As Joe Molloy argues in Acid Detroit: A Psychedelic Story of Motor City Music, this post-riot cultural turn seeded a musical lineage that carries on to this day, registering and responding in ever-new ways to the world-altering mood of deindustrialization — a mood that first seemed to imprint itself on the city’s consciousness with the ’67 riot. In the decades to come, avalanches of new sound jarred Detroit. The jangly, deep-groove jazz-funk of trumpeter Donald Byrd. The lush, down-tempo protest hymns of Marvin Gaye. The electric space travel of Funkadelic. The Midnight Funk Association radio takeovers by the Electrifying Mojo, a local DJ who scrambled pop music’s racial codes by playing everything from deep-cut Prince to the B-52s and Kraftwerk. The cold, machine-haunted techno of Cybotron. The militant noise of John Brannon’s hardcore punk. The rushed, bone-dry snare claps, automated yet askew, of hip-hop producer J Dilla. Detroit’s assembly lines, whose rhythms Berry Gordy had begun his career humming along to at the Lincoln Motor Company Plant, had ground to a halt, and the city’s musicians responded by turning out-of-joint history into odd, fusing, out-of-joint rhythms.
Acid Detroit packs this lineage into a pocket-size 170-page history. It moves in episodes, roving from soul to proto-punk, acid rock to acid rap, touching on a great number of artists but delving at length into around a dozen, who compose for Molloy a post-riot tradition. Follow this tradition, Molloy argues, and you end up with a whole history: the book’s opening page claims it to be the first book to “survey the entire territory” of Detroit’s music.
But the power of Molloy’s book flows from a larger argument. Its title borrows from the cultural critic Mark Fisher (who co-founded Repeater Books, the imprint behind Acid Detroit, in 2014). When Fisher died by suicide in 2017, he left behind an introduction to an unfinished book called, charmingly, Acid Communism. The introduction promised a major second act to Capitalist Realism (2009), an end-of-history tale of how capitalism came to feel interminable, as if it were a world system without alternative. Acid Communism, in historical subject its prequel, traveled back to the New Left window in the 1960s and ’70s when “the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness and psychedelic consciousness” attracted mass converts to the image of a very different world: a vision of less work and more collective freedom, offering a “new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving.”