High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! "Panic in Detroit" is a song written by David Bowie for the album Aladdin Sane in 1973. Bowie based it on friend Iggy Pop`s descriptions of revolutionaries he had known as a youth in Michigan. It is also interpreted as being written about the 1967 Detroit riots.Rolling Stone magazine called the track "a paranoid descendant of the Motor City`s earlier masterpiece, Martha and the Vandellas` "Nowhere to Run"".