Preface: I recommend listening to Falling Up by Theo Parrish &b Carl Craig while reading this post. My favorite track from Carl. I love how dry the percussion!

This was a set I caught at Slingshot in 2022, an electronic music festival held at a former wholesale fruit warehouse near downtown Durham NC. This repurposed industrial space was an apt venue to see this particular show. Throughout Craig’s performance, a video loop played showing drone level shots of industrial buildings in Detroit at night. We weren’t far from the former tobacco warehouses that you find throughout downtown Durham. Superimposed over the images of Detroit was a series of three simple messages written in red: “Carl Craig – Detroit – Love,” with a heart sign to match the word. Like a sample, that looped message had a surprising power over the course of the evening.

The images behind the message did not show broken windows or other obvious signs of post-outsourcing decay. However, the emptiness of the parking lots around them and the darkness of most of the windows made me think these were abandoned buildings that had once been central hubs of The Motor City – before Ronald Reagan decided to shift the United States from an industrial economy to a service sector one. (See the book Secrets of the Temple by William Greider for more on how that went down.) The topic of outsourcing was a familiar one to me, and is likely one of the first things that come to mind when people think of Detroit.

When I was younger, I saw a book of photographs by a French photographer organized around the theme of post industrial decay in Detroit. I recall images of floors strewn with materials that had once been used in work or school or library spaces, as if people had left that spot in the middle of a natural disaster, never to return. I looked it up just now on Amazon and saw it’s selling for $397! (Yves Marchand and Romaine Meffre: The Ruins of Detroit.) I didn’t like it. It was “beautiful,” for what that’s worth, but it struck me as disaster porn, partially because it was obviously pitched to a high end art photography market. There were no people in the pictures to feel empathy for, or to hear and learn from. It felt like a junior partner in Western European Imperialism thumbing its nose at the senior partner, rather than someone critiquing that imperialism or encouraging solidarity with those suffering from its patterns of exploitation.

By contrast, Craig’s images of Detroit made it look powerful and demanded respect. If, in fact, the buildings were not currently in use – and I’m not sure that they weren’t – the way they were represented made it easy to imagine them as humming sites of potential future production. The night time setting left an empty space in which one could dream and imagine alternate futures and possibilities. Futures that, as Craig’s predecessor Derrick May says in a documentary about Techno, would respect the past rather than making people angry by destroying it.

I thought at the time of the book Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, which my friend Peter Hughes had recommended to me a few years before. The blurb from Haymarket Press says it “tracks the extraordinary development of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as they became two of the landmark political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s. It is widely heralded as one the most important books on the black liberation movement.” I taught a lesson to my 5th grade students this year comparing and contrasting these organizations with the work being done by the Black Panther Party in Oakland.

The gains of this movement and the promise it held before its defeat was one catalyst for the decision to relocate automobile manufacturing overseas, or in the South of this country, where labor laws are much weaker than in Northern cities like Detroit. If one of the prime functions of racism under capitalism is to divide and conquer the labor movement, (“They divided both (Black and white) to conquer each.” – Frederick Douglass,) then an anti racist movement within auto workers’ organizing spaces is obviously going to threaten the profit margins of Ford, Chrysler, and GM, and lead them to look elsewhere.

Craig’s slide show made it easy for me to imagine an alternate reality: what if America’s industrial policy welcomed a labor movement like that instead of crushing it? How much healthier and stronger would Detroit be? The United States? The working class?

I recently watched the PBS documentary Desire: The Carl Craig Story. I didn’t hear him talk about labor unions but it did feature footage of him driving around Detroit and talking about the abandoned buildings that could be seen outside the car windows. He said that he used to imagine these empty spaces as blank canvasses to fill up with all kinds of future projects and activity. He said he was inspired by the sounds of various printing machines at a copy shop where he once worked, and the film cut excellent examples of such mechanical sound textures together with the sounds of his programmed hi hats. You got a sense of how he was inspired by seeing the close knit but competitive trio of Detroit’s first wave of techno, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, and Juan Atkins, work in close proximity to one another in Detroit’s Eastern Market District. (In this clip on YouTube, May says that Atkins taught him how to feel the air, not just breathe it, shortly after we see Atkins saying that there’s an atmosphere in Detroit that seeps through the music there that you can’t find anywhere else.) This interpersonal and intergenerational fabric was far from the uninhabited landscape of The Ruins of Detroit.

There were wonderful interviews with his parents, a retired teacher and letter carrier, that testified to the loving community of support that he grew up in. He played a green Stratocaster that his parents gave him as a child in many of the interview segments, and talked about his father’s jazz records and the Black Sabbath album his brother brought home one day. Craig furthers the sense of affirming community roots by speaking about the importance of avoiding what he calls “Minstrel show” style images of Black poverty and suffering that white corporate music executives often green light and mass market to suburban white audiences. (See Wise Intelligent’s 3/5 an Emcee: The Manufacturing of a Dumbed Down Rapper for more on that.)

This respect and care carries over into the gear that is used to make the music. The importance of the machines that techno is so associated with – drum machines, sequencers, synthesizers, outboard rack gear – resonated with the (post) industrial identity of Detroit and of Chicago, where he would go looking for inspiration as a young person. If the CEOs of these cities were built on tearing down one kind of mechanical infrastructure, these musicians would begin to build a new one. I loved the scene of him standing on a highway overpass looking towards the skyline of Chicago and describing how huge it looked as a young kid coming there from Detroit.

I recently saw Craig in Manhattan at Capitale, a venue located in the former Bowery Savings bank built by Stanford White. The image that the music called to my mind in that particular space was of a massive moving vehicle, as broad as a multi lane highway, gathering momentum while cruising downhill. It sounded more than capable of rebuilding a new productive center for a future economy. I felt like that sound could roll straight into Chicago off the I-90 —– and then run right through the center of the Windy City and grind it to a pulp. It sounded unstoppable.

At the show in Durham, his set stood out from others at the Slingshot festival because of the way he handled the low end of the frequency spectrum. He had the thumping bass that resonated in your chest, the sound that the others all chased, but he didn’t put as long a sustain and decay on it as the other artists did. As a result, the full range of the frequency spectrum remained fully audible. There was a ricochet effect to the layers of percussion in the mid to high range that made it much more fun to dance to. It sounded like birds chirping to each other in the higher layers of a dense forest canopy. There were lots of hints your body could take in different directions as you moved rather than just one four on the floor pulse that drowned everything else out. I danced all the way through his long set without stopping. It was the most fun I’ve ever had dancing.

The other artist I had come to see at the festival – Andy Stott, the Friday night headliner – got me dancing too, but it wasn’t as much fun because the bass was so loud that I could barely hear the mid and upper frequency ranges. It sounded like the bass just smothered everything in a downward spiral rather than driving everything forward like Craig’s low end did.

This difference was reinforced by their physical postures and their gear. Stott worked off a laptop, and bent his back down until it was practically parallel with the ground while he controlled the keyboard, with the blue haze of the screen illuminating his face. Craig worked off decks rather than a laptop, and stood up straight with his shoulders pushed back. He talks in the documentary about not being much of a dancer because he’s spent his life on the stage DJing, but there was a distinct bounce in his step as he tweaked the knobs that was infectious. I’ve seen Stott live at Public Records in Brooklyn recently and found his stage posture pretty consistent with the first time I saw him, though his low end worked better for me in that smaller space.

Craig’s posture at Capitale was the same as in Durham as well. He seemed to really take in the audience and feed their energy back to them through the decks. I thought the Durham audience gave more for him to work off of than the audience in the Bowery did, perhaps because it was at a festival dedicated to the genre that drew afficionados from far and wide.

I do miss Durham sometimes.