Provincialism

When I reactivated this blog again recently, I began by adding older articles and reviews I had neglected to post in the last two years or so. For whatever reason, maybe simply just a chance to reminisce about the very recent past, I added commentary intros to several of them, mentioning a few things related to each article. After I had written a few of these intros, I went back and skimmed them, and they seemed to reveal someone who was hopelessly provincial. I make the fact that I saw Sunn O))) twice or talked to Michael Gira seem like kind of big deals for me. And they were.

But I read so many different  blogs and websites from professional (or more or less professional) writers who live in large cities (mostly NYC, right?) and have much easier access to a wide array of cultural events, that I've become somewhat self-conscious about how anything I write might be viewed in the shadow of all these "more connected" views, just in case Google directs some more cosmopolitan-minded Sunn O))) or Matana Roberts fan to this blog.

And this is unfortunate.

Spend enough time online reading blogs and interacting with Twitter, Tumblr et al. and you may start to feel you're part of a larger community. And there's no denying this late in the game that online community is a a real and valuable presence, but certainly no more than people we see at the supermarket or post office several times a week who have never heard Swans or Skull Defekts, and would likely care less about them if they did. If you work in most offices, chances are you are not comparing Moogfest schedules with your co-worker. We're linked online to people through our tastes, our loves and passions even, but for most of us our day to day lives are largely spent interacting with people with whom we share very little aesthetic sensibility.

Spending a lot of time online can provoke an anxiety of keeping up and a need to show how aware you are, often to the detriment of what's happening on a more localized level. Points of view about larger cultural concerns from outside major cities are extremely important. While not too many people probably want to hear about how Earl Sweatshirt's new album hits you as a white Southern male, or about how the new Thee Oh Sees was the soundtrack to your latest quarry visit (or, I don't know, how Public Enemy schooled you on the farm), there's no question our understanding and responses to popular music is dependent on a large extent on our day to day lives. Too many websites try to mediate this a great deal, and all too often we're told how we should be responding to something before we even see or hear it, but as much as we like to pretend otherwise sometimes, where you're from still matters.

I know this is all obvious, but it is often easy to forget when we're all clicking on the same links.

Local flavor has never had much favor in band profiles or album reviews of nationally-known acts, but in the more personal realm of the blogosphere, more provincial takes can be some of the most unique and revealing writing out there. Obviously I'm not trying to imply everyone in NYC or L.A. or London has the same point of view, and obviously each of these cities has community voices within them that get drowned out by the larger homogenous culture, but there's no question that by and large the tone of the coverage of and attitude toward popular culture is set by people in these cities.

As far as Knoxville culture is concerned, there are some interesting locally-oriented blogs. While my own cultural interests rarely coincide with what's usually covered in Inside of Knoxville, I know of no other blog or covering at least an aspect of the local arts and music scene to this extent. I'd love to see someone cover Pilot Light, Poison Lawn, Birdhouse, Ground Swell and other such venues in a similar fashion. There used to be more of this, like the good folks over at The Wigshop and other blogs, and I dabbled in it for a bit, at least some live reviews, but frankly I don't go to shows nearly enough anymore. I'm not sure why no one has been able to maintain such a site. There could be a point of view I might be imagining but I'm sure is held by some that the lack of this kind of coverage is part of what makes this part of the Knoxville music scene so unique. To my knowledge, there is no ongoing public record of the shows and occurrences in these venues, other than the random Tweets, status updates, Tumblr posts, Instagram photos, and Snapchats, which are by design anti-archival. There is a beauty to the more ephemeral nature of this kind of documentation, where you really HAD to be there to, and any context after the fact must be assigned by the viewer/reader, but narrative can be a wonderful thing, too, even if it is inevitably loaded with agenda and bias and misinformation.

But I think I've gotten a bit off topic. All I mean to say is, let's celebrate a new kind of provincialism as an attitude that is stubbornly embedded in and dedicated to the communities we live within, but is open to being informed by and engaged with the wider culture.