#6 - states
You can skip to this week’s playlist on Spotify or scroll to the end.
I started this playlist of songs with a U.S. state in the name when I made the cities one, after adding a song then realizing it was named after a state, not a city. In the ‘cities’ newsletter, I included Chicago off Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois and mentioned his imaginary 50 states project. It felt appropriate to bring back this playlist this week having just returned from Michigan, the 1 other state he made an album about (and is from).
I spent my Spring Break in Flint, MI as an alumni ‘trip supervisor’ with NYUAD’s Engineers for Social Impact program. A central theme of EFSI is for engineering students to learn how to ask questions before offering ‘solutions’, how to ask the right questions, and how to listen to the communities impacted by those questions. As a result, I now possess a disproportionate amount of knowledge about this small U.S. city/town I have no relation to. It wasn’t quite straightforward explaining to the very confused Flint residents why 14 students/alumni from 12 countries were walking around their small, depopulated city.
Flint’s depopulation is something we’ve spent much of the week learning about. Once a so-called company town, it was built and populated, in large part, as a result of being the site of General Motors’ headquarters. The “vehicle city” was once home to GM’s largest manufacturing site in the U.S. (Buick City), 80,000+ GM employees, and one of the first, largest, and by far most influential labor strikes in U.S. history. It’s difficult to overestimate how deeply GM is intertwined with the history of Flint; nearly everyone we met had a GM story, whether they or a family member worked for GM or their childhood home overlooked their factories. Many nostalgically recounted a vibrant city which, when GM left Flint and evaporated tens of thousands of jobs in the process, became the site of drastic depopulation, abandoned homes, extreme unemployment, and increased crime (a NYT piece once called it Murdertown, USA, which I hate). This was all exacerbated by the structural racism which neglected, segregated, and tore up the city’s majority Black neighborhoods.
Though Flint is no longer a company town, it is still very much dependent on private stakeholders, and GM money still runs deep. By the end of the trip, the students would laugh every time I was about to ask a question, because they knew I would ask, again, whether the museum / theatre / community org / business initiative / etc etc we were learning about is funded by ex-GM CFO Charles S. Mott’s Mott Foundation. (The answer was yes, always).
I came out of the trip wanting to read, learn, and think about many topics, from capitalist dependencies / governance structures and corporate (ir)responsibility to labor movements, urban planning, and community mobilization. But my favorite memories in Flint weren’t necessarily explicitly related to any of these deep, complex issues. They were sleep-deprived conversations with drivers, scholars, and commuity organizers, attending a very small local theatre performance after seeing its flyer elsewhere in the city, or attending the gig of a talented musician we’d met two nights before. In 1 week, Flint went from a city I’d only known of because of the tragic water crisis to a city I genuinely care about and have memories in. And it was a great reminder for me, as a social science graduate student, that I don’t necessarily need to find my interests in academic papers, conferences, or news articles. That at the root of all my supposedly intellectual interests is just curiousness about and care for people. And I can find that in an album or a movie or a converstion in Cairo, or in Abu Dhabi, or in Flint, or wherever people are.
10 songs
(Spotify)
Texas Reznikoff - Mitski
Happiness, Missouri - EL VY
Midnight Train to Georgia - Gladys Knight & The Pips
Ohio - Wild Pink (ft. Samia)
Minnesota, WI - Bon Iver
Carry Me Ohio - Sun Kil Moon
Utah - Brotherkenzie (ft. Samia)
California - Lana Del Rey
California Dreamin’ - Omar Apollo (The Mamas & The Papas cover)
Say Yes! to M!ch!gan! - Sufjan Stevens
One of today’s biggest documentary filmmakers, Michael Moore, made his directorial debut in 1989 with Roger & Me, about GM leaving his hometown of Flint, Michigan. It’s available on Amazon Prime and Youtube. It’s next on my to-watch list but if it’s anything like Moore’s other work, I’m sure it’s funny, entertaining, enraging, and a little absurd. (I once wrote my final paper for a documentary class on Moore’s films, and then told him about it.)