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A

Aaliyah

She was a transcendent talent, the ultimate D girl. Aaliyah Dana Haughton grew up on Detroit’s Warrington Drive singing gospel and appeared on Star Search at age 10. As a student at the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts (now Detroit School of Arts), she maintained perfect grades despite already being a signed recording artist. By 22, she was a global superstar, a role model for young women with her fresh style and distinct voice.

She was about to conquer Hollywood when she died in a plane crash in 2001, only 22 years old. For the 20th anniversary of that tragedy, the Detroit Youth Choir performed a selection of her hits; .

Aretha Franklin

No musician embodied this city like the Queen of Soul: complicated, passionate, entirely singular, and arguably the greatest singer of all time. The Michigan state Legislature declared her voice “a precious natural resource.”

Aretha Franklin was born in Tennessee but was raised up in Detroit singing gospel at her father’s church. Her long career had peaks and valleys, but she always found ways to reinvent her sound. Her last Detroit performance was on June 10, 2017, at the Detroit Music Weekend at Music Hall, while she had pancreatic cancer.

She passed a little over a year later and lay in state at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. The best way to honor her memory may be to attend a concert at the exceptional on the riverfront.

B

The Beatles

Two weeks after rocking Detroit’s Olympia Stadium in 1966, the Fab Four, burned out by two or three years of Beatlemania, announced they would never tour again. In 1970, they went their separate ways, but three of the four former Beatles returned to Detroit with new bands.

The closest John Lennon got to playing Detroit again was Ann Arbor in 1971, when he and Yoko Ono performed at the freedom rally for activist John Sinclair, imprisoned for marijuana possession. Sinclair was released three days after the rally.

Big Sean

It’s been called the greatest gathering of rap royalty in Detroit history. On Nov. 6, 2015, Big Sean played the Joe Louis Arena to raise funds for his . The long-time Detroiter, whose album Dark Sky Paradise had debuted at No. 1, welcomed a stream of guests onstage, including Lil Wayne, and ended with a rousing version of “Detroit vs. Everybody” alongside his collaborators on the hit song and video: Royce da 5’9”, Danny Brown, DeJ Loaf, Trick Trick, and Eminem.

In 2017, Big Sean received the key to the city for his philanthropic work, and last September, he filmed an intimate concert at the Detroit Institute of Arts’ Rivera Court to air on .

BLKBOX

A child piano prodigy named Charles Wilson III went on to graduate from the Detroit School of Arts and take the name BLKBOK (“Black Bach”). This genre-bending neoclassical musician blends classical riffs with rap and hip-hop influences, and his recent compositions reflect social justice themes.

“Classical music is for everyone,” he told the Detroit Free Press in 2023. “There’s no better city to grow up as a musician than Detroit because there’s so much of it there.”

Blues History

Metro Detroit’s legendary blues history lives on in the , a nonprofit that “keeps the blues alive” by spotlighting singers, musicians, record labels, and clubs that have made the scene sing since the early 1900s. DBS also raises funds to erect headstones for blues musicians buried in unmarked graves.

C

Alice Cooper

In a 2021 interview, the godfather of shock rock told The Guardian, “I think the Detroit sound has something to do with working with big machines; it made people feel at home hearing big, loud rock music.”

Cooper grew up as Vincent Furnier in East Detroit (now Eastpointe), a pastor’s son who binged on horror movies at the Eastown Theatre. The family left for Phoenix to help his asthma, where he would eventually form his band before relocating to Los Angeles. But in 1970 — a year after the infamous chicken incident — he and his band left LA (too much love and peace) for a farm in Pontiac. They shot at beer cans and did preproduction for Love It to Death, which produced his first national hit, “I’m Eighteen.” His 2021 album Detroit Stories is a tribute to those crazy days.

C. Howard Crane

From 1905 to 1930, this self-taught architect designed more than 50 movie palaces in Detroit. Many of them have been demolished, including the United Artists Theatre and the late, great Olympia Stadium, but those that remain are our favorite vintage venues: , the , the , , and the most lavish of them all, the .

Creem

Calling itself “America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine,” was the brainchild of two Detroit “hippies [with] electric typewriters” who chronicled the raucous Detroit music scene from 1969 to 1989. Along the way, they coined the phrases “heavy metal” and “punk rock.” Only Rolling Stone was bigger.

D

Detroit Music Awards

take place every year at The Fillmore, where this nonprofit foundation honors local, regional, and national musicians in all genres, from community orchestras to Lizzo.

Detroit Symphony Orchestra

Founded in 1887, the struggled to survive in the 20th century. Since 1989, it has found a stable home in Orchestra Hall (itself saved from demolition). The first symphony to broadcast on radio in 1922, the DSO calls itself “the most accessible orchestra on the planet,” with free webcasts of its performances and affordable tickets.

E

Eminem

Detroit’s most beloved rapper may be a grandfather who speaks at political rallies now, but last June’s Michigan Central grand opening concert proved he can produce stage shows pretty well, too.

In the 1990s, Marshall Mathers was living the hardscrabble life that would inform 8 Mile, polishing his quicksilver freestyle rhymes in early rap battles at on Congress Street (still in business). More than 200 million records later, rap’s elder statesman still uncorks new songs like “Houdini,” which he debuted in a surprise set for the thrilled crowd at Roosevelt Park, Michigan Central Station’s “front lawn.”

F

Funkadelic

James Brown brought his percussive funk to Cobo Arena in the 1960s, but the godfather of funk is George Clinton, a producer and writer at Motown who later moved his bands, Parliament and Funkadelic, to Detroit in the late 1960s; assembled his P-Funk collective of musicians; and began recording at .

Funkadelic, blending funk with psychedelic rock, came out in 1970, but One Nation Under a Groove (1978) took them to No. 1. P-Funk’s touring shows were known for their outrageous costumes and showmanship; Clinton continues to perform at the ripe age of 83, with an upcoming show at Sound Board at MotorCity Casino Hotel on Feb. 6.

G

Gospel

Detroit’s flourishing Black churches produced a gospel tradition rivaled only by Chicago’s. It created at least two true superstars: Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin, who recorded her first gospel record at only 14 years old. That was back when Elma and Carl’s House of Music was the place to buy gospel records.

Since the 1940s, Detroit has produced the most popular gospel groups in the nation, including The Meditation Singers from the New Liberty Baptist Church, The Clark Sisters from the Church of God in Christ, and The Winans, a quartet of brothers who are part of the Winans gospel dynasty.

On any given Sunday, Detroit rings with songs of praise, and the keeps the faith 24/7.

H

Bill Haley

In 1954, the Highland Park native recorded “Rock Around the Clock” in New York City, not Detroit. But Bill Haley and His Comets returned here to perform it to a sellout crowd at Olympia Stadium. The song topped the charts and is credited with making rock ’n’ roll mainstream and striking fear in the hearts of parents everywhere.

The Hideout

In the early 1960s, a couple of college kids rented a VFW hall in Harper Woods and called it The Hideout, a weekend club with live music catering to teenagers. The “hideout” concept spread to similar halls in the metro burbs and helped launch the careers of Bob Seger (who recorded his first album on the Hideout label), Glenn Frey, and Suzi Quatro, among others.

John Lee Hooker

Around World War II, a young Hooker traveled from Memphis, Tennessee, to Detroit for factory work, bringing his guitar and a love for Delta blues. He played local clubs like the Apex Bar on the North End (closed but still standing), but discovering the electric guitar took his foot-stomping sound to a new level. “You had to play electric in those clubs, they were so noisy. But the sounds you could make!” he said in a 1983 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts.

What followed were blues classics like “Boogie Chillen,” which let him quit his job as a janitor, and “Boom Boom,” inspired by a bartender’s scolding when he showed up late at the Apex for a gig. In 1980, he famously performed the song in .

I

Iggy and The Stooges

A wiry, frenetic front man inspired by Jim Morrison’s onstage antics, Iggy Pop (born James Osterberg in Muskegon) was renowned for his excess, which included rolling around in cut glass and smearing peanut butter on his bare torso. He invented stage diving — not to mention, many believe, punk rock — with his band The Stooges.

They were from Ann Arbor with an attitude; their concerts were fierce, fraught, and often violent. The bad energy caught up with them in 1974 at Detroit’s Michigan Palace after a series of violent interactions with a motorcycle gang. They reunited in 2003 at Coachella and were inducted into the in 2010.

J

Jazz Everywhere

From intimate clubs like and to the , from at Music Hall to the DIA’s long commitment to jazz performance, the jazz scene in Detroit is as diverse as the genre itself. All the greats have come through, of course, but Detroit’s homegrown talent, especially women, held its own. Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane, who was married to saxophonist John Coltrane, took jazz harp to new levels, while organist Lyman Woodard’s “Saturday Night Special” is considered a jazz fusion classic.

J Dilla

As a teenager, started making beats and sampling vinyl in a basement studio in his Conant Gardens family home, becoming the most influential producer in hip-hop. He co-founded the rap group Slum Village while still in high school and pursued a solo career, but collaborations with stars like Common, Erykah Badu, Janet Jackson, and De La Soul, among many others, solidified his reputation as a visionary. His acclaimed instrumental album Donuts was released on Feb. 7, 2006, three days before he died of a rare blood disease at age 32.

K

Kid Rock

This right-wing rocker’s “redneck pimp” image belies his background. Born Robert Ritchie to a wealthy car dealer in Romeo, he came up through the rap ranks in Detroit with Eminem in the 1990s before shape-shifting into several genres at once. His 1998 breakthrough album, the rap-country mash-up Devil Without a Cause, which he described as a “cross between Run DMC and Lynyrd Skynyrd,” sold 14 million copies. Thirty-five million records later, Kid Rock is still touring and playing the American badass.

Casey Kasem

Lebanese American disc jockey Kemal Amin Kasem was born in Detroit and began his radio career at Wayne State University. He found DJ and TV success at WJW in Cleveland before earning international fame hosting American Top 40 for decades. His acting and voice-over work included playing Shaggy in Scooby-Doo.

L

Little Stevie Wonder

When Berry Gordy Jr. signed the sightless 12-year-old prodigy to Tamla Records in 1961, the diminutive was added to Wonder’s name to accentuate his youthful genius. He made three albums in eight months, and his harmonica-driven “Fingertips,” which he performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, knocked Andy Williams off the Billboard No. 1 spot. (He was the youngest soloist to ever chart on the Top 100.) Wonder dropped the “little” at age 15, after his voice changed, and he went on to become a very, very big star whose latest tour brought him to Little Caesars Arena this past October.

Louder Than Love: The Grande Ballroom Story

In 1967, as the city was burning and Vietnam was raging, a faded 1920s dance hall on Grand River Avenue became Detroit’s counterculture hippie headquarters. This award-winning documentary recounts the ’s (pronounced Grand-ee) short but psychedelic history as a venue where the world’s greatest rock bands performed (Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, and The Who on the same ticket? Yep.) In 1972, the venue closed for good; the building still stands and is listed on the .

M

Madonna

In the 1970s, a certain wild child from Rochester Hills danced all night in Detroit’s gay bars. She was famously kicked out of Menjos for indecent exposure. is still alive and kicking, and so is .

MC5

More influential than famous, this hard-partying late-’60s “proto-punk” band (MC stands for Motor City) set the stage for punk. They did not play well with others. Their biggest record was the obscenity-ridden Kick Out the Jams, but J.L. Hudson’s department store refused to stock it. The band responded with more expletives, and Hudson’s dropped all Elektra Records music. Elektra then dropped MC5.

Motown Museum

Since 1985, the has told the story of Berry Gordy’s world in the original Hitsville USA house on West Grand Boulevard, home of a musical movement that changed the world. After years of fundraising, the museum has broken ground on a splashy, nearly 40,000-square-foot expansion behind the original site, with plans to open in the summer of 2026.

N

Nirvana

In late 1991, Kurt Cobain and company were relatively unknown when they played a now-legendary set at in support of their second album, Nevermind. By the beginning of 1992, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had vaulted grunge into American living rooms.

O

Orion Music and More Festival

Heavy metal dominated Belle Isle in the summer of 2012, when brought 32 acts to Detroit, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Arctic Monkeys. Forty thousand people were transported to the venue by school bus. A highlight was Metallica’s performance of Kill ’Em All in its entirety. “We’ll be back, Detroit!” they proclaimed, but the festival proved too expensive and never happened again.

P

Paradise Valley

For 40 years, Black music and life thrived on the east side of Detroit. Nightclubs and music venues were packed into a few square blocks, attracting the greatest singers and musicians of the day — and lots of white music fans, too. The dress code was furs and pearls at the upscale Flame Show Bar, where Berry Gordy, a young songwriter, liked to hobnob with greats like Billie Holiday and Jackie Wilson. (His sisters ran the photography concession.) Most of Paradise Valley was demolished for highways and urban renewal projects in the ’50s and ’60s, but the aims to return the neighborhood to its past glory.

Q

Suzi Quatro

Long before she was Leather Tuscadero on Happy Days, Suzi Quatro was watching The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show from her home in Grosse Pointe Woods. Inspired, she and her three sisters started an all-girl rock band called The Pleasure Seekers. They made their name at The Hideout, with Quatro on lead vocals and bass, and later opened for Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, and Chuck Berry.

In 1968, the band signed to a major label, Mercury Records, and they later renamed themselves Cradle, turn-ing to a harder sound. In 1971, Quatro decamped for the U.K. and a solo career (one rock critic called her “a refugee from the frightened city of Detroit”).

Her iconic publicity shoot in a black leather jumpsuit predicted the tough sexiness of Joan Jett. She’s 74 and still touring, and the suit still fits.

R

Radio Stations

Long before streaming services, bands relied on radio airplay to promote and sell their music. This gave DJs a lot of power to shape musical tastes. At WKNR, the top station of the 1950s and ’60s (nicknamed Keener 13), Robin Seymour introduced Detroiters to Black R&B, Motown, and Bob Seger, while Dick Purtan hosted one of the top-rated morning shows in the nation before moving to CLKW.

WRIF was the rock station of the 1970s and ’80s and led the charge to abolish disco. And for the past 76 years, WDET — Detroit’s NPR station, which was founded by the United Auto Workers and is broadcast from Wayne State University — has been living up to its mission to “serve an engaged, diverse and curious audience through trusted news, inclusive conversations and cultural experiences that empower our community to move forward.”

Diana Ross

She is 80 now but still all about love, a product of the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects who went on to front , the most successful singing group of the 1960s — female or otherwise — with 12 No. 1 hits and then six more as a solo artist.

Ross has two Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Grammys. She and Berry Gordy broke a lot of hearts when they moved Motown to Los Angeles, but Hollywood was calling.

Of course, she was nominated for an Oscar for her first starring role as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues. Of course, she built a still-vital solo recording and touring career, with all the awards that came with it. And of course, when she took the stage at Michigan Central last June, resplendent in a voluminous orange gown — her first performance in the city proper since 2013 — she reminded everyone who reigns supreme.

S

Bob Seger

It’s hard to believe that had only one No. 1 single in his 50-year career, and it was for a movie (“Shakedown” for Beverly Hills Cop II in 1987). But 10 platinum albums prove Seger is No. 1 in the hearts of his fans. Born in Henry Ford Hospital, the son of a Ford Motor Co. executive, he grew up in Ann Arbor and fronted various bands until hitting the right formula with the Silver Bullet Band. Live Bullet, filmed at Cobo Hall, and Night Moves made him a national star. After he retired from touring in 2018, changed its address to 33 Bob Seger Drive, for the record 33 sold-out shows he played there.

Searching for Sugar Man

This Oscar-winning documentary traces the path of Sixto Rodriguez, the enigmatic singer-songwriter from Detroit who found unlikely fame in South Africa, where he was “more popular than Elvis.” He passed away in 2023 at age 81, but not before becoming a global phenomenon thanks to the film and his remarkable talent.

T

Techno

Electronic dance music is rooted in Europe but found new expression in the Detroit suburbs in the 1980s.

Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson were some of the only Black kids at Belleville High School; inspired by a radio show called The Midnight Funk Association on , they bought a synthesizer and turntables and learned to mix music in their basements — music that May described as “like Kraftwerk and George Clinton are stuck together on an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.” In the 1990s, a new generation of techno DJs played their hypnotic, repetitive tracks in Detroit’s abandoned industrial buildings, attracting hundreds of revelers; the old Packard Plant was ground zero for the rave culture.

Techno has lots of subgenres, and all are celebrated at in Hart Plaza and at clubs like and , while , the world’s first techno museum — a few blocks from the Motown Museum — breaks it all down, by appointment only.

Tejano

Two new historic markers stand in Southwest Detroit, honoring the musicians who brought Tejano music here 70 years ago. An accordion- and guitar-driven blend of Eastern European polka rhythms and traditional Mexican music, Tejano came here from Texas, and as Mexicantown grew, so did the number of conjuntos, or bands, playing local clubs, dances, and events.

The Las Vegas Lounge was the epicenter, and that’s where Martin Solis Jr. and his conjunto, , played their first gig in the late ’50s. For the next five decades, Los Primos and other bands popularized Tejano around Michigan but never made a record.

After Solis passed away at the age of 90, his son Frank found a paper bag of reel-to-reel tapes — unknown recordings of Los Primos. He happened to know Jack White’s brother Eddie Gillis (they grew up together in Southwest Detroit), production manager at Third Man Records, who pressed them into vinyl for the first time. Third Man also helped to sponsor the plaques.

U

Underground Music Academy

Not your average music education, the curriculum at this new school from DJ and producer emphasizes Detroit’s legacy of Black electronic music, with lessons in DJing and music production. Waajeed — a Kresge Artist Fellow in 2014
and an ������ Detroiter in 2024 — draws from his experience with the , a collective popular in the 1990s that advocated for social justice and self-determination through the lens of “sonic communities” steeped in techno music. Last October, UMA completed its first online course, and it’s planning a winter semester in 2025.

V

Verona Apartments

Joni Mitchell was 21 when she moved to Detroit in 1965 and married folk singer Chuck Mitchell. They lived in in the Cass Corridor, where she wrote “The Circle Game” and “Both Sides Now,” and she performed them at folk clubs around Wayne State University like the Chess Mate and The Living End. The marriage lasted two years; she moved on to New York City and greatness.

W

Jack White

This upholsterer turned indie superstar guitarist is the patron saint of Detroit music. Born here in 1975, he grew up John Anthony Gillis in Mexicantown and played in local garage bands. In 1997, he and his first wife, drummer Meg White (he took her name and insisted they were siblings), first performed as at the Gold Dollar in Midtown.

The quirky duo released 10 albums and rewrote indie rock history with their simple, primitive sound; Rolling Stone considers White Blood Cells and Elephant among the greatest 500 albums of all time. The duo divorced in 2000 but continued playing together, with Jack White pursuing side projects with The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather.

Since The White Stripes ended in 2011, White has pursued a prolific songwriting, producing, and performing career; his label and store, in the Cass Corridor, boosts the local economy and presses vinyl in the back. As a board member of the , White finds and reissues rare recordings, such as those of Tejano, on vinyl.

In 2013, White was the “mystery donor” who saved the Detroit Masonic Temple from foreclosure, and he later had a theater named after him. Eleven years later, at the Masonic Temple, during the first stop on his Supply Chain Issues tour, he proposed to and married his third wife, singer Olivia Jean, onstage.

X

X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X

Under Artistic Director Yuval Sharon, has emerged as a force in progressive opera. In 2020, he staged his first production, Twilight: Gods, in the opera house’s parking structure. In 2022, Sharon revived Anthony Davis’s 1985 visionary work on Malcolm X in a production Detroit News critic Maureen Feighan called “haunting and timely.” (That same year, Sharon was named to Time’s list of 100 emerging leaders.) Detroit Opera’s slate for 2025 includes Davis’s The Central Park Five.

Y

“(You’re My) Dream Come True”

’ first single, written by Berry Gordy and released in 1962, hit the R&B charts and kick-started the group’s remarkable career. The rest is history (and a Broadway musical).

Z

Zeppelin Crashes

In October 1980, Detroit was the fifth city on Led Zeppelin’s North American tour The 1980s: Part One. On Sept. 25, during rehearsals in England, drummer John Bonham was found dead at the home of Jimmy Page after a day of heavy drinking. The tour was canceled, leaving thousands of Detroit fans holding tickets for a concert at Joe Louis Arena that never happened. On Dec. 4, Led Zeppelin disbanded. But the music lives on: Jason Bonham and his , a tribute to his late father, played at The Fillmore two years ago.

This story originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of ������ Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of ������ Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our will be available on Jan. 6.��