#benhamper

Ben Hamper wrote a book, published in 1992, called Rivethead. It was about life as a "shoprat" at GM in Flint – shoprats were the toiling laborers whose robotic work was, we come to see, deliriously boring and even dehumanizing. Not surprisingly, these jobs were ultimately replaced by actual robots. The plants closed throughout the 80s and 90s, and now we have the Flint we have today: A wasted city, concrete pored over the flats where the plants once stood, crime that makes scores of blocks uninhabitable.

We'll hear more from Hamper. Here's how he described Flint as it was in the 70s, when he started working at General Motors:

'Flint, Michigan. The Vehicle City. Greaseball Mecca. The birthplace of thud-rockers Grand Funk Railroad, game show geek Bob Eubanks and a hobby shop called General Motors. A town where every infant twirls a set of channel locks in place of a rattle. A town whose collective bowling average is four times higher than the IQ of its inhabitants. A town that genuflects in front of used-car lots and scratches its butt with the jagged peaks of the automotive sales chart. A town where having a car up on blocks anywhere on your property bestows upon you a privileged sense of royalty. Beer Belly Valhalla. Cog Butcher of the world. Gravy on your french fries.'

Not the most flattering depiction of Flint. But as far as I know, there aren't any flattering portraits of Flint – only those that describe desperation and depression, all leading to the same place: Flint as the epicenter of economic principles gone awry. Where economies of scale turn the future new workforce inductees into benumbed laborers. And worst of all, when high margins spring up elsewhere, the company up and leaves; when the work is done, with no remorse, the town it created flattened, cannibalizing itself; the company's mission incomplete; the city's residents left to start something new, to rebuild in the shadow of everything that came before, or, at worst, dispersed, destitute, or dead.

Hamper is perhaps too cruel – like any city, Flint is home, today, to good people, smart business people, people who are tied to the city forever by blood and even decades after the demise of the local plants are trying their damndest to turn the place around. But there's enough pain in the city's history to make the most passionate capitalist stop for a moment.

Hamper is interesting to me because he documented all this pain with a sneer, sarcastic and knowing, not only reporting how he filled hour by tedious hour in Rivethead, but, even before that, playing the city off the stage on his radio show, Take No Prisoners, which showcased the lowest of lo-fi, the grittiest and most untrained of the young punks.

For me, one person stands out in all my light reading on Flint history: A dude named Ben Hamper.

Hamper was a riveter at GM in Flint in the 80s. He wrote a column about music for Michael Moore's community newspaper, which culminated in his book "Rivethead"; he had a community radio show that played local punk bands starting in 1981 (five years before "Rivethead"). He didn't care about much, it seems, except music and his factory life. Perhaps because Moore identified him as a personification of the Flint everyman – but more literate and matbe more ambitious – Moore lifted him up, helped him start his radio show, published his writing in the Flint Voice.

Hamper also had a Wayne's World-like public access TV show starting in 1990, called, like his radio show: "Take No Prisoners." He's retired to the wilds of Northern Michigan now.

A music scene built up around Hamper's show, filled with angry and mediocre bands that probably could have come up anywhere – though, on the other hand, they bore the roughness of Michigan's 60s garage bands. Were any of them good enough to, like, listen to? That's what I'm trying to discover now, by listening to archived episodes of Hamper's show – how much of Hamper's goofy talking during his radio (and later TV) show, and how much interview material we use, vs. jamming out to music, in this episode of Pressed in America, will likely be determined by that.

Hamper wasn't an activist, he was just a regular guy. "I was just like a private reporter," he told the Flint Journal. "I was just trying to make sense out of my own world in the factory. I didn’t have any wide-scope agenda writing that book. It was just sort of something that came with the job description."