Acid Detroit A Psychedelic Story of Motor City Music

Acid Detroit tells the story of Motor City through its revolutionary music past and present, in order to find the seeds of radical transformation among its ruins.

Acid Detroit is an exhilarating, technicolour view of Detroit’s musical and social history from the 1960s to the present day. 

Redefining the counterculture as a time of Acid Communism, Acid Detroit diverges from most books on the Sixties, which centre on California, to show that Detroit was an unequalled hotbed of radical activism, urban unrest and sonic innovation. 
Considering Detroit's unique mix of people and cultures and enduring sonic legacies, it covers everything from incendiary garage rock, to European-influenced techno and experimental hip-hop crews, intertwining the artist’s lives and works with the city’s rise and decline, from its establishment as an industrial powerhouse to the high point of Motor City, into its decline and tentative rebirth. 

A mind-expanding tour through time and space that explores the lost possibilities, histories and hidden potentials of the city, Acid Detroit reveals a history of resilience and transformation hidden in the shadows of the abandoned factories and warehouses of the Motor City.

Joe Molloy is a resident of Detroit. He is reappraising the histories handed down to him through radical critical perspectives with the intention of shaking the settled past up into dazzling new patterns. One of the emerging voices of his generation at just twenty-two years of age, Acid Detroit is his first book.