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negative racial attitudes still prevail. In their 2000 book, Detroit Divided, professors Reynolds Farley, Sheldon Danziger, and Harry J. Holzer conclude from an array of interviews that most African-Americans in Detroit feel that they miss out on better jobs, promotions, and better neighborhoods because of systematic discrimination, regardless of their level of achievement or education. The whites who were interviewed recognized the same prejudice among residents of the city and surrounding areas but feel that it poses less of a practical problem for black Detroiters. They feel that blacks don’t work hard enough or take advantage of the opportunities presented them. The authors concluded that, while blacks see discrimination everywhere, whites seem to doubt their neighbors’ intelligence and feel that they are difficult to get along with, as neighbors or employees.

In the nineties, Detroit along with other Midwestern manufacturing centers bounced back as the country enjoyed the boosted economy of the Clinton years. General Motors opened new plants and the city built a new sports center and casinos that increased the number of unskilled labor positions. In 1992, the unemployment rate in Detroit was the highest in the country. Six years later, it had fallen at a rate more than that of any other city in the country, but still remained well behind the average.

Detroit has always been at the mercy of the hands of industry. The city was not developed with an eye toward infrastructure or culture and in its bountiful times did little to change that. The auto trade’s down years have left Detroit pocked with gaping holes—zones full of abandoned factories and rotting neighborhoods. In these craters, however, cultural flowers have bloomed. An architectural example, rendered more by cost-cutting necessity than design, is the parking structure in downtown Detroit that was used as the setting in 8 Mile for an impromptu rap battle between Jimmy Smith Jr. and Free World, his rap rivals. The garage was built in 1977 into the gutted remains of the Michigan Theater, which in 1926 was one of the city’s largest, most ornate movie houses. The molding and intricate plasterwork of the theater were preserved within the new structure, not to save history but to avoid the costs of removal. The result is a unique, beautiful, and inadvertant statement on the true nature of the city itself.

In contrast to the lack of mainstream culture, a rich musical tradition well outside of the lines of the norm is Detroit’s legacy. Though there is little evidence in the form of celebrated music festivals, such as New Orleans’ Jazzfest, or large museums, such as Seattle’s Experience Music Project, to reflect the fact, Detroit is one of the most influential and least-appreciated cities in the history of American music. From the country-and-western music of plains-states workers who moved to the city in the twenties to the fertile jazz scene of Detroit in the fifties, local musicians consistently took new turns at developing their own sound. From MC5 to Motown to Kid Rock to Carl Craig—Detroit artists are the innovators in the music culture of their day, alien to the norm and free to create due to a geographical and cultural alienation from the mainstream.

The Bassment: the building that housed the Bass Brothers’ former recording studio on West 8 Mile Road in Ferndale, Michigan. Eminem’s Slim Shady EP was recorded there in 1997.

Some of the richest music of the twentieth century was born in Detroit, nurtured in pockets of a city that has no outlets to support them, in the thick central industrial belt of a country ruled by its coasts. Blues legend John Lee Hooker followed the Southern black migration to Detroit, developing his eclectic take on the craft in the Paradise Valley and Black Bottom sections of the city in the forties. Singer Dinah Washington was raised in Detroit, peppering everything from R&B to blues to jazz with her critically disdained, distinctive, high-pitched grit. The Detroit jazz scene of the fifties gave us innovators such as jazz chanteuse