When you ask Detroit rapper Lelo for the meaning of his “New Detroit” movement/mantra/album title, his answer changes from discussion to discussion. In one interview, he declared that he didn’t want to try to define it, instead choosing to let the work speak for itself. When I spoke to him about the upcoming album, and more generally, what he felt set his “new Detroit” apart from the old one, his answer — like the city at the center of all this conversation — had evolved.
“When I first started seeing New Detroit, I was a way younger person,” he admits. “I had some real serious life events that happened. And it’s just like, new Detroit ends up becoming whatever Detroit is that year for me.”
He recounts his recent meeting and collaboration with fellow Motown native Babyface Ray, marking how even that interaction sparked a shift in how he sees the onetime manufacturing metropolis.
“I feel like, with that situation, it wasn’t just, ‘Oh, we just linked up at some random parking lot,’” he says. “That’s the neighborhood I grew up in. That’s my grandfather’s restaurant. He going in there touching the community. He talking to my grandfather who stayed on this block to help everybody. He talking to all the kids. And what that showed me is that New Detroit got to be more community than what I initially thought it was.”
That sense of community and fellowship has always been at the center of the city’s musical legacy. Motown, the label that gave Detroit its nickname, Hitsville, USA, was a family-owned operation; one of its biggest acts with a band of brothers from nearby Gary, Indiana. This stuff is baked in. And while Lelo certainly incorporates some of that awareness and mindset into his work, he also uses his own output to highlight another of the city’s homegrown sounds, ghettotech, which hasn’t been quite as celebrated as the soulful pop sounds of Jackson 5.
Searching to define ghettotech, a style of electronic dance music spun-off from the city’s unique forms of house and techno, Lelo lands on, “It’s unchained. That’s the fly part about it. Everything is so defined by rules, but I think ghettotech is one of them things where there are no rules. The only rule is to dance. So it’s almost, it’s one of them connective factors. It’s weird, because right now, you got all these young folks discovering it, and they like, ‘Oh, this the flyest coolest thing.’ But at the same point, that’s the music my mama was listening to. When my mama had her wedding, all my aunties, all my older cousins, they was dancing to ghettotech music.”
That connection between the old and new, between the roots and the leaves, has been a hot topic of discussion in recent years. From Beyoncé’s efforts to reclaim country for its Black originators with Cowboy Carter to Ryan Coogler’s musical history lesson in the middle of his Southern gothic horror film Sinners, Black artists have felt a renewed compulsion to rediscover the origins that were erased after this pop culture’s popularity was taken for granted.
In his way, Lelo is pushing a similar campaign in his Midwestern corner of the world with “New Detroit.” While harkening back to the city’s soulful roots, he’s also striving to create something original.
“I feel like part it’s a duty to diversify the sound, but that’s not necessarily what it’s about,” he muses. “That ends up happening. The sound changes, but I think it’s more so diversifying what people see my city as. A lot of people, they get a statistic, or they get one thing that becomes popular, and that’s what defines this place. But it’s much more to it.”
He continues, “We could have the craziest jazz musicians, jazz singers. We had the craziest R&B. Motown was here for a large part. But for a long time, all you heard about Detroit was the murder rate. So, hopefully, if everything goes right, five years from now, when the new generation of kids talk about what they know about Detroit, they can say ‘Lelo.’ They can say ‘New Detroit.’ They can say whatever kind of impact that ends up being.”