday’s Detroit Free Press.
Where Hicok recounts the cold, dark depths of Lake Superior and rows of corn alongside the wide swath of I-75, White creeps through a hole in a gate, probably rusted and swirled on top with razor wire, to fish, watch the mail boats, and daydream about shipwrecks. There’s a layer of soot resting on Jack’s memories, the black powder from burning houses and nearby factories that settles on dirty, sweaty hands, sticky with Sander’s malt, the “fresh-baked fumes of culture.”
And, of course, promptly upon the publishing of Jack’s poem, a slurry of anonymous online commenters mucked up his attempt at a white flag to the city he grew up in and helped grow.
So he’s said a couple of not-so-nice things about the city in the past. So has anybody who’s lived there. The “Say Nice Things About Detroit” campaign had good intentions, but blind optimism didn’t help anyone.
While he was there, Jack White helped shine a spotlight on the city’s ever-urgent, jittery, shout-out-loud soul, which for a decade or so had been insulated by moss and the cold, dark, deep lakes encircling the state like a soundproof moat.
Tourists zigzagged between Detroit’s storied record stores and Hotel Yorba, revisiting old blues and jazz haunts and the hallowed Motown Museum. Countless new bands, both in the city and throughout the world, took to this scene’s reinvigoration of rock ’n’ roll, and helped move us all forward.
It’s been almost a decade since The White Stripes released their self-titled debut, and I still can’t visit a single bar in my new hometown, on any night of the week, without hearing at least one of their songs. And each time I hear them, they sound as new as they did back in my old office at Metro Times, having just opened an envelope holding White Blood Cells.
Almost immediately after hearing the record, I was setting up an interview[1], and Jack was e-mailing directions to his house on Ferdinand, the house where he grew up, where I was scheduled to interview him and Meg: “is two o’clock good?” he wrote. “that would be cool for us, please listen to the new record if you have a chance, love to know what you think of it.”[2]
And now, from afar, White is sharing his sincere love for his hometown. Yes, he moved out of Detroit a couple of years ago. So have thousands in years prior and since. Some (granted, a much smaller number) have moved in.
Maybe White will move back some day. Maybe Hicok will. Heck, maybe I will. But in the meantime, why don’t we all heed Hicok’s peaceful prose: “Let us all be from somewhere./Let us tell each other everything we can.”
…
[1] Ben Blackwell (Jack’s nephew, then a young journalism student and the band’s impromptu-publicity guy; now an esteemed blogger and drummer for The Dirtbombs) helped set up the interview, and he’d probably like to believe it was his keen negotiating skills that landed the band on our May 2001 cover. But I knew there’d be no question in my editors’ minds once they heard the wail and fuzz on the opening track. And once our cover ran, and the calls started coming in, I knew things were going to get interesting.
[2] Somehow we convinced the duo to let us print the fact that they had been married, going against conditions I had naively agreed to in my negotiations with Blackwell; yeah, he was a college kid, but at the time I was a recent grad myself, a spry 24 [and, ahem, note the date of my story (5/30/01) against Time’s “White Lies” piece (6/16/01), which supposedly “broke” that story, although I do remember a Free Press article in there somewhere, which for the life of me I cannot find online]. But I also remember thinking it wasn’t that big of a deal that they wanted people to think they were brother and sister, and I might have even fought a bit against the big reveal. Bad journalist!
