Detroit’s idle: the domestic sounds of labour’s foreign landscape

The scene(s)

During the half-time show of the National Football League’s 2011 Super Bowl – the most-watched annual sporting event in the US – Chrysler Group LLC premiered the commercial for their new model 200 sedan. With popular rap emcee Eminem (né Marshall Mathers) in the driver’s seat, the viewer is taken on a ride through Detroit, the once lauded hub of American auto production. The camera offers quick flashes of iconic city scenery alongside interior and exterior shots of the 200 in an attempt to locate the product within a similarly consumable geography. Even with these visuals, the commercial is notable first for what is absent; it reworks Detroit’s economic and cultural histories in order to launch a product intimately tied to the past that it dismisses. What we don’t see is what we don’t hear within Chrysler’s pitch: the work and sounds of auto production, a ghost industry that, in spite of limited material impact within the city’s employment record, has continued to generate consumer goods. ³ The commercial exemplifies both disappearance and fetishism as it dismisses the means (the work) in order to highlight the ends (the car). With the framing device ‘Imported from Detroit’, Chrysler attempts to signal Detroit nostalgia and negate the outsourcing of US manufacturing while signifying on the luxury of foreign cars. The importation that frames the advertising campaign spirits commodities into and through Detroit without any proof of the sedan’s conception and birth within the city limits. The commercial’s soundtrack similarly displaces the product from its Detroit landscape. What we hear signals another import within the advertising campaign: rap music, a style delivered to Detroit from New York and, in the case of Eminem, by way of Los Angeles. Complicated circuits of transfer, manufacturing and production detail and map the ways in which culture unwittingly exposes the contemporary conditions of economic recession. Detroit is the scene for this examination because its history exemplifies intersecting streams of industrial and cultural production and, in its material present, demands the invention of new conversations and relationships between the two.

Entitled ‘Born of Fire’, the Chrysler commercial begins in a documentary film style that cycles through various sceneries in an attempt to (re)present an authentic Detroit. The fire used to name the ad is not a reference to the 1943 uprising at the Sojourner Truth projects over housing integration, nor to the five-day insurrection of 1967 over police harassment and surveillance in Black neighbourhoods. The devastated landscape represented in the commercial, which juxtaposes miles of abandoned buildings with the skyscraping corporate infrastructure of the downtown core, hints at a city of evacuation and greed, even while it uses this geography to encourage consumer purchase. But what are viewers being asked to buy? There are at least three products in this commercial that, in combination, chart the struggles for and over a major US city: the 200, Eminem and Detroit are the commodities that feed a national narrative of dispossession through the conjoined projects of labour, music and location.

Studies at the nexus of work and culture continue to be necessary in histories of race and class because they expose the processes of identity and state formation through local conditions influenced by, and influential in, global political economies. Works by George Lipsitz, Archie Green, Brenda McCallum, Robin Kelley, Michael Denning, David Roediger, Scott Nelson and Tera Hunter are notable examples. ⁴ The work that I develop here is grown from the knowledge that culture and work cannot be disarticulated within the post-industrial scenes of the US. The large-scale transition from manufacturing to service economies means that labouring people are, by and large, no longer working in the organised trades that once defined a healthy economy; generations Y and Z are distanced from work and its attendant relationship to the ‘American dream’. This reality, however, does not displace the individual’s responsibility to subsist financially under capitalism. As Michael Denning argues, ‘capitalism begins not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living’. The demand for and normalisation of employment allowed for the normalisation of its inverse, unemployment, which ‘was the basis for the great social-democratic techniques that sought to contain the spectre of wageless life’. ⁵ I investigate the ways in which creative industries, namely the popular musics that regularly result from the underground economies of city segregation and un(der)employment, expose wageless life and its social-democratic containments. The entanglements of music and labour are not just the sounds of production, important as those are; there are dynamic resistances that circulate around and through labour, including sonic transgressions that do more than move and pace it – music shapes our perception of work and those (not) performing it. While the manual labour of Detroit will be discussed here, it is the absence of it that animates my readings of cultural production. I argue that the 2011 Chrysler commercial and its ‘Imported from Detroit’ sloganeering relies on sonic techniques and traditions that radically displace cultural and labour trades from car production and its imagined site of origin, Detroit. The dual performances of work and music within ‘Born of Fire’ are collapsed, as one is sacrificed and absorbed into the other. Music emerges as the dominant product and is used by Chrysler as shorthand for a prosperous national future delivered via the ‘foreign’ city of Detroit.

Instead of working to buttress one another, the rhetorical, visual and sonic strategies represented within ‘Born of Fire’ betray one another as they slip and slide past each other within the historical continuum upon which the commercial attempts to signify. Most prominently, the ‘hard work and conviction’ mentioned by the narrator are manifested visually without any actual labour, with the exception of a Black hotel doorman and a passing frame of those figures frozen in time in Diego Rivera’s Depression era mural, Detroit Industry (1932) – a relic of a bygone era where work, while scarce, was culturally valuable and an indicator of national strength. Instead of seeing and hearing the labour that produces the central product of this commercial, the Chrysler 200, we see instead rapper Eminem and hear a loop of his Oscar-winning 2002 single, ‘Lose Yourself’. These are the products that contend with the 200 for consumer attention. Eminem became the most nominated artist of the 2011 Grammy Awards only two months before this commercial aired. His ‘celebrity value’ undoubtedly facilitated the marketing for the 200, yet his role as commodity complicates his interplay with the car, producing a tension that is mediated by both of their claims to Detroit. ⁶

It seems an obvious statement but Detroit is a place apart. It is variously situated within national imaginaries as both a beacon of hope and an archetype of decline. As Heather Ann Thompson notes:

Detroit has held symbolic meaning for America in every decade since World War II … [from] the best of postwar American consumerism and productivity [in the 1950s] … to the worst of what America had become after decades of social and political turmoil. ⁷

The hollowed-out city interior that marks Detroit’s current condition is not its history, nor even the totality of its present; rather it represents a moment on a continuum of important socio-political and economic shifts that compel further consideration. Historian Thomas Sugrue dates the origins of Detroit’s urban decline to the 1940s and 1950s, decades in which the post-second world war economic high quickly faded. ⁸ He notes that ‘Since 1950 Detroit has lost nearly a million people and hundreds of thousands of jobs’, effectively displacing entire generations of people. This crisis, made up of myriad socio-political elements including housing and education, is attributable to ‘two of the most important, interrelated, and unresolved problems in American history: that capitalism generates economic inequality and that African Americans have disproportionately borne the impact of that inequality’. ⁹ Changes in labour production (including its flight), and the growth of conservative white voting blocks in the suburbs, further materialised and widened the gaps in wealth and access that continue to plague Detroit. These conditions are not unique to that city but their practice is particular. It is essential within urban and geographically situated studies to resist what Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods argue is ‘a spatial practice that conveniently props up the mythical norm and erases or obscures the daily struggles of particular communities’. Contending with the intimacies of these quotidian circumstances and surroundings better highlights the dynamics of power and its response – in particular, how Black, brown and poor people are intimately tied to other communities and locations within the ‘uneven geographies’ that the authors describe as ‘locations long occupied by the wretched of the earth: the geographies of the homeless, the jobless, the incarcerated, the invisible labourers, the underdeveloped, the criminalized, the refugee, the kicked about, the impoverished, the abandoned, the unescaped’. ¹⁰ Without fetishising Detroit, I want to contend with it on its own terms, acknowledging the ways in which it is distinct and demonstrates the intersections of culture and economics within ‘uneven geographies’. Approaching Detroit through its multiple productions, including sound, allows for an alternative archive and narrative of the changing physical and labour landscape of the city and its creations.

The sounds that first compelled bodies to move in the once industrial city were grown from Detroit’s manufacturing technologies, drawing the ear towards the release and hiss of steam, the plant whistles that signalled the appropriate length of time for worker fellowship, and the buzzers that regulated the pace of production. If music can be said to be the constitution and appreciation of organised noise, then it is possible to understand the sounds emitted from Detroit’s Mount Elliott Tool and Die, and Conner Avenue Assembly factories as a music of their own. Black workers were especially influential as both the subjects and producers of this labouring musical tradition. As Bryan Wagner details, early twentieth-century folklorists argued that Black culture was generated from only the most depraved of circumstances, and spaces of physical labour proved to be ideal sites of exploration. According to the prevailing notions of the period:

A good worker makes a bad [cultural] informant because he is too respectable to waste time singing, and a bad worker makes for the best kind of informant because the dearth in industry and respectability is richly compensated by musical genius.

This belief subscribed to a ‘systematic rationale, which correlated economic failure with cultural authenticity’. ¹¹ While Wagner rightly critiques and deconstructs this formulation, it is worth considering how economic deprivation has inspired artistic innovation and from whence it came. The rise of Motown at the moment of urban decline in Detroit and, as I later discuss, the release of Chrysler’s hip-hop-laced commercial at the tail-end of the early twenty-first century depression, detail how crises imbricate labour and culture in the construction of US narratives of prosperity and perseverance.

The music of Black labour and labour of Black music in Detroit

Black musics have a long history of arising from and in response to struggles within the home, workplace, community and nation. Socioeconomic circumstance is the centrepiece of a number of Black mobilisations that have launched important and iconic sound projects, including the Black women tobacco workers of FTA Local 15 in Charleston, South Carolina, whose pickets launched the anthem, ‘We Shall Overcome’. ¹² Workers, then, both enslaved and ‘free’, have been responsible for creating conditions of political possibility that fuse labouring status with cultural practice by refusing the inhumane demands and ideo-social limits of ‘work’ within the walls of the plantation, factory or home. The labours of Bobo Jenkins offer an example of this practice. A blues singer and long-time Chrysler autoworker in Detroit, he described how the sounds of labour organised his music. He said, ‘That whirlin’ machinery gives me the beat. It’s like hearin’ a band playing all day long. Every song I ever wrote that’s any good has come to me standin’ on that line.’ ¹³ The intimacy of the line and Jenkins’s art signal the important fusions that erupted from the manual and creative labours of individual workers and the synergistic dependence developed between each project. This collaboration was experienced by another autoworker who used it as the model for a sound project that changed the course of music history.

Although hip-hop grounds the 200 ad, it is not the sonic legacy that most resonates with the city that Chrysler claims. That honour belongs to the productions of Motown, which developed alongside the urban crisis of Detroit. The company looms large within national histories of Black musical production as a home for innovative mid-century luminaries who performed the ‘race music’ on the soundtrack for a desegregating US. Motown’s alternative moniker of ‘Hitsville, USA’ explicitly announced the collision of sound and geography; it located its production within the United States while also suggesting its distinct localisation within an imagined community of people and places coalesced by hits, or the market success of sounds. The assembly of the ‘Motown sound’ through musical notation is indebted to its Detroit location; as Suzanne Smith argues, ‘The Motown Record Company was a product of and an agent within [a] unique, and distinctly urban, cultural formation’. ¹⁴ Early on, it reproduced the work of the city’s many auto manufacturing plants, producing sound in a formulaic A-B-A, bubble-gum major key in order to keep pace with the rest of the Motor City and its many locales of influence internationally. Motown founder and president Berry Gordy Jr’s reliance on the industrial tradition of Detroit developed when he was a worker in the Ford Wayne Assembly Plant. He recalled the influence of industrial machination on his musical and business acumen, saying

At the plant cars started out as just a frame, pulled along conveyor belts until they emerged at the end of the line – brand spanking new cars rolling off the line. I wanted the same concept for my company, only with artists and songs and records. I wanted a place where a kid off the street could walk in one door an unknown and come out another a recording artist – a star. ¹⁵

Hitsville was its own manufacturing plant but, instead of rubber and steel, Gordy’s raw material was Black talent and bodies whose ‘baby, baby, baby’ sounded the pulse of production.

Gordy adopted more than the pace of the assembly line in his Motown empire; the industrial model was three-dimensional and provided him with other techniques through which to build his business. Motown ‘produced music independent of the automobile industry, yet it capitalized on the industrial ethos, marketing strategies, and emerging technologies of automobile manufacturing to create its music and promote its entertainers’. ¹⁶ Much like the US auto agents sent south to recruit Black labour for northern industry, Gordy sought out his original workers, those blues and jazz musicians who played gigs around Detroit but were often migrants from states like Mississippi and Tennessee. In 1959 he scoured the streets of Detroit in his search for the musicians who would build his brand. He found an interracial group of musicians who became the house-band at Motown. Calling themselves The Funk Brothers, these men are described as ‘the greatest hit machine in the history of popular music’. They built ‘I Hear a Symphony’, ‘My Girl’, ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’, and many other singles within a history of chart success that ultimately surpassed that of Elvis, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles combined. In spite of this, their labours have been mostly obscured. ¹⁷ It is in part the mechanical nature of Motown’s assembly that made it possible for the behind-the-scenes labour of sound to be disappeared. Gordy adopted the corporate model of worker anonymity in the service of promoting the contained spectacles of his solo and small ensemble stars, including the talented Tammy Terrell, Diana Ross and The Supremes, and Marvin Gaye. In so doing, he effectively isolated his workers – with names like Eddie ‘Chank’ Willis, Uriel Jones, Joe Messina and Eddie ‘Bongo’ Brown – from the means of production within Motown’s creative industries.

The abuses of Motown’s line of production were not lost on its musicians. Some of The Funk Brothers commented on the work environment in Studio A, which they affectionately renamed ‘The Snake Pit’. Mostly literate musicians, they were fed compositions that they were expected to master on sight. Their labours were characterised by twelve- to fourteen-hour days during which hit after hit was taped in one take. Post 1965, new recording technologies and producers were introduced at Motown and The Funk Brothers were denied their touring privileges, becoming an exclusive studio band instead. ¹⁸ Increasingly, Gordy adopted a Taylorist organisational style. David Montgomery described this early twentieth-century form of scientific labour management as ‘concerned with the systematic organization of production and with the instruction and enticement of the employee to perform his specific work assignment in “the one best way”’. ¹⁹ Gordy was clear that he, indeed, had one way of building Motown and his bureaucracy developed ongoing tensions within the label. The steady increase in work demand, along with its streamlining, duplicated the automation practised in the auto manufacturing plants that ‘promised both to increase output and to reduce labor costs’ primarily through reducing the labour pool. ²⁰ In the spring of 1972, a member of The Funk Brothers arrived to work at Studio A only to find a sign on the door announcing that there was no work there. Unbeknownst to the musicians, Gordy had relocated the label to Los Angeles taking none of his house musicians with him. ²¹

Motown’s flight was indicative of larger labour trends. Detroit’s entrenched relationship to industrial work meant that the labour expended on the assembly line was responsible for ordering and organising the city: its music, workers and politics. This organisation, however, was not sustained within an American Century that failed to provide the economic base necessary to meet the needs of its citizens. The city’s transition from a metropolis with a substantial and vibrant Black middle class in the 1950s to an industrial wasteland in the 1970s was precipitated by the state-level policies of moderate Republican governor and former auto executive George Romney and a national gas crisis that led to the quick and penetrating decay of US auto manufacturing. Detroit ceased to sound the same with the exit of mass production; the rhythms that once signalled full stomachs and a vibrant Black public sphere were evacuated in the wake of capital’s flight.

As necessary as the labour was to building Black communities, the product that that labour built also held cultural significance. The status of the automobile within Black cultures is evident in the three-dimensionality of its production as well as its sociability. Paul Gilroy argues that automobiles have ‘a symbolic importance far beyond their material and even political currency’ because they ‘acquired … significance in the context of the U.S. racial nomos – a legal and spatial order – that secured segregation and promoted the reproduction of racial hierarchy’. ²² Indeed, within local, state and national political cultures, the manufacturing coming from Detroit underwrote the labour practices and technologies that made Black containment in the urban centre and white flight to the suburban peripheries possible. The Jim Crow segregation maintained by the formation of suburbia initiated an especially perverse racial and economic stratification within Detroit analogous to South African apartheid. ²³ Within this political geography, the automobile takes form as a method of escape and survival but it is unevenly experienced in Detroit where Black citizens are shackled to their location by any number of privations and restrictions, including personal credit and public transit.

The multiple dislocations engendered by the ‘U.S. racial nomos’ in turn generated responses that made up a citizen’s tool kit, including musics intimately connected to the community’s socio-political and labouring conditions. Music’s role within automotive production (labour within the factory) and technology (sound systems within the car) helped to construct dense worker and consumer engagement with the automobile. What, then, happened to community formations when the assembly line ceased to sound? What happens to the music that served as a method and reflection of that formation when the bass beat – the pulse and organising rhythm of labour – ceases to exist? Contemporary Detroit exposes the new beats that take the place of the factory as the foundation for Black working people. The different sounds are composed of alternative technologies of production that have reorganised the ear to new ways of hearing, in the process changing the way that people live in a post-industrial society.

The sound of unemployment

Detroit did not struggle with responses to this condition in isolation; ‘many northern industrial centers after World War II evolved from prosperous magnets for native- and foreign-born hopefuls to decayed centers where prosperity seemed unimaginable’. ²⁴ The rapid decline of the US economic base in 1970s’ New York facilitated the development of a radically altered soundscape through the multimedia enterprise of hip-hop. Urban areas throughout the country (and later the world) responded in kind, implementing new techniques of sound, aesthetics, technology and dance that expanded the potential of the form even as they localised its production through unique regional characteristics. The economic decay did not dissolve hip-hop’s attachment to labour, however; it instead reconstructed and amplified it in alternative ways. The trajectory of Joseph Saddler, for example, maps the transition from the robust Black capitalism of cities like Detroit to the rise of alternative Black labours, knowledges and technologies. Born in Barbados and raised in New York City, in the 1970s Saddler attended Samuel Gompers High School in the Bronx. Gompers, the founder and long-time president of the American Federation of Labor – the labour conglomeration initially responsible for the protections of the Detroit-based United Auto Workers – was, by the time Saddler matriculated, an obscure benefactor for those born at the end of the baby-boomer generation. The cruel irony of Saddler’s education was that his departure from Gompers vocational high school prepared him for very little because the industrial economy that Gompers was so central to organising was in a state of rapid regression. Industrial sector jobs decreased and were replaced by new(er) service economies. Instead of languishing in the stagnant economy, Saddler reinvented himself as Grandmaster Flash and his generation turned their attention and efforts towards pioneering the new technologies stemming from stolen electricity and dusty records. ‘The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel’, released in 1981, was his major foray into this new arena and the volume that introduced him and his Furious Five to an international audience.

Taking wheels and labour from the assembly line to the house party or playground involved different raw materials, procedures and investments. Flash’s technique in the more than seven-minute manifesto assembled five songs through his dexterity on the wheels of steel – wheels that no longer moved through the chemical and physical alterations of the Chrysler plant but instead were themselves the machines that processed other materials, the actual wax as well as the ephemeral sound produced from its grooves. Here, the labour of musicians is tangible, as is their relationship to autoworkers. Materially, these cultural workers are paid, like autoworkers, for the labour that they expend in service of others. While their processes are distinct, the ends for autoworkers and DJs are the same; like the workers at Mack Avenue Engine Complex, Flash’s job was to make bodies move. The swaying, grinding, pop-lock and drop of Flash’s audiences was not the travel of automobile drivers, yet for communities with limited historical access to mobility and/or pleasure the shared escape yielded similar results. Sonically, the break beats of hip-hop grew from the pops and clicks of the industrial assembly line, pulsing and structuring the production of sound; freedom for the DJ however means that s/he autonomously sets the pace and length of these cycles, free from the oversight of a boss. Taking their cue from the jazz and funk musicians before them, hip-hop DJs similarly refuse to be ‘mastered by the clock’, and instead work their wheels from the centre to the edges of the wax and in live venues from the precious moments after work ‘til the breakadawn’. ²⁵ It is the spun industrial beats of the inner city DJ – not the assembled industrial commodities of labourers – that structure the post-industrial soundscape of urban America.

Eminem was the emcee who became the international face of Detroit hip-hop. After travels through Missouri and rural Michigan, he landed in the city as a teenager and quickly expanded his lyrical presence. He gained the attention of Interscope-Geffen-A&M Records Chairman Jimmy Iovine after he was placed second at the 1997 Rap Olympics and his 1999 release, The Slim Shady LP, criticised for its homophobia and misogyny, nonetheless went quadruple platinum. To his credit, his public persona has matured alongside his lyricism and since 1999 he has been a prominent figure within Detroit, even working with elected officials. He was a major supporter of the nation’s first ‘hip-hop mayor’ Kwame Kilpatrick, who won the Detroit office in 2002, the same year that Eminem released his motion picture debut, 8 Mile. In it, Mathers plays Jimmy ‘B. Rabbit’ Smith, Jr, a working-poor white kid from the trailers just north of Detroit’s fabled 8 Mile marker, once exclusively occupied by Black communities. An aspiring emcee with a day job at an auto factory, Rabbit begins the film (set in 1995) broke and broken, with no girlfriend, no car and en route to a stay at his alcoholic mother’s trailer after choking on stage during a rap battle. The accompaniment to this series of events is a deconstructed piano rendition of ‘Lose Yourself’, the phonic organiser for the film that is used on two other occasions to signal scenes of Rabbit’s triumph. The second scene featuring ‘Lose Yourself’ is the night before Rabbit’s second rap battle against a rival named Papa Doc (played by Anthony Mackie) from the ‘Leaders of the Free World’ crew. As he sits at the desk in his little sister’s room writing lyrics for the coming battle, the song plays with its full production but only bits and pieces of its verses, leaving the story partially obscured. The final rap battle is the climax of the film and the sequence that ultimately exposes the full text of the song that quickly became Eminem’s signature.

The last time that the audience hears ‘Lose Yourself’ is after Rabbit wins the battle against Papa Doc. In total, he bests three emcees (all of them Black) in order to walk away with the title, but instead of going to celebrate with his friends, he returns to his shift at the factory as his anthem plays. The film’s repeated use of ‘Lose Yourself’ and Rabbit’s return to the factory are significant for my purposes here because, in tandem, they manifest the connection between industrial Detroit and contemporary hip-hop missing in the Chrysler commercial. Chrysler’s use of ‘Lose Yourself’ relies on its attachment to Eminem and his role in the record-breaking 8 Mile, which centres on, and at times dissects, the socioeconomic demise of Detroit. The burn-scarred and abandoned buildings that overwhelm the cityscape, lack of employment and absentee leadership lead to the low morale and lack of cohesion amongst the city’s inhabitants and are the fateful backdrop to the trials and tribulations of Rabbit and his 313 crew. Their conditions are equalised in the film, in spite of differences of race, neighbourhood and ability, suggesting that the greatest unifier is the shared oppression of class. This is information that Chrysler only glosses over in its commercial, which runs for two minutes. The imagery and narrative employed by the company is only interested in alluding to this destruction – and the potential for solidarity in consumption – as a means by which to situate its commodity as the answer.

The build-up of the song, from a piano-driven instrumental in the early stages of Rabbit’s trajectory to its full production as he emerges victorious from battle, narrates the ascent of a single man. In the final estimate, however, he holds only a qualified and incomplete amount of power, and it is this realisation that leads him back to the factory. Rabbit’s story, as emcee and labourer, makes the Chrysler scenario possible. The 200 is marketed as the fleshy-steel material embodiment of the optimism and hard work so prominent within the narrative of ‘Lose Yourself’, which encourages the listener to ‘Lose yourself in the moment./ If you want it,/ you better never let it go./ You only get one shot,/ do not miss your chance to blow./ This opportunity comes once in a lifetime.’ The narration offered in ‘Born of Fire’ similarly adopts a tone of hardscrabble optimism. The male voice leading us on our tour argues that ‘It’s the hottest fires that make the hardest steel. Add hard work and conviction and the know-how that runs generations deep in each one of us – that’s who we are. That’s our story.’ The collective ‘our’ used here is an imagined community organised to fit inside the advertisement of Chrysler’s corporate character, which includes revivalism, strength over adversity and glamour. The myth of Black integration within the cities is here put to the test, in that Black people are marginalised bit players within the commercial/project. ²⁶ Viewers are led to believe that the unity amongst the group lies in its shared misinterpretation, which can only be translated and resolved through the situated expertise and products of Chrysler. The narrator decries and dismisses those ‘who don’t know what we’re capable of’. Their ignorance, he argues, is due to the fact that they have ‘never even been here’ – to Detroit, the city that Chrysler claims but cannot materialise.

In the final estimate, ‘Lose Yourself’ is the song that mediates Rabbit’s dream with his reality: he walks away from the battle victorious in order to return to a job that we are encouraged to see as a stop-gap en route to a life of success. The 2002 viewing audience is relieved to see that Rabbit is victorious in his bid to local rap stardom in part because we know that his job in the auto factory will not always be available to him; our contemporary knowledge tells us that the industry will go but we are led to believe that Rabbit will persevere. It is because we recognise the Rabbit in Eminem that we can transpose his success back onto his 8 Mile character, the working-poor labourer. The suggestion that rap music is the more stable, more accessible industry in which to find work can only successfully be made to a generation that has never known the bounties of manual labour. The Chrysler commercial relies on this experiential gap for its realism and distorts both auto and art industries by manifesting them as untethered to shifts in the nation’s political economy and unrelated to one another, effectively erasing the ‘form and the quality of human life’ under capitalism. ²⁷

Chrysler’s dismissal of larger economic contests is accomplished through privileging the commodity and minimising the real actors of its production within the narrative and visual scene. As I mentioned earlier, the ‘Born of Fire’ 200 is immaculately conceived. In spite of the ‘us’ and ‘our’ so loosely employed by Chrysler, the bodies who produce the commodity are disappeared. There is no labour. Dana Frank outlines that this practice is not new; throughout the long history of ‘Buy American’ campaigns, the products of labour are highlighted as the means by which US labour would survive, versus respecting and preserving the labour itself. The auto industry in the US has been and continues to be one of the stars within these campaigns. By the early 1990s, the flight of production beyond the nation allowed for the so-called ‘U.S. auto industry’ to be ‘neatly separable from any actual workers laboring in the United States’. ²⁸ Yet, the commodities survive and develop a ‘society in which relations among people take the form of relations among things’. ²⁹ This is the ‘commodity fetishism’ theorised by Karl Marx, which reveals a world in which ‘the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race’. The commodities exist independently of and coevally with the wage-labourer and engage in negotiations on a par with the brains and hands that produced them. ‘Born of Fire’ is a visual marker of this phenomenon; the commodity (car) is the centrifugal element around which all other actors – namely Eminem and Detroit – orbit. In fact, we are led to believe that the value of Detroit is found in this commodity. In order to streamline the buying experience, the visual and narrative efforts of the commercial absent ‘the peculiar social character of the labor that produces [the commodity]’, thereby omitting its genesis by particular workers at a certain time and place. ³⁰ This radical exclusion transmogrifies the object into life itself and allows Chrysler to advance consumption as the method of national vitality.

The Chrysler commercial provides the evidence of culturo-economic transition and highlights the multiplicity of entanglements between national cultures of production and consumption. Eminem’s exit from the driver’s seat of the 200 prior to taking the stage of Detroit’s historic Fox Theater is his travel from a past of mass domestic automobile manufacturing towards a new platform and model of production. He enters the Fox and walks on stage with the harmonising gospel choir Selected of God, and announces, with a finger pointed at the camera: ‘This is the Motor City and this is what we do.’ In this moment, Eminem situates the city within its contemporary moment and through that inadvertently betrays the intent of the commercial – here he announces that music is what Detroit now does, not cars. The location at the Fox further stages Detroit’s intervention within the cultural and performance realms. The only industrial trace within the city is at the very beginning of the commercial, which situates two external shots of factories as the viewer begins the journey north on interstate highway I-75. The first frame centres a factory that is shown in a slow playback as if it is winding down, while the second is seen in a moving frame as we, the drivers, pass by. There is no work being shown here, only the shells of car manufacturing plants that, we are to assume, still produce jobs and commodities. Chrysler avoids showing labour in ‘Born of Fire’ and fills the void with cultural producers and their sounds, again proving what Detroit does.

Although interracial, the Fox Theater scene erects its own troubled labour and managerial dynamics. Eminem’s leadership position places him front and centre while the choir becomes his background and accompaniment in a story where he is already a privileged actor. He is one of three commodities in this project that, like the commodity fetish of the 200, is favoured over the singing cultural labourers who are described as ‘a fiercely close-knit chorus of Detroit vocalists currently enduring foreclosures and job losses and personal debts while they filmed the ad’. ³¹ As the star and consultant on the commercial, Eminem cues and employs the musicians who make his ends possible, but they are restricted in their capacity to speak in this scene and the futures that Chrysler claims are representative of it. Selected of God is no longer even legally able to perform the signature ‘Keep Detroit Beautiful’ that the choir sings in the extended version of the commercial. The phrase is trademarked and, as a recent court case has demonstrated, Chrysler will litigate in order to maintain beauty and profits as the special province of a small, powerful few. ³² The Chrysler façade of city revitalisation is here peeled away and exposed as an advertising ploy invested in manufacturing exclusivity in order to turn a profit. The staging at the Fox and attendant legal injunction again remove Black cultural producers from the fruits of their labour and silence them in a performance that works valiantly to evade the spectacle of labour and the coloured bodies who perform it.

Eminem is important to the Chrysler commercial because of his fame and talents but only insofar as they are attached to Detroit. The efforts of the company to distinguish itself culturally are bound by its geography; its claim that ‘We’re from America but this isn’t New York City, or the Windy City, or Sin City’ hints at Detroit’s dissimilarity but only in relation to a short list of other locations, both real and imagined, that we are led to see as somehow more glamorous. Consumer accumulation is the foundation for this assumed opulence. The narrator begins by asking, ‘What does Detroit know about luxury?’ There are material stakes embedded within this question that are flattened by the request that we purchase the product. Luxury is frontloaded within the commercial as a way of setting the frame for discussion; we are asked to recall the city’s history of grit and labour but only in relation to a shared ambition that, much like the placement of the Rivera mural, freezes labour in a past period disconnected from contemporary socioeconomic conditions. Hip-hop – the popular music formation regularly critiqued for its excesses – is the backdrop to a narration that both exceptionalises the simplicity of Detroiters’ lifestyles and advances an argument that ‘When it comes to luxury, it’s as much about where it’s from as who it’s for.’

Chrysler chooses the ‘where’ – Detroit – over the ‘for’ by disappearing labouring bodies from the city landscape. Detroit is diced into bite-size parts in order to highlight the elements that distinguish it from other major cities. New York, Chicago and Las Vegas are mentioned as antithetical to Detroit, yet they are not the only cities influencing the composition of ‘Born of Fire’. As a product and musician, Eminem cannot be disentangled from his primary producer, Dr. Dre (né Andre Young), a Los Angeles emcee/producer who rose to hip-hop royalty through the group Niggaz With Attitude (NWA). Eminem’s national platform was constructed by the beats of the west-coast producer who, in turn, gained an exponentially larger following (and larger paydays) from his collaborations with the white emcee. It is not surprising then that Chrysler used this relationship to brand its 300 sedan as well, a commercial which this time starred Dr. Dre. His Chrysler ad, entitled ‘Good Things’, uses the same format as Eminem’s – showcasing the bareness of the everyday – but this time the skyline is that of Los Angeles. His final line, ‘This is LA and this is what we do’, picks up on Eminem’s line for the 200 but it is less clear here what he is referencing. Unlike with Detroit, Chrysler makes no pretence of manufacturing in Los Angeles. ³³ The 300 has no home there outside of consumption, yet the Beats by Dr. Dre sound-speakers that we see as Dre closes his car’s trunk point us towards another product. Beats, co-founded by Dre and record executive/8 Mile producer Jimmy Iovine, produced under the imprint of Monster Cable, however, are not made in LA either, or even the United States, but in China. ‘Good Things’ works a similar hocus-pocus with production by using a US-based icon of popular culture to advance a narrative of US industry and core values. Dr. Dre’s presence has to perform a significant amount of work in order for ‘Good Things’ to resonate within its commodity field. ³⁴ None of the products within the commercial, other than Dre, were made in LA, making him the only locally produced commodity in the ‘Good Things’ catalogue. Dre, then, is the only item that allows the LA scenery to feel authentic; without him the Chrysler ad would seem wholly out of its element because it would have no claim to the environment. The consumer products within the commercial, which also ends with the ‘Imported from Detroit’ frame, were actually made in and imported from locations around the world. This knowledge throws the Chrysler campaign further into crisis and exposes the ways in which the company uses both the Detroit and Los Angeles scenes to obfuscate the racialised labours that complicate the company’s claims to these local industries and cultures.

The final statement of ‘Born of Fire’ sets the ultimate tone for Detroit’s difference; as the imagery fades to black, the ominous tag ‘Imported from Detroit’ appears as cover for the Chrysler logo. These three words allude to the dislocation and marginalisation of this US city but fail to acknowledge how foreign-ness signals a radical and centuries-long struggle over whose lives matter and whose do not. Used to manufacture fear in times of war and economic recession, the rhetoric and practice of the ‘import’ has long brought with it material social, political and economic consequences. Its pairing with Detroit by Chrysler plays to and mediates national fears through the commercial’s distortion of the city’s uneven geography. The continued displacement of and lack of resources for Black communities, in the wake of incarceration, rebellion and disaster, documents the alternative citizenship categories ascribed to these persons who are within but not of the nation. James and Grace Lee Boggs were clear that, for Detroit, Black bodies were the most vulnerable and expendable and that:

the problems of the inner city will become increasingly insoluble … that the city itself will remain the dangerous society, a breeding place of seemingly senseless violence by increasing numbers of black youth, rendered socially unnecessary by the technological revolution of automation and cybernation, policed by a growing occupation army which has been mobilized and empowered to resort to any means considered necessary to safeguard the interests of the absentee landlords, merchants, politicians, and administrators, to whom the city belongs by law but who do not belong in the city and who themselves are afraid to walk its streets. ³⁵

The Boggses describe Black violence – like that of 1967 – as a development of and response to industrial profit techniques, including the more recent large-scale flight of capital beyond US borders. To contain this threat, the state, in collusion with private interests, has erected the prison industrial complex, which includes surveillance and detention structures, ranging from the police (‘occupation army’) to the courts to the jails and prisons that now (coercively) employ Black women and men by the thousands and pay them only cents on the dollar, if they are paid at all. ³⁶ Ruth Wilson Gilmore details ‘how resolutions of surplus land, capital, labor, and state capacity congealed into prisons’, producing dense structures and logics of containment that have long-term environmental and societal effects on urban and rural areas around the nation. What the prison cannot absorb – the crisis produced by the ‘overaccumulation of surplus’ – is removed to the peripheries of territories, politics and economies. ³⁷ The outsider status and dispossession of an idle Black working class is embedded within the narrative and visual logics of the ‘Born of Fire’ commercial, which signifies on and absconds with Black cultural labours in order to ground its claims to a majority Black city that has been sacrificed to ‘the absentee landlords, merchants, politicians, and administrators’.

Disposable citizens under US democracy are, according to McKittrick and Woods, those characterised by an inability to flee from the nation’s ‘dangerous societ[ies]’. As a car manufacturer and wage-paying employer near (although not within) Detroit, Chrysler could provide the means by which the city’s residents would not be trapped within circumstances of despair or locations of danger. This, unfortunately, is not its agenda. The documentary style employed for ‘Born of Fire’ is not so much interested in resituating or resuscitating Detroit as in damage control for the national image of the auto industry in the wake of the 2009 federal bailout. Instead of celebrating Detroit, Chrysler uses its commercial platform to entrench practices of evacuation by absenting the city’s populations, labouring and otherwise, and privileging the vehicles that would protect consumers from having to walk its streets. The end of labour is seen here through that commodity, which is a composite structure of imported and domestic pieces that relate to one another within a world of things that is on a par with the people and places that make it possible. Chrysler’s claims to luxury are undercut by the wageless life that the 200 bypasses in the streets of a city that now, with the exit of industry, lives and listens differently. That Detroit no longer sounds like car manufacturing is a cruel irony that reveals Black people’s violent separation from the means of production and the products that could make their escape from poverty and abuse possible. The sounds that now fill that space must pick up where the former left off so that Detroit’s new soundtrack will carry the potential for change into the next millennium.