Election 2024: The Music is the Message
Election 2024: The Music is the Message
Issue #755 The Choice, Thursday, October 24, 2024
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So, it has been quite the Election 2024 week here in Detroit, the city most are saying Vice President Kamala Harris absolutely has to win to carry Michigan. She needs Michigan as one of the key swing states to carry the rest of the country with an Electoral College victory in just a little less than two weeks.
I know, right?
So, I guess I will once again risk being the completely unscientific Pollyanna in the room and suggest that Detroit is the one city Kamala does not have to worry about. Not to say, as she has repeated often in recent speeches, that she can afford to take any votes for granted or that she doesn’t need to work hard for our vote. As a city built by hard-working people, Detroiters don’t like lazy. And Kamala has been anything but that, with her repeated return visits. She has worked overtime to get our attention and to show how much we matter to her and her campaign.
But if the overwhelming love and energy for Kamala exhibited during each of those visits hasn’t been enough to send the message, I sensed something a little more special taking shape these past couple of weeks. It began on October 10 when Trump made a campaign visit to the extremely conservative Detroit Economic Club, where he was received with polite applause until he started running down Detroit. While he was in Detroit. Even for conservative white males desperately searching for any reason to hold their noses and vote in Trump’s favor (you know, for the economy and all that, even though it is President Biden’s economy that is the envy of the world), this was a difficult pill to swallow.
End of polite applause.
This performance was followed days later, both unfortunately and hilariously, with Trump’s dancing panda routine at a campaign stop (not in Michigan, but in Pennsylvania, stick with me) that has since become an endless font of comic material for memes and mockery. Something about the unlikely – and grotesque – combination of Trump, congested dance (??) moves, and mashup of songs like YMCA and Ave Maria just didn’t give us Trump doubters much option but to point and laugh uproariously as the Great Orange Hindenburg continued to crash and burn into nearby scenery while his supporters watched in confusion – and no small amount of fear and trepidation.
Not quite a week ago, on Saturday, my wife and I decided it would be fun to ride our bikes down to the Detroit Department of Elections and drop off our ballots in the ballot box outside. It was a beautiful day, and we love to ride. But once we got close to our destination on West Grand River, it was hard not to notice that the entire several-block-long area surrounding the Department was fenced off due to a huge block party. The block party was being hosted by the City of Detroit for young folks, encouraging them to vote. Let’s just say the event was well-attended, and the music was noticeably better than what Trump’s Pennsylvania rally attendees were subjected to.
Several days later, on Tuesday, I was walking down Congress Street, leaving work, when a young man was walking not too far ahead of me, and I noticed the huge crowds lined up and down the street headed toward Huntington Place.
“What’s this about?” he asked.
It was Obama. In town to hold a rally in support of Kamala Harris. Let’s just say it was well-attended. And who was it that introduced Obama to the stage? Detroit rapper Eminem. Obama later joked about Trump’s dancing panda routine after semi-rapping the lyrics to Eminem’s massively famous Lose Yourself track featured on his hit movie 8 Mile. He then asked the crowd to picture in their minds if a similar horrific event had been perpetrated by either himself or Kamala. But even as bad as that would have been, Obama noted that the soundtrack would definitely have been better.
That same night, my wife and I went out to dinner and then attended Stevie Wonder’s concert at Little Caesar’s Arena. It was an incredible show and my first time seeing Stevie live. It was the hometown leg of his get-out-the-vote tour entitled “As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart,” which also made stops in the battleground states of North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin. The Detroit concert was sold out, and even though Stevie didn’t preach (much) about the election, everyone knew what this was about and why one of Detroit’s most beloved and respected citizens had hastily arranged this tour.
Because Stevie doesn’t tour much at all any more. Just like Eminem never gets involved in politics. But right now? At this critical juncture in history? Two of Detroit’s finest stepped up and out of themselves because they knew what was at stake – and what they could do, what they had to do.
The music is the message.