Motown and Muhammad Ali

Some things/people have no equal. They're G.O.A.T.s, period.

Aug 15, 2022

Issue #110 OpEd American and Detroit History and Culture August 15, 2022

On that fateful day when Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, sent Sonny Liston crashing to the canvas and suddenly became boxing’s Heavyweight Champion of the World, he accomplished a feat that virtually nobody except The Champ himself thought possible at the time. Prior to that historic victory, Ali was just a good-looking kid in good shape with a big mouth who seemed to have a particular skill for attracting news cameras.

But then he backed that mouth up. The five words he shouted into the surrounding news cameras afterward proved not only devastatingly accurate to describe the moment at hand, but also prophetic. Because it wasn’t just that fight that shook up the world, it was the miracle arc of Ali’s entire life:

“I shook up the world.”

Last week, Detroit’s Motown Museum hosted a celebration recognizing the museum’s expansion into a sizable cultural facility at its home on West Grand Boulevard designed to more accurately reflect the true size of Motown’s global legacy. You might say that Motown is the Muhammad Ali of the music industry; there is not one music company anywhere in the world that can stand in the same ring. What Berry Gordy built - with the backing of his family – was an enduring gold-plated musical and cultural legacy in the Music Capital of the World that will most likely never be matched.

Stevie Wonder. The Temptations. Marvin Gaye. Diana Ross and The Supremes. Martha and the Vandellas. The Four Tops. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. The Jackson Five. The Funk Brothers. On and on and on and on. And a list of chart-topping hits that stretches from Detroit to the musical horizon and beyond.

And keep in mind that just as no music company anywhere can hold a candle to the legacy of Motown, no other city can boast supremacy in so many genres of music. From jazz to rock to rhythm and blues to rap to gospel to techno, the global musical phenomenon that got its start in Detroit.

But it is Motown that has drawn the most attention, understandably so, and it is Motown that arguably has the most to do with why Detroit has earned the title of The Greatest Musical City in the World.

Since those glory years of the Motown Review, Detroit has endured far more than its fair share of pain and suffering. The battered city has been at the butt end of more than a few jokes delivered casually by late-night hosts and others who probably never even set foot here except in the airport on their way to somewhere else lesser than. We became an easy target for lazy jokesters with micro-memories incapable of comprehending what it must have taken for a working-class African American community to produce such greatness over and over and over again while balancing survival within the crushing jaws of racism and oppression done Northern-style.

But all through the jokes and the snickering hateful references, all through the ruin porn and the ruined lives, Detroit somehow kept delivering the best of the bests. Because Motown showed us that we actually are the best. And so we also delivered Techno, and Eminem, and J-Dilla, and Jack White and the White Stripes, and on and on and on…

We shake up the world.

How did Motown and Muhammad Ali affect your life? Let us know in the comments!

We Are Speaking

Discussion about this post