Living for the City

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...