1967 Detroit Riot - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

At least three songs directly refer to the 1967 riot. The most prominent was "Black Day in July", written and sung by Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot for his album Did She Mention My Name? (and later covered by The Tragically Hip); as well a later version of the song "The Motor City is Burning" by John Lee Hooker (later covered by the MC5), a song that specifically mentions the intersection of 12th and Clairmount, and "Detroit '67" by Sam Roberts, which concludes with a call for riot police to attend to "trouble down on 12th Street".

Middlesex, a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides has a detailed retelling of, and makes some social commentary on the riot.

Joyce Carol Oates's 1969, National Book Award-winning novel, them, concludes with the Detroit riot.

The riot was also depicted in the film "Across the Universe".

The December 7, 2010 episode of Detroit 1-8-7 on ABC aired archive footage and photos of Detroit during the 1967 riots. The episode's primary storyline depicted a 2010 discovery of a black male body and a white female body in a fallout shelter constructed under a building burned down during the riots. In actuality, there were 2 individuals who lost their lives, listed above, in a basement of a building that was burned down.

A 2008 EP release by Detroit producer and DJ Moodyman was entitled 'Det.riot '67' and released on his imprint KDJ. The release featured a track called 'Det.riot' that sampled radio recordings from news reels talking about the riot.

David Bowie: Panic in Detroit 1973 (Trident Studios, London December 9, 1972–January 24, 1973/ RCA records.)

Read more about this topic:  1967 Detroit Riot

Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:

    Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
    John Berger (b. 1926)

    What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.
    Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985)