By Melissa Walsh

My mother’s quest to understand boys recently prompted me to re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn while traveling with my family over spring break. I’m so glad I did. As a mother of four “rapscallions,” the experience of re-reading the adventures of Mark Twain’s “rapscallion” Huck Finn was an epiphany.

Huck’s narration reinforced for me how critical it is for those of us mentoring boys to nurture patiently and boldly a boy’s “rapscallion” instincts into the sense of noble purpose he’ll require for his rite of passage into manhood. Twain provided several mentors for Huck, from the widow who sought to “sivilize” him to Aunt Sally who nearly lost her sane mind caring for him and Tom as they executed their “elegant” plan to rescue Jim. And just as Huck’s pap was the antithesis of a father’s love and respect for a son, Jim became the man- hero Huck and Tom needed.

My first reading of this great classic was as a high school student. I must not have gotten much out of the story back then, because I didn’t remember much about it. But now having re-read this story as a mother of sons, recognizing more clearly my calling to raise boys as the most important mission of my life, Twain’s prose echoes in my mind each time I feel that urge to scream at the top of my lungs, “Boys, what are you doing?!!!! What were you thinking?!!!!”

Three of my four sons are about the age of Huck and Tom, early adolescence. And because we live very close to the middle school, I often find myself hosting half a dozen or more adolescent boys in my home after school. Arriving home from my day at the office, I step over the mound of large shoes kicked off near the doorway, holding my breath for the stink of course, and head straight to the kitchen to bake scores of pizza rolls and stir a fresh pitcher of kool-aid.

Sure, adolescent boys don’t smell great, they track in mud, they’re loud, they eat a lot, and they’ve destroyed many things in my home, “by accident” of course, but I’m so glad to know where they are and what they’re up to. And it’s been fascinating to observe them up close. Soon they’ll have driver’s licenses and be lost into the world. Yet though I fully appreciate how precious these American sons are, their squirreliness leads me to feeling from time to time quite “looney,” just as Huck described Aunt Sally after the spoon prank. (I identified strongly with the character of Aunt Sally.) Instead of aiming to “sivilize” them, as Huck accused the widow of aiming to do, I send them outside into the suburban wilderness of manicured lawns and blacktop or insist that they work off the testosterone spikes with the free-weight set in the basement (a worthwhile investment for any family with adolescent boys).

Increasingly, I grow a deeper fondness and empathy for boys this age. I enjoy their child’s curiosity coupled with their rather mature conclusions about the events and people around them. I smile noticing how their total height has yet to fall into proportion with their long, lanky limbs and large feet, like six-month old floppy-eared pups awkwardly scurrying about on oversized paws. Re-reading Huck Finn enhanced my appreciation for adolescent boys, as Huck’s narration of his journey invited me into the heart and mind of an adolescent boy. I learned that an adolescent boy’s rationale and motivation are more dependent on what he senses in the present and less on what he visualizes for the future, though ironically so much of what the boy discovers in the now shapes the man he will become.

We (mentors of boys) must learn to live in the moment with them as they, in the here and now, discover who they are and will become. I’m convinced that adolescent boys do not discover their identity and purpose by pondering it, but rather experiencing it. They actively pursue discovery of their identity and purpose through hands-on exploration and action-packed challenges.

In The Wonder of Boys, educator and therapist Michael Gurian concluded that American parents and mentors are failing boys by not supporting them properly during adolescence, a period of life he dubs “the hero’s journey.” According to Gurian: "Our culture has robbed boys of the hero’s journey in myriad ways. Some among us have feared its warrior extremes and thus tried to teach boys to deny their need to perform and compete. Some among us, seeking to utterly destroy the male sense of role, have taught boys to avoid protecting and providing, to avoid that piece of their heroism. Some among us, too busy to help boys become the hero each needs to be, have neglected our elder responsibility. Most of us, feeling unheroic ourselves, have avoided looking into a boy’s eyes and seeing his desire to be a hero."

So what would Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) think about how we’re raising American boys today? I suspect he’d be disappointed that beer commercials have become the premier medium for conveying a manning-up message, that drinking alcohol is prescribed for manliness. I also suspect Twain would be appalled at the pervasiveness of ADD diagnoses, labeling typical “rapscallion” qualities as disorders and then drugging the Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer out of our boys.

A great truth that Mark Twain so brilliantly presents in Huck Finn is that adolescent boys are, at their core, seekers. We ought not so readily label them dysfunctional, criminal, at-risk, or hyperactive misfits. Every adolescent boy is a sapling of a man-tree living in the moment of discovering what kind of tree he was designed to be, each wanting to grow up tall and straight and each wondering what kind of fruit he was created to bear. Adolescent boys take risks to discover their courage, wrestle with one another to discover their strength, tease one another to discover their propensity for wit and humility, and roam the neighborhood to discover independence. We, their mentors, must be there for them to enable them to discover their virtues freely and responsibly on the hero’s journey. We must be present, discretely holding our breath while stepping over their shoes. We must live in the questions of discovery with them, actively listening, respectfully advising, and unconditionally loving them as they experience the joys and struggles and endure the consequences of the hero’s journey.

Mark Twain said, “There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.” Well said. Let’s embrace the rapscallion that is at the core of a boy and support it, not tame it, into becoming a man on a good mission.
“A boy remains a boy until a man is required,” warned Daniel Boone’s mother. Indeed, let’s remain close to our adolescent sons as they meet requirements for manhood. As we patiently and boldly nurture them with a concoction of equal parts love and respect, let’s remember to listen up, laugh it up, and lighten up.

By Melissa Walsh

​In a letter to W. T. Barry in 1822, James Madison wrote, "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

Demand Fact-Based Content; Reject Sensationalism as 'News'

Every new grad of journalism has a fundamental career decision to make. Sell sensationalism. Or aim for truth-telling. Call me “old-fashioned,” but I find the “the new journalism” of leading 1A stories with opinion, speculation, or rumor quite disturbing. Save it for the op-ed page or a blog entry.

Readers are also accountable; the journalist’s commitment to truth-telling cannot sustain a democracy if the readership discontinues a demand for truth. For our American democracy to thrive, media consumers must make the effort to discern fact-based information from sensational speculation. They must actively support media outlets and independent journalists who value truth-telling over money and attention.

Filtering the good information from the clutter of unverified statements is difficult. It requires looking deeper than the morning local paper and evening network news, where headline stories may have been rapidly spun from content spoon-fed by press secretaries and decision-makers who are so high up the food chain that they have little to no sense of how those at the grassroots are subsisting. Becoming a critical thinker and good news reader requires becoming a student of history, an independent researcher, a fact- checker, and an informed and listening observer.

In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis opines that newspapers alone offer little value for acquiring knowledge. "Even in peacetime," Lewis writes, "I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be seen before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand."

When I’m on a quest for knowledge about a topic, I don’t accept as real or complete news that passes as “news” alone. Complex events are presented in a news story too quickly and too simply to teach us anything of substance. I know from living abroad where news was happening before my eyes that a newspaper reporter’s black and white rendering too often excludes the critical gray tones and colors of the truth. Therefore, to get the whole story, I invest my dollars and time in news supplements and alternatives:

Study history. 
Just as I might gain insight into Italian from studying Latin, I learn about today’s events from reading history. For, example, I know from studying history that there is a historical pattern of economic instability leading to political instability. Any history buff knows that poverty leads to unrest, that the want for bread generates a hunger for freedom. And look what we see in the headlines today: rebellion triggered by damaged economies and rebels looking for a scapegoat.

Read the wires. 
Reading the wires regularly, I was able to connect the recent ousting of Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to the demonstrations in Egypt. Wire services, such as AP and Reuters, function as boots-on-the-ground news services that consumers desperately need to sift through the muck of ratings-driven reporting and to find some essential pieces of information and insight that the mainstream talking heads have left out.

Check the facts. 
For issues that I have a special interest in understanding clearly and completely, I regularly consult primary source material to verify statements made on the networks and in the press. For example, I referred to the DoD’s Comptroller for the complete details of the proposed 2012 defense budget while reading news surrounding conflicts regarding the federal budget. I also check the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s website frequently. My concern for our service men and women serving in Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) prompts me to review at least weekly the list of casualties. I also scan the DoD press releases.

Support Fair, Reasonable Critical Thinkers; Dismiss Hype-Mongering Pundits. 
As freedom-lovers, we must equip ourselves with knowledge to make our leaders and our press accountable. Passively listening to a tirade on Fox or MSNBC does not qualify as gaining knowledge. Just a little fact-checking, and you’ll find the cracks in the claims of these prime-time windbags who make a heck of a lot of money for their networks. A sign that our nation has become intellectually healthy would be the networks finally booting these guys from the airwaves due to low ratings. When consumers do their homework, interest in anti-intellectual, attention-seeking pundits withers. Pundits like these, whether on the right or the left of the political spectrum, are what I call “Hype Mongers.” And I would love to see the American public tune them right out of business.

In the embedded table, I contract the Truth Seeker (journalist) with the Hype-Monger (Pundit):

Challenge Policy Makers; Renounce Empty Partisan Rhetoric.
Political leaders can be just as ugly and deceitful as hype mongers. Policy makers can severely damage businesses as they make decisions impacting industries for which they are not subject- matter experts, when they gain campaign support for votes. Surely, lobbyists drive policy-makers’ decisions just as ratings drive the headlines in the mainstream network teasers. Also, when policy makers legislate by presumptuously putting people in boxes and labeling them with sweeping generalizations, the lives of many individuals are affected. When defense contractors and commanders looking to put a feather in their cap push for war tactics based on new technology rather than the real needs of the servicemen in the fight, thousands of lives and billions of tax dollars are lost.

In his essay “Congressional Oversight Willing and Able or Willing to Enable?”1 Winslow T. Wheeler described congressional oversight on executive branch national security decisions this way: "Mere words, in the form of prognostications at congressional hearings may catch the momentary eye–and the evening news–but their impact on policy, and history, vary from transitory to nonexistent. Beyond that, poorly informed questions, prosecuted ineffectually at a congressional hearing do little more than help us identify which politicians are the lightweights." As constituents, we must challenge our senators and representatives to do their homework and truly become the check and balance they were prescribed to be in the U.S. Constitution. If an informed citizenry held policy makers accountable, then we would have ourselves one fine democracy.

We Get the Democracy We Deserve.

George Bernard Shaw said, “Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” Gaining knowledge is hard work, and it is our duty as citizens. Seeking truth isn’t a warm and fuzzy challenge; it forces one to look at evil in the world, to witness suffering, to come to terms with betrayal by those entrusted to lead. But knowledge can equip and inspire citizens to act. It will lead to a higher quality of democracy.

In this dynamic media age, I hope that media managers are considering new ways for supporting a readership’s truth quest, such as enhancing reports with historical notes, facts and figures, and statements from relevant, diverse, and grounded viewpoints.

Instead of following the money, news must follow the truth. This way, the people might prevent legislation from following the money and ensure it protects people. News consumers would stop passively accepting the arguments of the Republican or Democrat dynasties and their ruling heirs, and instead demand transparency, accountability, and truth-telling.

“Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think,” wrote American patriot Thomas Paine. “But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks and all it wants is the liberty of appearing.”2

Let truth be the magnet that attracts and energizes our American democracy. Let the hype fade.

1 The Political Labyrinth, February 2011.
2 Rights of Man, 1792

​© 2011 Melissa Walsh

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By Melissa Walsh

Now in middle age and devoted to family and work, I’m not surrounded by Detroit's music scene, as I was years ago. Though I still have musician friends who perform around town and out of town, I don’t see enough of their performances. I long to be immersed in Detroit music life as I was during the 1990s, while, as a twenty-something, single hipster professional, living in Hamtramck — the closest thing Detroit had to a Greenwich Village or West Hollywood. Below is an essay I wrote in 2005 that expressed my passion for Detroit and the music it plays.
—Melissa Walsh

One particular D-word captures Detroit’s history and culture best – drama. Life in Detroit, the good and the bad, is rich in the emotion that rides struggle and achievement, yearning and hope, making it fertile for creativity. It’s no coincidence then that Detroit is known internationally as an important music city. It’s as if Detroiters seek to discover a soundtrack for the drama they live daily, gathering the city’s physical and spiritual sounds and building them into a decorative backdrop like glorious graffiti.

A Detroiter, I imagine the soundtrack of my life. My birth into an autoworker family in 1967 was surrounded by the social anthems of Seger’s “Heavy Music” and Franklin’s “Respect.” As a child, I frolicked to Wonder’s “Superstition” and Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band.” My earliest memories of fear include watching in confused horror televised news images from Vietnam, and the protest ballads of Marvin Gaye were in the air.

Various Detroit musicians accompanied my discovery of drama as a teen and young woman. Rocking with Seger, Ryder, and Nugent or praising our maker with the Winans, the Commissioned, and Thomas Whitfield, I let myself move to the city’s pulse. Witnessing the great experiments of May, Atkins, and Saunderson or grooving to the smooth cries of Baker or Was and Was, I understood the blessings inherent in a culturally rich city like Detroit. In the 90s I whooped it up with the Detroit Cobras, Demolition Dollrods, Gangster Fun, and Bootsy X and the Love Masters and let my mind wander with the emotional compositions of Breech, Discipline, and Majesty Crush. Of course, in my Detroit-life soundtrack I hear, with the masses of fans around the world, the latest famous descriptive musical renderings of Detroit’s drama, that of Dombroski, White, Ritchie, Mathers, and Craig. The soundtrack to my Detroit life continues to grow from artists on the Detroit scene today who are ripe with the hope of breaking their sound throughout and beyond Detroit, up-and-coming talent like the Von Bondies, Aquarius Void, Bantam Rooster, Blanche, and dozens more working from Detroit’s heritage.

Disappearance
Though Detroit is freely tagged as America’s music city, most of Detroit’s finest musical artists are taken for granted locally and overlooked nationally. Today, as I continue to follow Detroit’s rookie and veteran talent, I am well familiar with the many accounts of spectacular Detroit artists who could not break out of a small urban clique. As a seasoned music patron on the Detroit music scene, I fight back cynicism of the earnest artistic efforts I encounter and wonder at the disappointing hit-or-miss reality of success or failure Detroit musicians must acknowledge. I’ve witnessed scores of hugely talented musical artists vanish from the stage – artists with more or equal talent to the relatively few Detroit artists who have made it to the limelight.

A feature article in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Detroit Metro Times entitled “Where the Hell Are They Now?” reported on Detroit’s legendary local musical artists of the 80s and 90s who had dropped out from public view. Speaking to the general project of developing the article, the writers explained, “We [sic] learned one not-so-obvious absolute. The artists [presented] here – some whose music might not have aged as well as others – had at least some odd, Detroit-specific purity in their craft, whose phrases and images construct their own time and place but with the eerie timelessness and unchanging scent of factory exhale, scorched motor oil and blue collar fret.”

D-Word Determiners
As a patron, I can speculate on the base factors for this hit-or-miss reality. As a writer, I too face elusive success. Based on my own artistic experience and what I’ve observed over the years about the career challenges of Detroit’s musicians, I have organized my thoughts in two D-word lists: one summarizing the factors behind the commercial success and mass-popularity of a few; the other summarizing the factors behind the obscurity and commercial failure of most.

Let’s first look at my D-word list of failure factors:

Disastrous Distribution – The local labels, as well as the indie labels that Detroit artists sign with out-of-town, have monumental distribution hurdles, even in the Amazon age. Publicity continues to drive distribution realities. Outside the automotive industry, Detroiters are really bad at delivering a lucrative sales pitch for their goods. What’s more, artists are notorious as poor salespeople. Most devastating to music distribution, however, is the frustrating reality that labels are prone to become defunct, taking any visible opportunity for their signed artists out with them.
Discord – The following is a typical experience for the Detroit music fan: You follow a talented musical group in Detroit. You follow this new-found listening pleasure venue to venue for months or years, the venues becoming progressively more crowded with fans. One night, you find yourself close to the stage; so at the end of the performance you take the playlist as a souvenir, certain that this group will make it to the big stage one day soon. After all, their recent CD-release party was fabulous. Then, sadly, you discover an article in the Detroit Metro Times reporting the group’s breakup, often due to a root D-word factor – inter-group relational dysfunction.

Dependency – Like many creative people, many of Detroit’s talented folk become trapped in dependency – dependency on drugs or alcohol, dependency on a bad romantic relationship, dependency on peer and media reviews, dependency on a poor manager or label. For many artists, dependency blocks the path of creative freedom toward the goal of artistic success.

Detention – Unfortunately, several locally celebrated, Detroit-based musicians have landed in prison, usually due to one of the first two dependency problems listed above. Others have anger issues. Obviously, prison time breaks the momentum of building a music career.

Danger – Detroit’s real and perceived danger threatens the promotion of Detroit’s rising musical artists. Up-and-coming musicians are, for the most part, struggling financially. Musicians often find themselves on dark streets after club hours toting expensive equipment; they’re a vulnerable group in America’s second most-dangerous city. If their equipment is hijacked, they could be out of the music business for a while.

As far as perceived danger, many potential fans in the suburbs are overly fearful of venturing into Detroit’s bustling venue districts, such as Woodward Village, the Cass Corridor, the Warehouse District, Hamtramck, and the Michigan and Trumbull area. Danger-hype should not deter music lovers from smartly and safely visiting the scene’s mainstay venues.

Next, is my D-word list of success factors:

Drive – Paradoxically, the artist must possess an acute sensibility to emotion and passion while donning a thick skin to deflect the darts of criticism and hard luck. Any artist striving to break out of America’s poorest city to reach the national stage must remain driven and dedicated, despite criticism thrown from local reviewers and curses cast from miserable, green-eyed peers.

Destiny/Dumb Luck – Depending on your spiritual viewpoint, the reader may cite the being-at-the-right-place-at-the-right-place factor as either “destiny” or “dumb luck.” Though plenty of talented Detroit musicians have remained driven and hard working for years, even decades, most have not managed to deliver their sound to the particular audience that can hoist them into the limelight. Reaching the right audience – namely, suits from big labels or an active and powerful fan-base – depend upon a fate-force beyond the realm of an artist’s effort.

Dollars – Rumored throughout the music scene is speculation that certain Detroit musicians with minor or major success were born with the silver spoon. Accordingly, some perhaps funded their daily living and music-recording expenses with a family trust-fund. It goes without saying that money finances opportunity. When money’s no problem, a musician can study his craft privately under a master, he can spend more hours in the studio tweaking his sound, he can hire an experienced producer, he can purchase marketing schemes and tools, and he can get his name on event V.I.P. lists and network with the privileged and powerful. I am not suggesting that Detroit’s well-off artists who realized their commercial dreams are not talented. Nonetheless, what impresses me most in the Detroit music scene are the rags-to-riches, seemingly providential developments of loyal, underdog, hard-working Detroit musicians who climb to artistic and commercial success without a financial boost from the family stock dividends.

DJs – Getting a DJ to like you is a coup for a struggling Detroit musician with little-to-no money for publicity. Naturally, many area DJs are excited about Detroit’s music scene, and several offer forums for local artists to promote their work. For example, 88.7-FM (89X) DJ Vince Cannova’s “Homeboy Show,” broadcast each Sunday from 10 to 11 pm, is one important and sought-after outlet for area musicians to play to a rock audience that may not come to the downtown and midtown clubs to see them perform live. The radio personalities of WDET-FM, Wayne State University’s public broadcasting station, regularly feature local artists, interviewing them live or programming their songs into their comprehensive national playlists. “Detroit’s First-Lady of Rap,” Smiley has a radio show on WHTD-FM that gives airplay to local rap and hip-hop artists.

Discipleship – A dictionary definition of “disciple” is “an active adherent, as of a movement or philosophy.” Musicians with disciples have a better chance of getting noticed outside their local fan-base than those who do not. The legendary Iggy Pop and the MC5 grew from a revolutionary base and later drew a popular following. Bob Seger has maintained a baby-boomer working-class base. Alexander Zonjic plays to an aging yuppie base. The Winans minister to an evangelical base. Kid Rock developed a north-of eight-mile, young gen-X base. White Stripes impressed a back-to-basics rock/ blues, hipster base. Eminem captured an angry-young-poet base. And Detroit Techno’s Derrick May, et al., as well as Detroit industrial-punk’s legendary Shock Therapy collected a huge German-national base. I could go on and on. Interestingly, some of these trailblazing artists found themselves in a position, decades after their peak-performance heyday, to license their works to advertising companies for commercials and movie studios for soundtracks. They can thank their loyal following for these lucrative residual ripples that enable them to retire more comfortably.

Description
Scores of talented musicians playing the venues and festivals of the Detroit music scene are little-known, even locally, outside of their peer crowd. Yet, despite all the little-knowns who ought to be well-knowns, Detroit itself is internationally known as a great music city in several genres, including rock, blues, jazz, and gospel. Consider, for example, the Music Institute, which birthed the genre of Detroit Techno; the Hip-Hop Shop clothier, which supported the rapping calesthetics of Eminem, Slum Village, and Jay Dee; or Detroit’s famous St. Andrew’s Hall, which is recognized as a must-play American venue for any rock band on its rookie national tour.

Not only have many Detroit musicians gone from the floors of crowded Detroit dives to the national stage and international spotlight, but Detroit’s many concert venues, large and small are critical stops on musical artist tours of all genres. Detroit’s musical grassroots are esteemed by fans from around the world. And from time-to-time the scene is dotted with art-loving celebrities working, playing, and listening shoulder-to-shoulder with Detroit’s unknown and little-known creative people. Detroit’s gospel artists are arguably the finest in the world. Music experts hail Detroit blues, jazz, and rock creations as perfecting the blending of the revolutionary with the familiar. In addition, Detroit’s opera and classical music base is thriving, healthy enough to support the expansion of Detroit Symphony Hall to the Ford Symphony Plaza and Michigan Opera Theater’s newly reconstructed home, Detroit Opera House, which is the cornerstone of downtown’s sophisticated Harmonie Park. (Note the D-essence of MOT’s 2005-06 season moniker, “Desperate Divas.”)

How appropriate it is that Detroit’s main music export of the past ten years runs with an industrial heartbeat, reflecting the city’s history of attracting émigré industrial workers from abroad and the American South. A vast array of musical style and tradition was, as a result, threaded through Detroit’s social experience. Take the popular Detroit rock group Immigrant Suns, which celebrates ethnic heritage in rock anthems that include rearranged melodies from European national music. Or consider the decades-long fun, Yankovic-style rockers the Polish Muslims, who, even before Weird Al Yankovic, parodied rock lyrics accompanied with Polka revised riffs. The innovation of Detroit’s freethinking musicians in all genres is directly linked to Detroit’s sizeable immigrant heritage and the great influx of Southern whites and blacks to Detroit’s factories over the span of the twentieth century. These influences pervade everything about Detroit society today. Detroit’s skilled musicians are both nostalgic and trailblazing, a delicate chemistry that stirs the listener’s emotions and nurtures sensibilities on social issues. Detroit’s musicians are eager to showcase the city’s struggle-shadowed beauty and pain. The Detroit music scene is where they freely run to a stage to blast what they know to be true. They all are inspired by another D-word –dream. Like education, creativity and faith, a dream cannot be stolen.

Discovery
The central reason for my writing this essay is a D-word – discovery. Success for Detroit artists can only follow the discovery of listeners. Yet I know anecdotally that the music lover traveling to Detroit’s venues encounters a paramount obstacle – it is extremely difficult for the outsider to navigate Detroit’s music scene. The result is that Detroit’s diamonds remain underexposed in the rough of Detroit’s urban terrain. Publicity campaigns for Detroit’s cultural opportunities fall far short of being comprehensive and useful for the music-lover traveler. The only way for a music pilgrim to find his or her way through Detroit’s music scene satisfactorily is with the guiding assistance of a native Detroiter familiar with the city’s dives and hotspots off the narrow, underdeveloped path of Detroit tourism.

Though the world has embraced the genres this great music city has manufactured, many music lovers remain ignorant of the who and where behind the construction of these genres. With new industry in Detroit, then the aim ought to include getting Detroit artists, and the dedicated venues that feature them, fixed in the radar of music lovers everywhere. Non-Detroiters are aware of Detroit’s musical genre-manufacturing history. But what they should have available to them is community and information leading them on a musical field trip of a one-of-a-kind American city whose current political head is widely dubbed as “the hip-hop mayor *.” Music lovers from around the world require a virtual guide through Detroit’s dynamic music scene and all the D-words it includes – desire, deliverance, dread, desperation, discernment, demolition, déjà vu, delight, dazzle, diversity, and of course doo wop.


* A reference to Kwame Kilpatrick, Mayor of Detroit at the time of writing this essay in 2005.

​© 2005 Melissa Walsh