Detroit has an awesome reputation in many musical genres, but the feeling absorbed when walking its streets, especially in the lower part of the Cass Corridor-- especially after a couple beers-- is the raw edge of punk.
Or maybe I felt that way last week because I stopped at an infamous punk bar near downtown called the 2500 Club. Small tough place; punk band in black setting up; tough-looking attractive punk girl behind the bar; tough-looking manager telling her how he'd got the scar on his chin in some rumble or other.
Afterward with steam coming from manhole covers and abandoned buildings looming everywhere-- interspersed with occasional open party store or inhabited dark-brick urban hotel; punk music still echoing through my ears-- I felt, as deep as I ever have, the stark aura of punk, its characteristic edge.
I walked through dropping temperature to Lafayette Coney Island for a couple carryout coney dogs, a brief warm moment of populated life, then back to the surreal blackness of urban nightworld, passing a nightclub which a few weeks prior had police department "crime scene" tape across its doors and two chalk body outlines on the sidewalk in front. Now it was open for business with a phalanx of bouncers standing in front of the doors-- all wearing hats and all of them black except one tough-looking white dude. In Detroit people look tougher than in other cities. Everyone looks tough. Maybe because everyone here IS tough. It's a unique aesthetic; real; fascinating; artistically stimulating: what keeps Detroit from the complacent genteel phoniness of so much of America and what it ultimately has to sell.
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