Detroit’s idle: the domestic sounds of labour’s foreign landscape

Black music is an ideo-aesthetic practice that highlights the making of myriad identity positions, including race, citizenship and class. Under globalisation and the mass commodification of US life, however, corporations have co-opted Black musics for various ends to manufacture alternative desires and realities to those of the musicians themselves, whose visions are better understood as ‘freedom dreams’.1 This article examines one such abuse, in which Black music was used as both foil and concealment for an (enforcedly) idle working class in the majority Black city of Detroit. Through close analysis of two 2011 Chrysler Corporation commercials, the article demonstrates how the radical disarticulation of location, labour and race within popular culture has reconfigured Black labour into an ephemeral cultural influence, rather than a tradition of economic affluence. By dislocating the manual and cultural labours of Black Detroit from the scenery and products that it sells, Chrysler abandons the city that made it, opting instead to locate itself in a site of cultural and economic make-believe through the medium of a white male rap emcee.