Jeff Mills – From Detroit to the Future

Growing up in Detroit, the city had more activity – there was an industry. The automobile industry was there, it was stable – that allowed a lot of things to happen. The arts, the social aspect of the city – the industry affected all the different levels. In the '70s, a lot of that was sucked out of the city. After that, the city functioned on a pretty basic level for a few decades, until it got worse, and the basics of what a city needs in order to function began to evaporate. Right now, the city is really a shell of what it was. It was designed for four million people, there are less than a million people there now, and even fewer taxpayers. So the city is really quite crippled, in an economic sense.

Musically, when I was growing up, Detroit was very rich – one of the richest places, in terms of history. Your daily interaction with music was more than perhaps any other city, because the history of Motown had really involved the entire city. Even before Motown, it was one of the two cities you stopped at, before you went west. Even in the early tens, twenties and thirties of the last century, the city was a place where cowboys spent their money and drank. So it kept that ballroom, saloon type of atmosphere.

Over the years it's been known for jazz, blues, industrial music – it's a very rich place, culturally. Growing up, everybody was connected to music – your teachers, your neighbours, the guy that owned the shop on the corner, the mailman. We didn't talk about it so much, because it was everywhere. A musician wasn't something that you wanted to be, because everybody played an instrument, everybody bought records. So there was very little discussion.

In every grade school class, everybody was associated with music, but of course some people were much better than others – they were the ones who would typically master the guitar or the bass or something like that. As you get older, some people's interests would move on to other things, and some people would stay with it. But that's why the city would always have this very large body of very talented musicians, who would become studio engineers, background musicians and things like that. Detroit was one of the few places that was really like that.

Now, I think the fondness for music is still there, but it's not what it was growing up in the '60s and '70s. You don't have the luxury of focussing on music if you need to find a job. The city, strangely, never considered becoming more involved in music, which is kind of strange – Nashville did it with country music, they really embraced it, they made it into an industry, they created an area for it where the administration could be done. But Detroit kind of missed that opportunity. Perhaps it's still there, the potential for that to happen.

I've lived in many cities, including New York and Berlin. They were all quite enjoyable to live in – I learned a lot from living in each place. That, mixed with travelling around all the time, gives you a good impression of where the more comfortable places to live might be. Age has a lot to do with it. I lived in a lot of different places when I was younger – I needed to live in cities that were more exciting. As I get older, I prefer different things.

I'm still a very active DJ, and the contrast is important. If I still lived in New York maybe it would be overkill. Chicago is much more calm. It's a great place to work. I now live between Chicago and Paris, and the contrast between those two cities is near perfect. Even the weather – the food, everything. The body of water that runs through Paris, which reminds me of Lake Michigan – all those things really make a big difference. One's dirty, the other's clean. In one city the people are rude, in the other they're nice... It's the contrast I enjoy.