313ONELOVE – A Love Affair With Detroit

The title of Marie Staggat’s photographic journey through Detroit electronic dance music history — that is, the techno and house artistry that helped change the world of sound as we know it — says it all. 

313ONELOVE represents what this journey is about. 

The 313 refers to the phone code that precedes all proper Detroit numbers. 

And “one love,” well, that needs no further explanation, does it?

But how did this story begin in the 313? 

And why did it inspire the kind of passion and desire in a Berlin photographer to make her come to this city seven times on her own dime to shoot artists and supporters, do landscape and architectural detail shots of city locations and collect paintings, poems, song texts and other Detroit ephemera — for a self-published book, no less?

Answers to those questions are not easy. 

I was here, in Detroit, writing about music as it happened then, my ear pressed to every cool local scene. 

Or so I thought. I’ve confessed often this one critical, salient point: techno was a new sound language that few of us, including me, understood then.

It appeared to come from no place, made by no people.

It had no handles, no hooks, no pretty words.

Perhaps it was, to paraphrase Mike Banks of Underground Resistance, a siren call from the future.  

But first, a tiny bit of history: what happened in Detroit beginning in the early 1980s started with little prior warning. 

As happens with movements that are later regarded as revolutionary, only a handful of people were involved in techno’s birth and nurturing. 

The stories are well documented, I won’t repeat them all here. 

Suffice it to say a radio tastemaker (the Electrifying Mojo) inspired some kids (the Belleville Three — Juan Atkins, Kevin Sanderson and Derrick May — plus another kid from Detroit, Eddie Fowlkes) with innovative programming that brought white artists like the B-52s, Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk into a sophisticated, urban dance party context.

Glammy, gender-bending and mind-expanding funk by Prince and George Clinton were also part of the blend that make up techno pre-history. 

Tap back further into the mid-1970s, when disco ruled the dance underground in New York, Chicago and Detroit, and there you have the origins of house music.

The first techno records were strangely out of sync with much of the musical output of the 1980s. 

They were dark, cold, futuristic, with scant information, often anonymous, largely wordless. 

They reflected where they were made, in Detroit, an industrial goliath in decline, also increasingly out of sync with the world.

But if the stripped-down architecture of the sound was mostly chill, the community that developed around it was not. 

Techno might be the first kind of music that was not meant to be heard so much as experienced in a union of mind, heart, body and soul. 

First, artists created the sonic energy to build a new kind of community dance floor ...

... then the dancers helped it evolve and multiply into an unstoppable global cultural force. 

To be sure, every day there is someone, somewhere in the world dancing to this music that has its roots firmly planted in Detroit.   

Look at Marie Staggat’s photos. 

The hands, the ears, the faces of artists, the built environment of the city that is a partner in the creation of this music: what you’re seeing is love for the people and love of the place they come from. 

There are over 180 pictures in all. 

Make yourself comfortable and dig in. 

There is a lot of history to catch up on, but it’s history that lives on: most of these artists are still in their prime, coming to a club or festival or a community dance floor near you.

See and feel what the photographer has put onto every page, then get out and participate in it for yourself. 

That’s what this revolution is all about: begun in the 313, a party that continues to spread around the world, all welcome to join together as one love.