Posts Tagged With "Southern Culture"

Eastbound and Up: Nashville (Part 2)

October 9, 2016 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

Whenever you see the words “art district” be wary.

Why? Governments aren’t good at identifying the best art districts for your time and money. Crime statistics, however, are better indicators. Go out and see for yourself. I could elaborate, but it’s beyond the scope of this blog entry.

One of the main reasons for visiting Nashville this time were stops in the Nashville Arcade. The spaces are great. But, unfortunately, the memo about being open 11a-3p on Saturdays ended up in the spam folder. As discussed in an episode of the Brain Fuzz arts podcast, engagement – the dead horse that artists and arts administrators continue to whip – requires that 1) the door be unlocked when you say it will be unlocked and 2) the phone be answered.

So much for those “art district” signs.

The Biscuit or The Gravy?

East nasty biscuit at Biscuit Love in Nashville - a recommended travel stop

An East Nasty at Biscuit Love in Nashville. Bring your own defibrillator.

There is good news, however. As explained in part one of this Nashville travel exposé I was unclear on hot chicken’s origin story. Biscuits on the other hand, I understand their origin story better. And, one place that is not overhyped in the Gulch is Biscuit Love. All of the development in the Gulch can be off putting. To see a line of fifteen or twenty deep there is not unusual. What is unusual however is the phrase “East Nasty” – a biscuit with chicken, cheddar, and gravy.

WeHo

With a full stomach of hangover food, you can head on over to two of the best gallery spaces in the south. Zeitgeist and David Lusk Gallery are comfortably located side by side in Wedgewood. These two spaces are always on the Nashville list. Nearby is Fort Houston – a real world working model of what a creative co-working space can be. It’s pretty awesome. I did not see an “art district” sign.

In so many parts of Nashville, you find the real world authenticity that is hard to reconcile with the overhype and escalated development that the city is experiencing. It’s much like the difference between the Nashville of the 2010 floods and the Nashville of the 2016 gas shortage. For a while, you can still get that sense among the Wedgewood area stops.

The Backwash

On a grocery trip / ice run in East Nashville, we were met with this response in trying to locate bagged ice:

“Yes, but it’s spring water sourced. Is that OK?”

When your soakage will be an East Nasty, it will work.

Eastbound and Up: Nashville (Part 1)

July 5, 2016 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

“Smells like Bonaroo, tastes like heaven,” said the barkeep at The Pharmacy, regarding their Etienne Dupont Cidre Bouche Brut de Normandie. Neither one of us knew quite what to think about that assessment, but I can attest to the claims regarding their burgers probably being the best in Nashville.

The burger at The Pharmacy might actually be the best in Nashville.

We were between stops on our first day back after a few months away, sandwiched between settling in our E. Nashville Airbnb and hitting a vinyl shop.

The afternoon’s itinerary also included a stop at a certain coffee shop where you can admire the artisan style iPad point-of-sale while trying to decide if you’re in a line or not (and for what). There, you have ample time to admire Metric on their turntable setup as you wait for your order to be called out.

Also, they have coffee.

I’ve had a similar experience while seeking caffeine there before. A friend’s recent account of his visit was surprisingly similar down to bus cart confusion. I still couldn’t locate the bus cart.

They also have several hot teas.

Eastbound and Up

One could easily stay in East Nashville and never go downtown, or anywhere else for that matter. Still Nashville has so many evolving neighborhoods that would be must stop destinations in any city. Grimey’s is truly a one-of-a-kind music store with a fine venue right under it in The Basement. That’s worth leaving East Nashville for. But, they’ve got a sister – or brother – venue with the Basement East in, you guessed it, East Nashville.

Black Mountain at Mercy Lounge in Nashville.

Closer to downtown, you’ve got Mercy Lounge and The Cannery Ballroom. The history alone regarding these Cannery Row venues is surprising. Speaking of history, there’s of course the Ryman. And, yes, the acoustics really are what they say they are.

Most of these stops have histories before the development boom of the last ten or fifteen years in Nashville. This boom has brought an almost overwhelming number of destinations for foodies and those with high credit limits and levels of disposable income. At the time of writing, roughly $2 billion in building projects across the area are underway.

What’s fueling the development? I hate to say it, but it looks like it might actually be as simple as a concerted shift in urban design combined with an effort to attract business (read: employers) to the city. Area industry has been lauded as more diversified (read: it’s not just country music) than that of other cities. It’s a college town. It’s a sports town.

In short, it could be a poster child for what loose monetary policy is supposed to do everywhere.

Some Potentially Related – or Tangential – Facts About Nashville

Like Florida, Tennessee has no income tax.
Nashville is a pain to fly into without a private jet.
Hotel rooms are few, and a Hampton Inn might cost as much as $400 per night.
Uber is a very effective method of transportation there.
Carter Vintage Guitars is better than Gruhn Guitars, but don’t tell anyone.

What’s The Origin Story of Hot Chicken?

The demon spawn of tourism and loose monetary policy includes hype. In this case, the show Nashville can also be counted. And then there’s hot chicken.

Being southern, I had never heard of what has been hailed as a uniquely southern dish. Then, on a recent trip to Nashville, I found that it couldn’t be avoided. Like the author in a Bitter Southerner account, I didn’t understand where it came from or how I had missed it.

And, just as in the story from The Bitter Southerner, I made a similar discovery regarding it’s origin story when I asked an Uber driver about it.

He said he and his brother would be roused when their father needed soakage around 2 am. But no, he said, it was never as big of a deal as it is now. It was just a thing in the black community.

I asked another Uber driver, and he said the best hot chicken was in East Nashville, contrary to countless reviews of tourist traps. I did see the phrase “Spicy Chicken” on an old storefront window and a telephone number without an area code.

I don’t know the difference between spicy chicken and hot chicken, but I did get a Gulch restaurant to bastardize (read: improve) one of their dishes with hot (or spicy) chicken. It worked.

Anyway, you can get Nashville Hot Chicken at KFC now.

In the next post, we’ll continue our survey of Nashville including a look in on the arts and a trip for bagged ice.

When The Alternative Goes Number One

August 27, 2015 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

As explored among earlier posts, country music has a problem. If Jason Isbell is accurately capturing the rural southern experience, then there isn’t really anything alternative about alternative country.

Add the fact that his Something More Than Free has spent time at number one on the country chart, and it isn’t even alternative in a market or business sense.

Hard kicking southern rock hat made in China.

Cultural confusion on multiple levels . . . a hard kickin southern rock cap made in China.

Alternative Country

There are countless other acts in the “alternative country” space that are producing extremely good work: Amanda Shires, Ryan Bingham, Bobby Bare Jr, and Hayes Carll come to mind. All are expanding on themes that have run from country music’s inception through its blues, R&B, and soul influences. In their music, contemporary humor meshes with traditional thematic material, and though it may not always aim for the emotional or psychological impact that is a consistent component of Isbell’s work, it doesn’t have to.

Alternative? If anything, it’s just the next logical evolution in country music. Or, what “country” really is.

Americana

Isbell took some well-deserved trophies home from 2014’s Americana Music Awards. Here are lyrics from a song that helped earn those awards – “Elephant” – about a friend dying from cancer:

She said Andy you’re better than your past,
winked at me and drained her glass,
cross-legged on the barstool, like nobody sits anymore.

She said Andy you’re taking me home,
but I knew she planned to sleep alone.
I’d carry her to bed and sweep up the hair from the floor.

If I had fucked her before she got sick
I’d never hear the end of it
she don’t have the spirit for that now.

We drink these drinks and laugh out loud,
bitch about the weekend crowd,
and try to ignore the elephant somehow.

John Hiatt, another artist classified as “Americana,” painted this picture in “Master of Disaster” – a blues rock trip through the LA area (with a shoutout to Madame Wong):

Close one there
Choking in clean underwear
Bleeding tongue
8-ball pounding in my lungs

I still don’t know what Americana as a genre really is. To me, Americana is the flea market ephemera that decorates the dining area of Cracker Barrel. All that the Americana label does is keep the more intellectually challenging country-influenced music conveniently away from the trough of fodder that distributors and big box stores can easily peddle as “country.”

These are lyrics penned by contemporary human beings wrestling with contemporary pain.

The Real Alternative?

Logically, the real alternative country sound is what emanates from the alternative universe created by musicians mimicking thick southern or country accents native to nowhere. They stick to themes that are now industry standard and keep convenient stereotypes of country life and southerners alive.

Why kill the golden goose anyway?

If Americana is the decorative ephemera in Cracker Barrel’s dining area, what has become identified as country is the Chinese-made shlock pushed in their waiting area “gift” shops. It feigns authenticity . . . just enough.

Something More Complicated

August 20, 2015 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

Every geographic region has its own flavors of joy and hardship. Life in southern Mississippi demands something different than the plains of Oklahoma. Job prospects in Trenton or the ports of New Jersey are different than those of Mobile or New Orleans.

Bottling The Essence

Consistently across his writing and recording, Jason Isbell is capturing probably better than anyone else the unique experience of contemporary and rural southern life.

You thought God was an architect and now you know
He’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow.

Jason Isbell (image from Picasa)

With that line from “24 Frames,” it’s easy to see that Something More Than Free requires more than just one good listen.

A line like this:

I don’t keep liquor here, never cared for wine or beer
And working for the county keeps me pissing clear.

. . . is comic on one level, but it also nails the vicious cycle now so common in southern rural life: Pain of personal ambition choked by lack of job prospects; add drug or alcohol addiction as a way of escape; further limit your job prospects; repeat.

It’s one thing to craft the imagery (in Something‘s “Speed Trap Town” for example), but it’s another to bottle the essence.

Even with Wal-Mart a half hour away, the country life is one that requires a different grit and know-how than what is required in urban life. Sound farfetched in 2015? Deal with a flooded dirt road in southern Alabama, a dried up well in middle Georgia, or an ice storm in the foothills of Appalachia. Sure, it’s easier now than it was in 1915, but life can be surprisingly difficult.

Meanwhile, farming isn’t what it used to be and most of the manufacturing jobs are gone. It’s a big deal when the new Kia, Mercedes, or BMW plant opens.

Then there’s military service, a related theme Isbell frequently explores. It is a fact that military enlistments have always been represented disproportionately by southerners and the trend actually continues to rise. As a result, armed conflict disproportionately impacts southern families and communities. Take a look at the lyrics from “Dress Blues”, a cut from the previous album Southeastern:

You never planned on the bombs in the sand
Or sleeping in your dress blues.

And no, Zac Brown did not write that.

Digging Deeper

As with “Dress Blues” and so much else in his work, Isbell insists on digging deeper into the southern and rural psyche – so much so that at times the writing has a Faulknerian quality. Isbell has expressed genuine surprise at the commercial success of Something More Than Free, and it’s understandable. The message in this work is contrary to the blind, usually mindless flag-waving, God-fearing, beer-guzzling stereotype peddled in what has become known as country music.

The southern existence is a lot more complicated. Indeed, country life – not just southern life – is a lot more complicated.

Country Music Has a Problem

August 10, 2015 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

Country music has a problem. More accurately, country music has a new problem. Jason Isbell’s excellent Something More Than Free hit number one on Billboard’s country chart and number one on the rock chart . . . in addition to spending some time in the top ten on the Billboard 200.

It probably wasn’t supposed to work out this way. More about that later.

That Don’t Impress Me Much

Country has been defined by the “contemporary country” or “country pop” sound, look, and feel since the arrival of Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, and Billy Ray Cyrus between 1990 and 1993.

It started off innocently enough – each of those artists are talented, each in his or her own way. There is no debating this fact. But, the powers that be got greedy when they saw just how much money could be made with country music after years of slow country sales and the “new traditionalist” country of the 1980’s.

Bad Rock With a Fiddle

Jason Isbell, from the cover of Something More Than Free.

Tom Petty once called it “bad rock with a fiddle.” And, that’s exactly what country music – as it is now generally accepted – started to become in the early 90’s.

With time, the color that our friends in low places had was lost. The jokes grew stale. Conversation became a bland re-hash every time: God, country, family, pickup trucks. S.O.S. different day. Same beer. Same bar. Slightly different chorus.

In this case of (extreme) arrested development, we grew apart. You know, like, when you grow up and they don’t.

Eventually, that’s also how we ended up with Keith Urban on American Idol.

Alt-Country and Americana

Several things the powers that be couldn’t explain began in the mid-90’s. For one, there was Johnny Cash’s “revival” with the help of Rick Rubin and the American recordings. It was often explained away as simple nostalgia. But, the demographic that embraced those records and went to the concerts weren’t old country fans looking to relive the past. It was a new – and very different looking – group of fans. In fact, many of those fans were likely still mourning the death of Kurt Cobain who passed away loudly on April 5, 1994. The first of Cash’s American recordings was released only weeks later that very same month.

It was about this same time, the term “alternative country” – now often also referred to as “Americana” – was born. One of the glaring issues with this label is that many alternative country artists also happen to be new traditionalists: Lyle Lovett, Dwight Yoakam, and Steve Earle, for example.

And, there are the artists that actually pre-date new traditionalism: Loretta Lynn and Emmylou Harris. Don’t forget Willie Nelson – also now usually lumped into alternative country.

Interestingly enough, there is also Shooter Jennings (yes, that Jennings), Hank III (yes, that Hank), and Bobby Bare Jr. (yes, that Bobby Bare).

Jason Isbell on Facebook with a post in response to accusations of “hype” surrounding Something More Than Free.

Still, early alternative country artists such as Uncle Tupelo and Wilco are largely credited with defining alternative country. Drive-By Truckers with their Muscle Shoals ties – and with whom Jason Isbell played – have helped further the sub-genre. Somehow though, bands like Wilco can also “graduate” from alt-country to alt-rock. Or, in the case of Drive-By Truckers, southern rock.

It all gets very confusing.

More importantly, what happens when the alternative goes number one?