Pop Localism Redux: "And how do we get to Detroit?"

You base your love on credit and when your loving days are done
Checks you signed with love and kisses later come back marked "Insufficient Funds" . . .

Pop Matters has published a piece by Yuval Taylor (of the blog Faking It) on Funkadelic's Maggot Brain:

. . . In the early 1970s, Detroit was the fifth-largest American city (now it is 11th), and it was, by almost any measure, the worst. Even the chairman of the Greater Detroit Chamber of Commerce admitted that “Detroit is the city of problems. If they exist, we’ve probably got them.” Because of labor conditions, unrest was at its peak: In 1970, one quarter of Ford’s assembly-line workers quit, and on any given day, a full five percent of General Motors’ workers would be missing without an excuse, a figure that would rise to 10 percent on Mondays and Fridays. Public transit was practically nonexistent, the school system was on the verge of bankruptcy, thousands of homes were deserted because of corruption in lending institutions, the police department resisted segregation and created secret elite units, racism pervaded all aspects of life, and Motor City became Murder City.

But at the same time, Detroit was the site of one of the nation’s most revolutionary black liberation movements. In response to the riots, a group of black workers combined Black Power with the more radical elements of the labor movement to formulate a new vision and a new social movement, one that directly confronted the establishment. At the vanguard were three revolutionary organizations: the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, which organized wildcat strikes and published widely read newspapers; the Black United Front, which encompassed sixty organizations ranging from black churches to a black policemen’s group to DRUM itself; and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, whose name speaks for itself. . .

Apparently I lied; a sizeable chunk of the piece is actually about pop music and localism.

Taylor says the thing that Funkadelic, the MC5, the Stooges, and Ted Nugent had in common was "a balls-to-the-walls aesthetic—loud guitars; fierce and steady rhythms; shouted-out lyrics about sex, drugs, and rebellion; songs that could go on for half an hour; flamboyant and violent onstage gestures; and an implicit menace, an unstated—or occasionally baldly stated—threat." Not surprising, given that it was Detroit, and it was the 1970's.

Another reason why "the [blank] music scene" should mean a place and not just a sound: all politics are local. America rarely has a political mood as coherent as seventies Detroit (anger), sixties Memphis (the "Southern dream of freedom"), or eighties Manchester (despair), and capturing such a mood is an interesting kind of political statement. Besides, how many protest songs about national politics are there, besides war songs? And could they possibly be better than "Motor City is Burning," or even "Charlie and the MTA?"