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 Dancing
in the Street : Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit
by Suzanne
E. Smith
1960s Detroit
was a city with a pulse: people were marching in step with Martin
Luther King, Jr.; dancing in the street with Martha and the Vandellas;
facing off with city police. Through it all, Motown provided the
beat. This book tells the story of Motown-as both musical style
and entrepreneurial phenomenon-and of its intrinsic relationship
to the politics and culture of Motor Town, USA. As Suzanne Smith
traces the evolution of Motown from a small record company firmly
rooted in Detroit's black community to an international music
industry giant, she gives us a clear look at cultural politics
at the grassroots level. Here we see Motown's music not as the
mere soundtrack for its historical moment but as an active agent
in the politics of the time. In this story, Motown Records had
a distinct role to play in the city's black community as that
community articulated and promoted its own social, cultural, and
political agendas.
Smith shows
how these local agendas, which reflected the unique concerns of
African Americans living in the urban North, both responded to
and reconfigured the national civil rights campaign. Against a
background of events on the national scene-featuring Martin Luther
King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Nat King Cole, and Malcolm X-Dancing
in the Street presents a vivid picture of the civil rights movement
in Detroit, with Motown at its heart. This is a lively history
and a vital one, peopled with a host of major and minor figures
in black politics, culture, and the arts, it is full of the passions
of a momentous era. Suzanne Smith offers a critical new perspective
on the role of popular culture and the process of political change.
(Amazon.com)
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