John Sinclair

On The Road #17

(The Dolphins, Amsterdam, May 8, 2006)—I left New Orleans for The Netherlands two months ago, but the sights and sounds of the devastated Crescent City continue to reverberate in my heart and my brain.

Recently I’ve been stuck on a particular phrase I saw in the New Orleans Times-Picayune early in January when Mike Cowan, Co-Chair of the New Orleans Human Relations Commission, was quoted as saying:

“Without a vision, the city that we love perishes. New Orleans becomes Detroit South.”

Ouch! I’m from Detroit, and I know whereof Mr. Cowan speaks. I grew up in the Flint area, a place so wrecked now that it makes Detroit look like Las Vegas, and I lived in and around—mostly within—the city of Detroit for 25 years. I moved to New Orleans in 1991 and left there for Amsterdam in 2003.

For 12 years I was a gleeful participant in the great cultural renaissance of New Orleans, one of the thousands of urban hipsters and fellow music lovers who migrated to the Crescent City in the 1990s and the first years of the new century from all over America to find a place where we could live the life of our wildest dreams and dip our feet, dance or even wallow in the nation’s last remaining urban cultural wetland.

I settled in the former Motor City in 1964 at the end of one era, when Detroit was the “Second City of Bebop” and a bristling center of black artistic, political and intellectual activity, and the beginning of another, when Detroit became Motown and the MC-5 led the rock & roll revolution. I left Detroit in 1968 to escape constant police harassment and persecution by the Detroit Narcotics Squad, lived and worked in Ann Arbor, went to prison, returned to Ann Arbor to enjoy its brief Golden Age as the “Dope Capitol of the Midwest” (1972-75) and then moved back to Detroit to participate in the city’s nascent economic and cultural renaissance that flourished during the sweet years of Jimmy Carter and crashed against the rock of Ronald Reagan and the current CIA government that’s run our country for more than 25 years now.

I lived in Detroit while the city shrank and died, and I gamboled among the ruins like so many of my beloved fellow citizens until I couldn’t take it any more and departed for the sunny Southland early in the 1990s. But Detroit—unlike New Orleans—never experienced the results of a gigantic natural disaster compounded by the government’s habitual refusal to commit adequate funds to levee construction and maintenance and topped off by what former mayor Marc Morial has called a “red line” drawn around a “massive land grab” by rich white people who intend to rule the city again.

Detroit’s problems stemmed instead from human disaster on a grand scale. Since World War II, when the city toiled as the “Arsenal of Democracy,” the Detroit metropolitan area has served as an experimental laboratory dedicated to the transformation of America from an industrial democracy into a corporate dictatorship designed to reward only the rich and the super-rich and deprive everyone else of every scintilla of political and economic power.

A pioneer in developing the freeway, the shopping mall and the modern suburb, the Detroit area was reconstructed along those very lines in the 1950s and ’60s to reward those people with white skins and punish those of a darker hue. Vibrant black neighborhoods were torn down to build the city’s sprawling freeway system and move the white people from the urban center to the suburban developments burgeoning outward north, east and west of the city limits. With the white people went their businesses, their stores, their factories and machine shops.

This process was well underway by 1950 and proceeded unimpeded for 20 years until the Black Rebellion of July 1967 made everything speed up. Now the white people weren’t even bothering to sell their homes and stores in the city—they were simply getting out as fast as they could and leaving everything behind before the black people took their ultimate revenge and burned the rest of the city down.

More than a million white people—a million!—fled the no longer friendly confines of the Motor City for the suburban life created by the real estate developers and underwritten by the federal and local governments. The infrastructure of the suburbs, for example, was overwhelmingly underwritten by tax dollars—the sewer system, water, electrical, the preparation of the land for building in every way—and the freeway system designed to move white people in and out of the suburbs was 90% financed by the federal government as well.

After the riots in 1967 the city shrank faster and faster, the damage slowed only during the four short years of the Carter administration and then ever more rapidly accelerated by the Reagan-Bush combine. By the time H.W.’s Michigan campaign manager, John Engler, was elected governor in 1990, I knew it was well past time to get the fuck out of Dodge.

The great city of Detroit had been reduced to less than half of its peak population, state and city governmental support for the arts and the homeless was about to be eliminated, Jim Gustafson had been thrown by security guards head-first through the glass doors of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Tiger Stadium was being abandoned and I had just been fired from my job as editor of the Detroit Council of the Arts journal, City Arts Quarterly, for opposing the construction of the new ballpark by right-wing Catholic pizza king Thomas Monaghan.

The worst thing was the relentless deterioration of the city’s cultural community and the spiritual qualities which had long inspired Detroit poets, artists, playwrights and musicians. The audience for jazz, blues and poetry had diminished to its lowest ebb and, for the artists themselves, there was very goddamned little left in the city to celebrate except for those transfixed by the sounds of factories closing down and unemployed people leaving town. The city simply didn’t want any art any more, and the ruthless destruction of Tyree Guyton’s brilliant Heidelburg Project urban artsite on the near east side came to serve as bitter proof.

New Orleans had the same kinds of physical problems endemic to a shrinking city with no licit economic base outside the industry that services the tourist trade, a ceaseless stream of well-employed white people scuttling for the suburbs and taking their tax base with them, neighborhoods and streets and housing and infrastructure in severe disrepair, schools so bad that legions of their graduates are functional illiterates, and a local power structure rooted in the Confederacy that had ceded political control to the black people but allowed no encroachment on their economic hegemony nor their cultural dictatorship, which as ever is based in the old Caucasian adage, “Niggers ain’t shit.”

They wrong for that, though, because the one thing that the people of New Orleans who don’t have anything DO have is their glorious and supremely resistant culture, which surpasseth in power, beauty, grace and soul the cultural expressions of any other ethnicity ever transplanted to America.

This is not the place to make a detailed case for the Afro-Caribbean culture of the Crescent City, but suffice it to say that I enjoyed the unspeakable pleasure of spending 12 full years smack dab in the middle of it, and yes, I do know what it means to miss New Orleans.

I left New Orleans in 2003 when I was evicted for the non-payment and gave up any hope of securing a living there. My long hours of volunteer shifts on WWOZ Radio had made me a popular media personality in the music community, I had a terrific band of Blues Scholars who made me sound pretty good every time we made an ill-paid appearance around town, and I was writing a lot of liner notes and free-lance journalism for the roots-music underground at the rate of about five cents a word.

But the only times I ever really got paid were [1] when I won $50,000 of a jury award in a leg-injury case (damage done in 1991, payment made in ’95) and [2] when our rented house burned up in 2000 and everybody we knew pitched in to help us until we had about $30,000 to rebuild our lives with. I used to make a little money in the 1990s designing and producing projects for WWOZ like the JazzFest broadcast and other ‘live’ radio concerts, location recordings, fund-raising CDs, programs for national syndication and the like, but every time I showed them how to do something they would eliminate me from the budget and turn the projects over to station management toadies and unskilled volunteers.

Then this idiot Ray Nagin (or Nay Reagan, as I call him) ran for mayor against the police chief and won, bringing the city administration back under the direction of the white business cartel and boding ill for the future. The New Fascism was raging out of control from our nation’s capitol, and you could feel its foul breath all the way down in New Orleans. It seemed like it was finally time for Vampire America to invade our funky city and suck the blood and guts out of it once and for all.

And, in terms of shrinkage, New Orleans had already embarked on a steep downward slope to Detroit South before the Flood. The city reached its maximum population of 630,000 people in 1960. In 2005, after 45 years of white flight to the suburbs and across the lake, the count was down to 462,000, for a reduction of 27%.

This figure would be considerably greater were it not for the quiet influx of a few thousand progressive white people from all over the country who have migrated in ever-increasing numbers to America’s last surviving “cultural wetlands,” as Michael P. Smith has called it, to enjoy the superior level of music and culture we recognize and respect as the unique product of the city’s African American population.

Quiet as it’s kept—and nobody ever says anything about it—this burgeoning group of cultural immigrants exerts quite a positive force in the urban wilderness of the Crescent City, where otherwise the white people differ little from their counterparts elsewhere in these United Snakes…. Well, maybe they’re a little worse in some ways, a little better in some others: After all, no other white people in America put on a Mardi Gras anything at all like theirs, or even think about having so much fun in the streets.

But you might call these 21st-century urban settlers the “wild card” factor in New Orleans, the joker in the deck dealt by the white business elite. A lot of them are kinda wild, like the plethora of wealthy, retired or semi-retired singles and couples in their 50s and 60s who were probably hippies once and have loved roots music since its heyday in the ’60s and ’70s. They came to New Orleans for JazzFest one year and kept coming back until they couldn’t stand the thought of going home and started looking for a double shotgun to buy so they could fix it up, live in one side and rent the other side out for enough to cover their mortgage payments.

The younger ones are even wilder. They’re coming to live in New Orleans now, not when they get old. They’re the same denizens you see in the college towns and university neighborhoods all over America, but they’re not faking it there any more—they’re in the Bywater or the 9th Ward or the Treme or uptown by the Irish Channel, and while their music and art is kind of corny at first, they know what they’re looking for in terms of authenticity of expression by people who grew up that way and they know what to do when they find it.

The meat of the issue is the music community, which has been blessed with—and has blessed in turn—an influx of creative talent of huge dimension in terms of both size and artistic capacity. Like Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s, New Orleans in the 1990s and ’00s has attracted successive waves of musical seekers to resettle in the Cradle of American Civilization As We Know It—and not just in pursuit of poetry, folk music and jazz, but equally after first-hand knowledge of ragtime, early jazz, swing, rhythm & blues, nasty funk, brass band jump, avant-garde jazz and the Mighty Cootie-Fiyo (“Coup of Fire”) of the Mardi Gras Indians.

Not just musicians have emigrated to New Orleans, but writers, poets, painters, filmmakers, sound technicians, recording engineers, community broadcasters, record producers, actors, script-writers and creative professionals of every stripe pulled up stakes, waved goodbye to standard rates of pay and went down South to try to re-situate themselves somewhere they could be more like themselves than ever. It began to seem as if every house abandoned by some white squares who were moving across the lake or over the river was getting snapped up by hip white people from somewhere else who couldn’t wait to take their place.

This phenomenon has evolved so naturally and so organically over the past 20 years or so that they don’t even have a name for it. It’s not gentrification per se because these are people who genuinely intend to step down in the social order and reverse the process of betrayal and flight from our fellow citizens of African descent. It’s really a different thing because they come with respect and as much humility as they can muster to honor and support the people who make the soulful music and art and culture that they love.

While they will always be white people, with all the burdens of ignorance and prejudice and insecurity that white people must bear, they’re a very rare sort of white people in that they have brought themselves to see and interact with African Americans as fellow human beings, fellow music lovers and even—dare I say it?—fellow citizens. This is something new, and it bodes well indeed for the future of the Crescent City in these unbelievably trying times.

Let’s look at the numbers again: With 462,000 residents before the Flood, the city is now operating with less than 200,000 citizens in place and a maximal projection of 250-300,000 persons, or 40 to 48% of the peak (1960) population. At the extreme, a Brown University study concluded, New Orleans could “shrink to about 140,000… and the city, nearly 70 percent black before the storm, will become majority white.”

Now that wouldn’t make a Detroit South at all. Detroit, which peaked at 2.1 million people in 1950, is now lucky to count about 800,000 persons as residents, and less than 10% of them are white. Over a million white people have fled Detroit for its booming suburbs; the city was completely stripped of its economic life and its remaining citizens left to suffer and struggle for simple survival in the most hostile of environments. Thus the shrinkage quotient for the former Motor City is something like 62%, or 5/8ths of the population, leaving about 38% of its peak population still housed in the city—with a black majority in excess of 90%.

So we’re not talking about Detroit South in political terms, since Detroit remains one of the blackest of all black political strongholds in North America. Indeed, political power is just about the only thing black people still have in Detroit: They don’t have jobs, they don’t have city services, they don’t have mass transportation that works, their schools are pretty much designed to keep them from learning anything that could help them, the physical landscape is appalling and even their cultural identity continues to shrink along with the social structure they’re trapped in.

No, it’s the shrinkage most of all, and the potential degeneration of the city’s cultural integrity and its deep spiritual matrix that’s worrying New Orleans when they talk about Detroit South. But I’ve said it before in this space and I’ll say it again: That’s not going to happen. The spirit of New Orleans is indomitable. It will not be crushed, beaten down nor ignored. Whatever happens in the physical world, as the 2006 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival has just proved once again, the music and the spirit and the people who carry them to the world will never be denied. And that’s the end of this column for today.

Amen.

—Amsterdam March 30-31/ April 15-20/ May 7-8, 2006

© 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.