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BY LAUREN RAMANATHAN

In print | Published January 22, 2009 — Updated February 19, 2009 00:03

Since my home state of Michigan has been in the headlines a lot lately, I’ve decided to write about an experience that I recently had in the infamous Motor City. Every last Friday of the month is “Funk Night,” meaning a group of DJs gets together and throws a crazy dance party in an abandoned warehouse in downtown Detroit (the name of which shall remain anonymous, not that the Detroit police are reading this, and even then they’ve got worse problems on their hands).

Winter break was my opportunity to see what the big and bad city of Detroit is all about. I went with a friend and three of her friends (who shall again remain anonymous). There were five of us, three of whom were people of color. Now, I mention this because of Detroit DJ culture’s much storied “race issue.”

Juan Atkins, inventor of Techno, and his compa triots were African American. But they chose monikers that “repudiat[ed] ethnic designations,” so no one could tell. And so Techno found a mostly white audience. Meaning that all in all, the Detroit Techno narrative is just another one of the white appropriations of black music. ¹

So I was not surprised to find myself one of the few people of color at the venue aside from the “security” guards (who accepted cannabis bribes for cuts in line) and, of course, the DJs. The whole issue was just accentuated by the constant thump of funk music in the background.

But all racial politics aside, once I actually got to the dance floor, I had fun … surprisingly enough. And that’s when it struck me. What is the meaning of a bunch of kids who presumably aren’t from Detroit coming to get jiggy in the country’s #1 bleeding city?

Apparently not much. Or so it would seem. Everyone seemed to be having a great time. Drunk (white) people kept on bumping into me, but that’s just to be expected wherever there are drinking white people.

But, really, should I have been feeling guilty about the colonial tones of this venture? I wondered how many of the people in the crowd had thought seriously about the bailout, Kwame Kilpatrick’s corrupt leadership or the fact that Michigan’s economy is now trailing that of just about every other state in the nation.

But this all leads me back to an important question about the politics of leisure. Shouldn’t we all have just been enjoying ourselves at that party? Which begs the question: In a faltering economy, do we have the right to enjoy ourselves? Is partying a necessity, or is the “Work Hard, Play Hard” ethic just for the privileged?

It is wholly possible that an event such as “Funk Night” is a place where lonely souls go to forget their troubles, socioeconomic and existential alike. But when the makeup of the crowd is so obviously hipster and so obviously privileged, what does that say about who can even afford the luxuries of temporary amnesia that the weekend proffers?

Perhaps this whole editorial is problematic, as it tacitly assumes that the underprivileged don’t party. Perhaps it is just that the venues I have frequented are not the milieus where non-white, middle class people tend to party, and the fact that I have mainly been exposed to spaces dominated by privilege is certainly only a product of my own privilege.

The points that I am trying to get at here are numerous. Chief among them: Is it appropriate, or even necessary, to constantly feel guilty during times of local turmoil? What does it say about our society that we seem to exotify the abject, the crime-ridden, the sorrowful? Does the party hard ethic only apply to a certain privileged subset of society, who subsequently justify their hedonism using the sobering realities of economic and political ruin that keep so many others constantly worried about how they are simply going to make it through the next day?

I don’t know the answers. But at least I’m starting to find the questions.

Lauren is a sophomore. She can be reached at lramana1@swarthmore.edu

Footnotes:
¹ Rubin, Mike. “Chicago House/ Detroit Techno: A Tale of Two Cities.” Spin: Twenty Years of Alternative Music. Will Hermes, Sia Michel, eds. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005. 93.

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