This Unbowed and Unvanquished Future
Joe Molloy, Acid Detroit: A Psychedelic Story of Motor City Music
Repeater Books, 280pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781914420511
reviewed by Alexis Forss
‘Detroit was always a great music town, and always will be,’ writes Joe Molloy early in Acid Detroit: A Psychedelic Story of Motor City Music. A deeply felt strain of hometown glory courses through this ambitious and amiable book which, in its 170 pages, zooms through six decades of musical history, builds upon the legacy of the late Mark Fisher, and envisions the renewal of the city’s best countercultural currents. ‘What emerges is an unapologetically modernist trajectory where the city’s musicians continually quest after the new while simultaneously trying to absorb the loss of a monumental past. At each stop along our journey through Detroit space-time, we’ll attempt to tease out these radical possibilities that still lurk beneath the scorched earth of the past sixty years.’ But for all that the book seems a casually abbreviated effort — its brevity, one feels, at variance with its scope — partly, perhaps, because its young author considers that opening statement to be indisputable in its entirety.
Now, few would dispute the first part of the claim. Detroit is one of the great cities of world music, so prodigious that its B-sides and rare grooves brought dance culture to England in the form of Northern Soul. Its traffic with Germany produced Iggy Pop’s Berlin albums, inspiring post-punkers from New York to Manchester, and gave birth to techno and the utopia of rave. When Molloy writes that the 60s heyday of the car industry and Motown (Fordism applied to cultural production) ‘made Detroit simultaneously both [sic] the industrial and cultural capital of the country, and arguably the world,’ you might nod along while letting the redundancy slide; this sort of verbal and conceptual overreach is part of the performance.
Throughout the prose is awkward and animated, often overexcited about ‘mind-blowing innovations’ because there’s ‘so much good stuff on offer.’ But Molloy is ultimately an endearing guide: it’s fun being out on the hoof with him, how breathlessly between stumbles he keeps promising what we’ll learn about later, who we’ll get to know better, where we’ll be returning to. The ultimate destination is back to the future, which is the promise of Fisher’s Acid Communism, the framework within which Molloy assembles his psychedelic underground, aggregates their collective spirit, and dreams their eternal city.
It’s a big tent, or, a ‘Psychedelic Shack’ — Fisher and Molloy’s romantic image, by way of The Temptations. One reads on, wondering which utopian vision other than the author’s enthusiasm will be capacious enough for not only the futuristic wizardry of Norman Whitfield, Juan Atkins, and J-Dilla but also the lumpen thrashing of garage, hardcore punk, and horror rap. His criteria, you realize, are often purely hedonic, a matter of good records and cherished gigs. Whether or not you had to be there, his book manages quite smoothly to be several things in its brief span. Often it’s scenes from the life of a music lover, which is partly why the book is such an odd assemblage in its other capacity, as the musical history of a city. But to understand why the book feels the need to be any sort of assemblage at all, it has to be grasped as what it most wants to be: the newest addition to the growing body of Fisheriana.
‘Acid Communism’ is the beginning of an idea, not so much contained as pointed at in the first seventeen pages of a book that Fisher was working on at the time of his suicide in early 2017, and the romance of the fragment has burnished the writer’s posthumous lustre. Towards his end, it seemed, he was trying to find a way out of the dire impasses he had described in 2009’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? As Fisher so mordantly and undeniably articulated it, the terrible success of neoliberalism since the early seventies has been its complete conceptual foreclosure of all alternative ideologies and dispensations. Capitalist Realism issues in affective and strategic impotence, and Fisher himself battled agonisingly with both.
After two decades of charting this dungeon with no exits and cataloguing its weird and eerie hauntings, Fisher began dreaming up our great escape: a return to the communitarian utopias dreamt up in the 60s and 70s, in search of new visions and ‘the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticization of everyday life.’ Molloy offers up his Detroit as the once and future site of this unbowed and unvanquished future.
‘It is perhaps Detroit that best encapsulates the rise and fall of the hopes of modernity,’ he writes. ‘In Detroit we see the social and psychic costs of having been at the core of the Fordist post-war project, as well as the ruinous edge of neoliberal globalization. Simultaneously, it is here we see the ways in which wider continuities of resilience, community and aesthetics have stayed true to a certain form of countercultural desire, sowing among the ruins the seeds of emergent post-capitalist futures.’
Here as elsewhere (‘dead zones of abandoned neighbourhoods, derelict warehouses, vast abandoned factories and overgrown fields, all bearing the traces of their former inhabitants’), Molloy’s figurative language demonstrates how so much hauntological writing risks the very aestheticisation of ruin that it professes to abhor. What’s missing is a sense of the lived-in and living spaces where all this took place, of voices raised not just in song. Where are the local critics, historians, and characters? For all the I-was-there-ism, Molloy often seems at an odd remove from the city that so enraptures him, so narrowly does he cleave to Fisher’s frame of reference.
If Fisher left Acid Communism undefined, then Molloy doesn’t exactly finish the job; the psychedelic ethos remains vague as both aesthetic and political programme. Other than being coterminous in Detroit space-time, it’s unclear what his line-up of artists has in common. Sure, George Clinton might get a kick out of Danny Brown, but most Detroit rap would probably dismay Lamont Dozier and the Holland Brothers. And how do the sonic and even political cul-de-sacs of garage rock and hardcore punk sit alongside the city’s continuum of Black sonic experimentation? If these movements spurred each other on, wasn’t it through energies that were combative and nihilating rather than a blissed-out communitarianism? Perhaps the point is that all spontaneous human creativity should be treasured and nurtured, in which case Acid Communism is nothing new or particularly persuasive. This plea can be heard in thinkers from William Morris to Guy Debord.
The great and suppressed pathos of this book is an open question: will Detroit always be a great music town? Expressing this reservation goes beyond simply failing to share Molloy’s localist enthusiasm for ‘the city’s current efflorescence of new musical forms.’ Nor is it a matter of simple restlessness during some of the journey’s detours and stopovers. It’s that this is a story of modernity, which promises everything but permanence. Would anyone argue that London (average monthly rent: £2,500) is still the music city it was 20 years ago, never mind 50? Molloy’s parade of musical discontinuity might add up to some sort of canon, but it’s also a time-lapse of capital’s ceaseless churn. He’s entranced by this spectacle, and doesn’t entertain the possibility that Detroit’s musical prodigality is the productive diversity of late capitalism itself.
Capitalism might endure because of, and not despite, all these brave new sounds because that’s what it does, offering us the endless spectacle of its own disavowal. Punk, Techno, and Hip Hop no longer freak anyone out but are cornerstones of the official soundtrack of western culture, spreading interpassivity rather than revolutionary praxis. Reading Molloy, one appreciates how many musical roads lead to Detroit, but it is unclear whether any offer a way out of our current dead ends.
Now, few would dispute the first part of the claim. Detroit is one of the great cities of world music, so prodigious that its B-sides and rare grooves brought dance culture to England in the form of Northern Soul. Its traffic with Germany produced Iggy Pop’s Berlin albums, inspiring post-punkers from New York to Manchester, and gave birth to techno and the utopia of rave. When Molloy writes that the 60s heyday of the car industry and Motown (Fordism applied to cultural production) ‘made Detroit simultaneously both [sic] the industrial and cultural capital of the country, and arguably the world,’ you might nod along while letting the redundancy slide; this sort of verbal and conceptual overreach is part of the performance.
Throughout the prose is awkward and animated, often overexcited about ‘mind-blowing innovations’ because there’s ‘so much good stuff on offer.’ But Molloy is ultimately an endearing guide: it’s fun being out on the hoof with him, how breathlessly between stumbles he keeps promising what we’ll learn about later, who we’ll get to know better, where we’ll be returning to. The ultimate destination is back to the future, which is the promise of Fisher’s Acid Communism, the framework within which Molloy assembles his psychedelic underground, aggregates their collective spirit, and dreams their eternal city.
It’s a big tent, or, a ‘Psychedelic Shack’ — Fisher and Molloy’s romantic image, by way of The Temptations. One reads on, wondering which utopian vision other than the author’s enthusiasm will be capacious enough for not only the futuristic wizardry of Norman Whitfield, Juan Atkins, and J-Dilla but also the lumpen thrashing of garage, hardcore punk, and horror rap. His criteria, you realize, are often purely hedonic, a matter of good records and cherished gigs. Whether or not you had to be there, his book manages quite smoothly to be several things in its brief span. Often it’s scenes from the life of a music lover, which is partly why the book is such an odd assemblage in its other capacity, as the musical history of a city. But to understand why the book feels the need to be any sort of assemblage at all, it has to be grasped as what it most wants to be: the newest addition to the growing body of Fisheriana.
‘Acid Communism’ is the beginning of an idea, not so much contained as pointed at in the first seventeen pages of a book that Fisher was working on at the time of his suicide in early 2017, and the romance of the fragment has burnished the writer’s posthumous lustre. Towards his end, it seemed, he was trying to find a way out of the dire impasses he had described in 2009’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? As Fisher so mordantly and undeniably articulated it, the terrible success of neoliberalism since the early seventies has been its complete conceptual foreclosure of all alternative ideologies and dispensations. Capitalist Realism issues in affective and strategic impotence, and Fisher himself battled agonisingly with both.
After two decades of charting this dungeon with no exits and cataloguing its weird and eerie hauntings, Fisher began dreaming up our great escape: a return to the communitarian utopias dreamt up in the 60s and 70s, in search of new visions and ‘the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticization of everyday life.’ Molloy offers up his Detroit as the once and future site of this unbowed and unvanquished future.
‘It is perhaps Detroit that best encapsulates the rise and fall of the hopes of modernity,’ he writes. ‘In Detroit we see the social and psychic costs of having been at the core of the Fordist post-war project, as well as the ruinous edge of neoliberal globalization. Simultaneously, it is here we see the ways in which wider continuities of resilience, community and aesthetics have stayed true to a certain form of countercultural desire, sowing among the ruins the seeds of emergent post-capitalist futures.’
Here as elsewhere (‘dead zones of abandoned neighbourhoods, derelict warehouses, vast abandoned factories and overgrown fields, all bearing the traces of their former inhabitants’), Molloy’s figurative language demonstrates how so much hauntological writing risks the very aestheticisation of ruin that it professes to abhor. What’s missing is a sense of the lived-in and living spaces where all this took place, of voices raised not just in song. Where are the local critics, historians, and characters? For all the I-was-there-ism, Molloy often seems at an odd remove from the city that so enraptures him, so narrowly does he cleave to Fisher’s frame of reference.
If Fisher left Acid Communism undefined, then Molloy doesn’t exactly finish the job; the psychedelic ethos remains vague as both aesthetic and political programme. Other than being coterminous in Detroit space-time, it’s unclear what his line-up of artists has in common. Sure, George Clinton might get a kick out of Danny Brown, but most Detroit rap would probably dismay Lamont Dozier and the Holland Brothers. And how do the sonic and even political cul-de-sacs of garage rock and hardcore punk sit alongside the city’s continuum of Black sonic experimentation? If these movements spurred each other on, wasn’t it through energies that were combative and nihilating rather than a blissed-out communitarianism? Perhaps the point is that all spontaneous human creativity should be treasured and nurtured, in which case Acid Communism is nothing new or particularly persuasive. This plea can be heard in thinkers from William Morris to Guy Debord.
The great and suppressed pathos of this book is an open question: will Detroit always be a great music town? Expressing this reservation goes beyond simply failing to share Molloy’s localist enthusiasm for ‘the city’s current efflorescence of new musical forms.’ Nor is it a matter of simple restlessness during some of the journey’s detours and stopovers. It’s that this is a story of modernity, which promises everything but permanence. Would anyone argue that London (average monthly rent: £2,500) is still the music city it was 20 years ago, never mind 50? Molloy’s parade of musical discontinuity might add up to some sort of canon, but it’s also a time-lapse of capital’s ceaseless churn. He’s entranced by this spectacle, and doesn’t entertain the possibility that Detroit’s musical prodigality is the productive diversity of late capitalism itself.
Capitalism might endure because of, and not despite, all these brave new sounds because that’s what it does, offering us the endless spectacle of its own disavowal. Punk, Techno, and Hip Hop no longer freak anyone out but are cornerstones of the official soundtrack of western culture, spreading interpassivity rather than revolutionary praxis. Reading Molloy, one appreciates how many musical roads lead to Detroit, but it is unclear whether any offer a way out of our current dead ends.