California Series in Hip Hop Studies

Hip Hop and Community Building in Detroit

Rebekah Farrugia, Kellie D. Hay

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520973367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Detroit, MIchigan, has long been recognized as a center of musical innovation and social change. Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay draw on seven years of fieldwork to illuminate the important role that women have played in mobilizing a grassroots response to political and social pressures at the heart of Detroit's ongoing renewal and development project. Focusing on the Foundation, a women-centered hip hop collective, Women Rapping Revolution argues that the hip hop underground is a crucial site where Black women shape subjectivity and claim self-care as a principle of community organizing. Through interviews and sustained critical engagement with artists and activists, this study also articulates the substantial role of cultural production in social, racial, and economic justice efforts.

1

Detroit Hip Hop and the Rise of the Foundation

Detroit’s musical history is rich and hip hop figures prominently in its evolution. This chapter situates the Foundation in the context of the local hip hop underground and in particular, the development of inclusive spaces like the 5e Gallery that privileged hip hop’s Knowledge element. We illustrate how these changes in the late 2000s were in contrast to the hard, raw, and male-centered battle rap culture that dominated in the 1990s and made it difficult for Black women like Miz Korona and Red Bone, as well as white male artists like Eminem, to be accepted at venues like the influential Hip Hop Shop. From here we move on to the Foundation’s efforts to create more inclusive spaces for women and the dynamics of its weekly open night, which the collective hosted for five years, from 2009–2014. We conclude with discussion of the objections, struggles, and successes of the Foundation during their years of operation between 2009 and 2016.

In the 1980s and 1990s the city garnered an international musical reputation for its innovative electro and techno sounds. It took some time for hip hop to gain momentum in this musical milieu, but over time hip hop music and culture began to permeate the city and its people. Local emcees and producers drew on influences from East and West Coast rap as well as the legendary radio sets of local DJs The Electrifying Mojo and Jeff “The Wizard” Mills. In a time before mass media conglomeration and conformity, Mojo and Mills’s sets featured everything from new wave and soul to classic rock.¹ Their eclecticism, along with Detroit’s rich musical history, inspired its hip hop trajectory. During this period, Detroit artists received some national attention and radio play but chart-topping hits from the region were sparse.² As the nineties wore on, the hip hop acts who garnered the most accolades were white and included the likes of Kid Rock, Insane Clown Posse, and Eminem.

The standardization of radio programming and the collapse of national rap tours were two conditions that led to the cultivation of hip hop scenes outside of Los Angeles and New York. Carleton Gholz³ singles out several venues for producing early artists like Slum Village and Eminem who are now canonized as Detroit legends. We came to know sites like Saint Andrew’s Hall downtown, the Rhythm Kitchen on the Eastside, and the Hip Hop Shop on the Westside as having the most impact. It was at fashion designer Maurice Malone and his partner Jerome Mongo’s Hip Hop Shop on Seven Mile Road that legendary producer J Dilla hung out with emcees like Eminem and Proof. Gholz explains,

The blueprint for the shop was the sale of Malone’s jeans and other hip hop culture specific commodities with open mic battles on Saturday afternoon. B-boys danced in the shop, while on Saturday evenings from 5 to 7 p.m. rap battles raged, overseen by long-time employee Proof. Shoppers came from everywhere since the shop was, according to Malone, unique in the entire world in the early 1990s.⁴

More important that the products for sale, the Shop was the community headquarters for networking, honing skills, and hard-core competition. Hip hop artist Leaf Erikson sums it up, saying, “on the mic, if you could survive at the Shop, you could survive anywhere at anytime. This was the era when open mic meant freestyle.”⁵ This period was the height of the gangsta rap era and that vibe permeated Detroit hip hop. The character and nature of the Shop was decidedly masculine. Men dominated these early years but women emcees like Lynette “Smiley” Michaels and Kalimah in the late 1980s, along with Lichelle “Boss” Laws, Red Bone, and Miz Korona in the 1990s challenged the gendered norms that relegated women to hip hop’s sidelines.

In our conversations with them, pioneers often begin their stories with institutional memory of places like the Hip Hop Shop. DJ Los is one of the city’s hip hop legends. Under the direction of his father Carl Butch Small, master percussionist for artists including Ice Cube, Nas, and Snoop Dogg, he took up DJing as a teenager. In 1988, DJ Los and emcee EZB released Untouchable on World One Records, the first hip hop album to come out of Detroit. Los continues to be actively involved in Detroit’s hip hop underground, working with artists such as the Almighty Dreadnaughts, Supa Emcee, and Kid Vicious. In 2019, he toured with Kid Vicious as part of Eminem’s Australia and New Zealand Rapture Tour. During the 5e Gallery’s years of operation it was commonplace to see Los DJing its events and hanging out in support of 5e and Foundation artists. He is a mentor in the community who frequently supports Foundation artists, be it serving as Miz Korona’s long-time DJ or scratching over the beats in Mahogany Jones’s track/video “Blue Collar Logic.”

DJ Los’s connection to other key hip hop players in Detroit’s underground goes back to the Hip Hop Shop days. The environment at the Shop was particularly brutal for women. As Los recalls, “It was raw, rugged and threatening; only a battle rapper like Miz Korona could feel comfortable on its stage.”⁶ It is no accident that during the Hip Hop Shop era Miz Korona’s emcee moniker was Pimpette. As one of her mentors, Proof was adamant that she change her name. He had no problem with her hard style but found her moniker troubling. Los reflects that “the Hip Hop Shop was the proving grounds and birth spot of the most talented, passionate, and biggest lovers of hip hop culture in Detroit! It is the one place that all of Detroit’s most recognized and most successful hip hop artists/DJs and producers of that era would meet to spar and collaborate with one another.”⁷ We cannot underestimate the intensity of the sparring. Community was indeed present, but for those on the mic it was also a brutal battleground.

Amazingly, while emcees were expected to spit skillful trash-talking rhymes, the beats underneath them were multidimensional. The jazzy, bass-heavy, horn-accented sounds trumped the killer context in which emcees abused one another with rhythmic, rhyming verbal assaults. Here we are reminded of Tricia Rose’s challenge to listeners to not give in to the beat when lyrical content is drenched in misogyny and other forms of contempt.⁸ When we met at the Cass Café to discuss his work with Mahogany Jones we asked producer Ronald “iRonic” Lee Jr. what he thought about the idea of conscious beats. After pausing to think he ruminated,

Music does speak. Music has its own language. Music can make you feel a certain way, whether it’s happy, sad, glad. [It can] make you more pensive, get you more amped and hyper. For me, I’m a revolutionary, you know what I’m saying, so music does have its own language and can evoke certain things.⁹

In addition to the relationship between music and revolutionary thinking, the influence of jazz also runs deep in Detroit. Motown’s house band the Funk Brothers brought their unique jazz-inflected pop sounds to the masses, and its influence can be heard on everything from Detroit techno records to the production of local hip hop. Most, if not all, of the producers we met come from musical families and homes where jazz, among other Black music genres, was a consistent soundtrack to daily life growing up. Traces and samples of these sounds continue to circulate in Detroit’s musical underground, leading some to define jazz-inflected hip hop as “conscious,” but consciousness implies awareness. The universal application of the descriptor to any jazz-inflected beat discourages thoughtful lyrical critique and enables emcees to evade responsibility for the content of their rhymes. More recent hip hop galleries and spaces continue to shape a full range of artistic styles within Detroit’s hip hop underground.

Detroit’s early hip hop scene left an imprint on the Foundation and the artists that supported it. The older pioneer figures came up in the Hip Hop Shop, whereas the next generation found their stage at the 5e Gallery. Inspired by his experiences at the Hip Hop Shop and his inter-elemental vision, DJ Sicari founded the 5e Gallery in 2008 as a sacred space where hip hop’s fifth element—Knowledge of community and self—was a pedagogical principle. DJing, emceeing, breaking, and graffiti are widely embraced elements. A commitment to Knowledge of self and community distinguishes people in the underground who support the Foundation, the 5e Gallery, and the organizing networks that they are connected to from the commercial market. Emcee Valid, a 5e protégé, spoke to us about the Gallery’s impact on his development:

I was like, oh this is really the core of hip hop. DJ Head was there, Fat Cat, DJ Dez, Slum Village people . . . this is the core of the Detroit hip hop community . . . . That was my dojo, 5e Gallery. When you talk about J Dilla, Eminem, Fat Cat, and Royce the 5’ 9” they say the Hip Hop Shop. Then there was a generation after that that talks about the Lush Lounge. And now to me, my spot in Detroit hip hop where I learned my craft, at least really where I fell in love with it and it made me a better emcee, and I worked on my stage craft—5e Gallery.¹⁰

In our conversation, not only did Valid map out a significant lineage of Detroit’s hip hop history, but he also emphasized the cultivation of artistry and community that happens in these spaces.

The Hip Hop Shop and the 5e Gallery were central sites where artists honed their craft and identities. They provided crucial gathering spaces for the hip hop community. The Old Miami and the Cass Corridor Commons also figure prominently in our study as key sites where Foundation open mic nights and special events took place. Once Sicari met Piper Carter and their worldviews coalesced the 5e Gallery became the first home and sponsor of the Foundation.

From 2008 until its closing in 2015, the 5e Gallery had a migrant existence. At the time of our interview in June 2012 Sicari was running his second gallery in the city’s Corktown neighborhood just west of downtown and had been in this location for two years. He opened the first location in a warehouse just down the street in 2009 but was evicted when the owner sold the building to a courier service. The first and second spaces were lost as a result of entering land grant contracts with building owners. As the neighborhood began to gentrify hungry for-profit business owners sold their buildings to cash rich buyers. In the summer of 2013 the 5e moved from the Southwest neighborhood to the Cass Corridor. In its third location, the Gallery occupied the lower level of the Cass Corridor Commons—a charming nineteenth-century limestone building that was once the exclusive property of the First Unitarian-Universalist Church of Detroit but is now home to the East Michigan Environmental Action Council. Shortly after the Foundation open mic night came to an end in 2014, Sicari opened the final site of the Gallery on West Grand Boulevard. Lack of funding and affordable space factored into its closing within a few months. Whereas the Hip Hop Shop launched the careers of gangsta style artists, the 5e returned to the Knowledge element and hip hop’s history as a community building culture. It was inclusive and fertile ground where women commanded many stages.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

We understood early on that there were not a lot of places for women to hone their craft in Detroit; however, we didn’t know the extent to which gender issues were paramount until we experienced deep hanging out with Piper Carter and the Foundation. Struggles ranged from deciding on a name, to building an audience, to producing supportive, mentoring communities.

We first interviewed Piper on a bone-chilling cold January morning in 2012. We arrived early, eager for the interview after attending the Foundation’s Tuesday night open mic events for six months. In casual conversations we had learned that she loves coffee so we stopped by Avalon Bakery for lattés and scones on our way. As we pulled up to park, Piper was waiting for us on the steps of the Cass Corridor Commons building at the corner of Cass and Forest Avenues, just a few miles north of downtown.

We said our hellos as the building manager let the three of us to a comfortable, quiet room. It was furnished with couches, a long dining-room-like table, and was adorned with intricate bay windows—symbols from a bygone era of material wealth. Piper began her story with an overview of her educational history and family background. She grew up living between Detroit and New York and was educated at Howard University in Washington, DC, and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She went on to relay industry stories from her time as a professional fashion photographer in New York where she had been working for the last several years. Sadly, the overt sexism that she experienced gave her endless examples of the exploitation of girls and women. More than anything she said she missed sites in New York’s hip hop scene that o...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Intersections of Detroit, Women, and Hip Hop
• 1 Detroit Hip Hop and the Rise of the Foundation
• 2 Hip Hop Sounds and Sensibilities in Post-Bankruptcy Detroit
• 3 Negotiating Genderqueer Identity Formation
• 4 Vulnerable Mavericks Wreck Rap’s Conventions
• 5 “Legendary,” Environmental Justice, and Collaborative Cultural Production
• 6 Hip Hop Activism in Action
• Conclusion: Women, Hip Hop, and Cultural Organizing
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index