Dancing in the street: Martha Reeves says the Motown spirit is needed in Detroit once again | Benjamin Ferguson

From The Guardian:

"Martha Reeves: The Motown spirit is needed in Detroit once again

The city's financial problems are no secret. But the former Martha and the Vandellas singer thinks Detroit needs to look to the spirit of 60s music to revive itself"

A glut of fatalist headlines and documentaries have recently given outsiders the impression that Detroit is a city with no money and even less hope. The statistics seem to give credence to this notion. Its unemployment rate, at around 30%, is higher than anywhere else in America, and crime, while on the decrease since 2000, still makes Detroit the sixth most violent city in the US.

For Detroit's older residents, this just feels like history repeating itself. Many talk about the 1960s, the last time the city was struck by economic strife, as if it were only yesterday. But the doom and gloom of foreigners is dismissed by natives, who remind outsiders that it was hope, not help or hyperbole, that got the city out of its depression. In one form, that hope manifested itself as Motown.

Leave it to England, where the love of Motown and 60s soul lasted longer and ran deeper, to think Martha Reeves can help Detroit. Sentimentalist that I am, though, I find it infinitely more appealing than championing the guy that wants to bulldoze the damn place. I read another piece on him in Slate a few weeks ago and I still think he's crazy.