race, class, rock and roll

Detroit Cobras frontwoman Rachel Nagy:

I don’t think any of us come from money, so it’s like our parents didn’t go out to dinner and dancing on the weekends, they had house parties…We didn’t grow up in the suburbs, so it’s like you’ve got [African-America] music all around you. You grow up with it and it’s just kind of an afterthought in your subconscious.

I've been working on an article about several recent memoirs written by Detroiters. Another site--one I'd like to incorporate into the article--for considering how Detroit acts as a locus for intersecting identity markers is the city’s indie rock scene, especially the most recent wave of garage rock bands. The members of the bands are mostly white but they work within a black aesthetic: southern blues. In this way they cultivate a hybrid racial identity. This movement largely rejects the values of liberalism, liberal anti-racism, and essentialized narratives of race and class. Race consciousness and class consciousness are elements of the ethos projected by these bands. They wear the dual consciousness on their sleeves, often in self-conscious and self-referential ways. For example, the band Soledad Brothers, technically from outside Toledo, Ohio, but closely aligned with the Detroit scene, borrows its name from the famous offshoot of the Black Panthers, a militant Marxist prison collective. So their name invariably invokes a radical version of race awareness. In a recent interview with The Guardian, the band, whose members are all white, pontificated on intersecting identity markers and blues music:

The blues is nothing to do with colour. It’s to do with intelligence and cultural awareness…There are loads of white guys who’ve made shitty blues music, but there are loads of brothers who’ve made shitty blues music…Women can be bluesmen, absolutely. Some of our favorite shit is by
women—Memphis Minnie, Jessie May Hill—in the 1930s, they were singing songs about “every married woman’s got a backdoor man.” They didn’t give a f***, man. In 2006, there’s Eria Wennerstrom from the Heartless Bastards, and Rachel Nagy from the Detrot Cobras—nobody can mess with her. The blues is about if you’ve been through some shit and you feel what you’re playing.

It would be easy to dismiss the band’s comments as tangents, as attempts to articulate a mythology of equality in which race doesn’t matter. But they foreground something vague that they call “cultural awareness,” certainly a signifier for musical and artistic credibility, but also a possible referent to a consciousness that exists independent of the racial identity of the individual.