Diatribe of the Day: We Don’t Need A Flag
Recently, Creative Loafing published a year end piece about the Atlanta music scene. You should probably read that first since this is a response to it. The message of the piece was that Atlanta has “long suffered from an identity crisis” relative to other cities that have become national music epicenters in pop music history. Atlanta doesn’t have “a discernible flag” of sound or style to rally around. While bands like Deerhunter, Black Lips, Mastodon, and Snowden blow up the city, there is no one aesthetic that you can label Atlanta’s music scene with.
Over the holidays I talked about what I call “The Silent Revolution”. What I see in the universe of music is a new ethic that challenges the conventional ideas of genre. There is a common idea that bonds today’s musicians together, and that is diversity. Everyone is pushing the boundaries of music as far as they can and creating new sounds or combining old styles together in different ways. Human beings all have different tastes, and they like having as many choices as possible, and with the aid of the computer age, people can now seek out the flavors they really want, or taste a new flavor every day instead of the old times when you were being force fed what a few individuals thought was best.
The reason that Atlanta is becoming such an important city in this movement is precisely because the musicians here are so diverse and different from one another. You can find great artists on just about every end of the sound spectrum in this town, and it’s not a liability, it is an asset. The music revolution going on doesn’t have a real flag to rally behind, it’s just happening. It’s under the radar, but it’s growing bigger everyday.
There are specific causal forces that have lead to Atlanta being so on the forefront of this revolution. I attribute Atlanta’s superiority in sonic diversity to geography and demographics. Atlanta is the fastest growing metro area in the US during this decade. Altanta is a metropolitan island in a sea of rural rednecks. If you grow up in the deep south, like I did, and you weren’t about killing deers, wearing camouflage, and waving confederate flags, the closest big city to escape to is Atlanta. Atlanta has an entire region of this nation to mine talent and creativity from, unlike, say, in the Northeast where there are so many major cities so close together. Atlanta is also one of the only major cities on the east coast with warm weather, so we get urbanites from up north who don’t want to freeze. I’m not saying we’re bigger than New York City yet, but relative to our size, I don’t think anyone is squeezing out better stuff.
It’s a new era and those hip to it know what we’re doing. This generation doesn’t have a flag, it doesn’t need a flag, and neither does our city. It may be “confusing” to the dinosaurs that can’t think beyond the box of conventional wisdom, but just go ask some record company executives how well conventional wisdom of the music industry has been serving them this decade.
- Posted by Davy Minor on January 16, 2008 at 6:53 pm
