Monday, June 1, 2009
National Skyline 'The Nashville Effect' Part Two: More Than Country, but Not That Much
Posted by Steve Haruch on Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 11:43 AM
As I mentioned the other day, Richard Florida posted a blog entry over at the Atlantic called "The Nashville Effect," which among other things says that "[Nashville has] turned into the Silicon Valley of the music business, combining the best institutions, the best infrastructure, and the best talent." Not content to just suck up the musical talent of the world, "Nashville has become the center for multiple musical genres from country and gospel to rock and pop, attracting top talent from across the United States and the globe."
Hold the phone! Daniel Silver counters that sure, there are "multiple genres" in Nashville, but it's not really that diverse: "Nashville is still far from an omnivore's delight. It's more of a feast for those with a voracious appetite for country, Christian, acoustic, etc: after you get past those 8 genres in which Nashville specializes, you drop pretty far and pretty fast through the rest, resulting in an average rank of about 63."
For his rebuttal, Silver uses the, uh, sure-fire method of looking at band MySpace pages and collecting location and genre information. Seems a bit flawed to me. A quick perusal of local acts shows that flaw in action. Chris Crofton and the Alcohol Stuntband are "Crunk" (Nashville rank: 28), for example. (And from Outer Mongolia.) Those Darlins are "2-Step" (Nashville rank: 58). Taylor Swift is "Country" (Nashville rank: No. 1). Not exactly bulletproof.
Read more: "How Cosmopolitan Is Nashville?" (Via Creative Class.)
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Two huge flaws:
1. Aforementioned methodology issue with MySpace creates sample problem
2. Emphasis on "bands" instead of "musicians" ignores Florida's original point that centralization of industry gives rise to a creative class in a locality
Also have questions about identifying a place-- what about Murfreesboro, for example, or what about bands who move to Nashville from other cities but are listed as "from" original city (this is yet another serious flaw from the MySpace approach)
Silver didn't really seem to understand what Richard Florida was getting at
I worked with Dan Silver on Chicago Music City, a report where we first used the MyspaceMusic data. All datasources have flaws, but I'm not sure that Those Darlins being defined as 2-step is a flaw, since the categories are not imposed on bands but chosen by the bands themselves. Unless Those Darlins were being tongue-in-cheek, this is the kind of music they want people to know they play. (I believe Dan did some common-sense aggregating, by the way, so he may well have folded 2-step into country or something else -- I have no idea myself what 2-step is either!)
On the Florida claim that centralized cultural industries attract creatives, rest assured Dan understands what Florida was getting at (he was just hired at Toronto where Florida teaches). We just have a small disagreement with Florida: we think it is cultural scenes more than cultural industries that attract non-artistic "creative-class" types.
Larry, what about the possibility that a huge supply of bands in a city means that individual bands look for a differentiator, and that leads to increased refinement of genre self-description? After all, an independent band has a primary audience in its own locality.
Those Darlins' reference to 2-step is probably a bit of a joke. There's UK 2-step aka garage (pron. GAR-adge) and there's Texas two-step, which is a western-style dance that looks like a simplified polka. Surely they're referencing both in a way to communicate what they're trying to do musically (though not literally).
Unless Those Darlins were being tongue-in-cheek, this is the kind of music they want people to know they play.
Cf. "Chris Crofton and the Alcohol Stuntband" above.
Watch out for this gay bar person if you are in Nashville TN.
http://timcarlislenashville.blogspot.com
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