I first visited the Detroit Electronic Music Festival several years ago, back when it was free to get in.
That trip has a permanent home in the back corners of my gray matter because it turned out to be very unfortunate. Me and my then-girlfriend had planned on hitching a ride with another friend of ours, getting as weird as we possibly could and running amok in Detroit until the thing closed down at 2 a.m.
But the ride said he had to leave earlier than we and the three others wanted to, so we were roped into driving our rusted beast of a vehicle. It made foreboding squeeling noises every time the wheels turned and shook like a novelty bed at any speed higher than 55, putting my nerves on edge to begin with.
When we got there, my worries faded. DEMF was, at that time, a fantastic spectacle. Thousands of people crammed into Hart Plaza, moving distractedly the one of many sounds coming off the multiple
stages. Shouting. Shoving. Pushing. Dances. Much drug use. Much drinking. Weird people dressed like every kind of counterculture clique you can think of — from pirates to bikers to hippies to techno goth.
The music was loud, thumping in the ears and the chest because there was no way to escape gigantic sub woofers, short of jumping into the Detroit River. No help but to dance to it, and it didn't matter how or who with.
I've always liked techno music, hopping on the shoulders of Detroit's hip-hop grandfathers, twisting their beats into frantic sound effects and more urgency. If hip-hop was about expression in the early 1980s, techno music became about experimenting with what you had to say. It is the last explorable frontier in music, the only genre where something genuinely new might be created.
We danced for 10 hours straight, stopping only for a cigarette every few hours. We'd lean on the rails by the river, blowing smoke towards quiet Canada across the water; then back into the fray.
Somewhere around 1 a.m. it became impossible to move. There were people everywhere, no way to get from one place to another without accidentally molesting someone or being molested yourself. We moved to the underground stages, where it was louder but the people were slightly more sparse. My girlfriend and I were standing in the middle of a crowd, watching some industrial mess of a band on the stage. When we turned around, our three comrades were gone.
We spent an hour looking for them, walking around the stage, finding high grounds to yell out. Nobody had cell phones; not that you'd have heard anything through it in that noise. We even walked the mile to where we'd parked, waited 20 minutes, walked back. We couldn't find them.
We left them. Screw them. They'd gone off somewhere and didn't stick with the group, and it was my
car. I wanted out of there. One of them had family in Detroit she could call. They eventually made it home.
My girlfriend and I went to our car, which was no longer squealing, but grinding, and thought for sure we were going to die on the drive back to the Battle Creek. If the car had broken down, I might have found a way to blow it up, my nerves were riding at such a high frequency.
I made the trip to DEMF again last year, in a much better car and on the Enquirer's dime. The festival got taken over by some mass-media production company and it's now $40 for a weekend pass, instead of free. That's still cheap, by any standards, but they've brought in so many advertisers and cross-promoters that there's more banners asking you to buy beer than there are DJs.
Slap an advertisement on anything, and you're bound to scare away a certain kind of clientele, like my friends and I were. The admission prices weeded out all of the great faces for people-watching, all the real scary people that are so intense about the music they'll drive from anywhere to have a bass line rattle their brains. They shy away from shrink-wrapped, sticker-slapped, hemp-flavored "4:20" lollipops, because it's boring and patronizing.
The music is still the same, the DJs are just as talented, but the lack of quality freaks seemed to drain something from the experience. Even with a fist full of far-reaching press credentials, I couldn't fully get into the spirit of the thing.
Looking back on my first visit, it was hell, but the frantic fretting added a layer of fear that heightened the urgency of the sounds. Watching people who couldn't afford entrance lean on the high fences erected to keep them out, just so they could feel a little of the thump, I knew that urgency was gone.
NOTE: Click here to read the press release on this year's DEMF.
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George Carlin, 1937 to 2008