Living for the City

Andrey Douthard is the founder of Paramita Sound, the Detroit record shop and collective that opened in 2014 and became a meeting place for the city's hip hop, electronic, and jazz artists. This is his full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. Douthard came up as a teenager in Detroit's post-8 Mile hip hop scene, brought in by an Inkster group called Street Justice. He remembers Hex Murda runn...

Liz Warner is an award-winning journalist and the host of Alternate Take on WDET, Detroit's NPR affiliate, where she explores music and culture in the city's most freewheeling register. This is her full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. Warner traces Detroit radio's role as a source of comfort and community, from Martha Jean The Queen calming the city during the 1967 riots to her own philos...

Don Was is a Detroit native who went from playing bar gigs and gypsy weddings around the city to producing the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, and Bob Dylan, and eventually running Blue Note Records. This is his full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. Was traces the raw, unpretentious sound of Detroit back to the city's one-industry economy and the immigrant communities, Mexican, Arabic, Easte...

Guilty Simpson is a Detroit MC and one of the few artists J Dilla chose to build an entire album around, a rapper whose commitment to craft and storytelling represents the city's hip hop underground at its most rigorous. This conversation was recorded in Detroit on what would have been J Dilla's birthday. This is his full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. Simpson talks about being in the st...

Bill Blackwell has been Bob Seger's tour manager for 50 years, a career that puts him at the center of Detroit's rock and roll story from the sock hops of the late 1960s through stadium tours decades later. This is his full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. Blackwell traces Seger's regional grind, driving through the night to play shows in Florida for a broken record. He recounts the electr...

Isiah Thomas is a Basketball Hall of Famer and the captain of the Detroit Pistons' "Bad Boys," the back-to-back champions who played the game their own way and never apologized for it. This conversation goes far beyond basketball. This is his full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. Thomas walks through the sound of the Bad Boys locker room, the shift from funk to hip hop, "Freaks Come Out at...

Nasaan is a Detroit rapper, director, editor, and world-builder who signed to Atlantic Records off the first video he ever made, and whose ERA 404 project — part album, part short film, part visual universe — is one of the most ambitious pieces of work to come out of Detroit hip hop in years. He is also the son of Proof, D12's beloved rapper and Eminem's closest collaborator, who was shot and kill...

House Shoes is a Detroit DJ and producer who spent a decade as the resident DJ at St. Andrew's Hall, ran Street Corner Music as a label for over a decade, and came up alongside J Dilla and Proof before relocating to Los Angeles. This is his full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. House Shoes talks about coming up on Detroit radio with Electrifying Mojo and The Wizard, breaking into the St. A...

Brenda Franklin Corbett is Aretha Franklin's cousin, raised in the Franklin family home in Detroit alongside Aretha, Carolyn, Erma, and Cecil, and one of Aretha's longtime background singers as part of the trio Aretha named the Prima Donnas. This is her full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. Brenda talks about singing with the grown folks in the choir at New Bethel Baptist Church by age six...

Mary Cobra is the founding guitarist of The Detroit Cobras, the band she started with singer Rachel Nagy that became one of the defining sounds of Detroit garage rock in the late '90s and early 2000s. This is her full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. Mary talks about growing up on bad Detroit radio, and how the silence pushed a generation of musicians to make the music nobody else would pl...

LADYMONIX is a Detroit DJ who drove across the country from LA in 2016, spent her first year just going out and dancing, and has held a Sunday night residency at Motor City Wine for nine years. This is her full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. In this interview, LADYMONIX talks about why she left LA — the cliques, the cutthroat energy, the $3,500 overhead that made creativity feel impossib...

Carl Craig is one of Detroit techno's most important architects, the producer behind Bug in the Bassbin, Landcruising, More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art, and a body of work released under so many aliases — Paperclip People, 69, Innerzone Orchestra — that the full scope of his influence is almost impossible to map. This is his full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. In this intervie...

Kevin Saunderson is one of the Belleville Three, the teenagers from suburban Michigan who invented Detroit techno, the architect behind Inner City, and one of the most influential catalogs in electronic music history. This is his full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. In this interview, Kevin traces his path from New York to Inkster to Belleville, where he met Derrick May and eventually Jua...

Waajeed is a Detroit producer and DJ who came up with J Dilla and Slum Village, co-founded the Underground Music Academy in the old NAACP building on the north end of Detroit, and hosts a weekly show on WDET. This is his full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. In this interview, Waajeed traces his origin story from rolling dice in Pershing High School's parking lot to landing in Amp Fiddler'...

DJ Minx is one of the founding architects of Detroit's techno and house scene, the creator of Women on Wax, and one of the most important DJs the city has ever produced. This is her full conversation with host Hanif Abdurraqib. In this extended interview, Minx traces her origin story from discovering techno through Electrifying Mojo on the radio to walking into her first gig with a bag of records...

Detroit has never been a city that lives in its past. Its greatest tradition has always been inventing the future. In the season finale of Living for the City, host Hanif Abdurraqib looks beyond Detroit's musical legacy to the people who will define its next chapter. At the Detroit School of Arts, teacher Maritza turned a hallway conversation with Waajeed and Cornelius Harris into a techno program...

In Detroit, records were never just records. They were history, community, memory, and proof that you cared enough to go looking. In Episode 7 of Living for the City, host Hanif Abdurraqib explores Detroit's enduring vinyl culture and the people who have dedicated their lives to preserving music one record at a time. This is a story about collectors, DJs, store owners, and believers — people who s...

Every artist Detroit has ever made has had to decide at some point whether to stay or go. The ones who left never fully left. In Episode 6 of Living for the City, host Hanif Abdurraqib follows the migration patterns of Detroit's musicians — where they went, why they left, and what brought some of them back. Berry Gordy IV, son of the Motown founder, speaks from Los Angeles about what it meant when...

Every great Detroit artist had someone who believed in them before they believed in themselves. In Episode 5 of Living for the City, host Hanif Abdurraqib traces the mentorship chains that run underneath Detroit's music history like a second infrastructure. Guilty Simpson, the last artist J Dilla was working with before he passed, reflects on what it means to carry that gift forward and why Dilla'...

Every era of Detroit music has been shaped by women, even when history tried to leave them out of the story. In Episode 4 of Living for the City, host Hanif Abdurraqib explores the women who pushed past barriers, challenged expectations, and transformed Detroit's music scene in the process. DJ Minx reflects on three decades of demanding respect in spaces that weren't designed for her, and how that...

In Detroit, radio wasn't background noise. It was the whole conversation. In Episode 3 of Living for the City, host Hanif Abdurraqib traces the invisible infrastructure of Detroit's sound. Not the studios or the stages, but the airwaves. Kevin Saunderson remembers hearing the Electrifying Mojo and knowing, before he ever made a record, what music was supposed to feel like. Brian McCollum, the Detr...

The city’s sound was shaped by places never built to last – until the music changed everything. In Episode 2 of Living for the City, Hanif Abdurraqib asks what happens to the spaces that shaped the music once the city around them begins to change. Waajeed, DJ and producer and one of Detroit's living encyclopedias, walks through what was lost when the lofts at The Griswold got converted into luxury...

Detroit’s music didn’t come from nowhere. It came from working people who carried the rhythm of the city with them long after the shift ended. In the debut episode of Living for the City, host Hanif Abdurraqib traces the thread between labor and art that runs through everything Detroit has ever made. Berry Gordy IV reflects on his father modeling Motown on the assembly line and what it meant to bu...

Before Detroit gave the world Motown, techno, and hip-hop, it gave the world something harder to name: a feeling that music made in basements and backrooms and borrowed spaces could become the soundtrack to an entire generation's life. That is the story Living for the City is here to tell, and nobody alive is better equipped to tell it than Hanif Abdurraqib. MacArthur Fellow. New York Times bestse...