I launched Nashville Cream 10 years ago last month, and when the blog’s current shepherd — Scene music editor Adam Gold — asked me to write about it, I actually winced. I’m glad it’s lasted this long, but truth be told, I wanted to murder that bastard child at least once a week from 2006 to 2008, when I was in charge. Why? Because blogs are a pain in the ass. Always were, always will be. Ask anyone who’s ever had to feed that content beast and face down the trolls who encamp themselves in the comments section.
Nashville Cream started off as a dream of arrogance — that the local rock scene at the time, full of incredibly talented but unsigned bands that no one gave a shit about, was worth covering every single day. Maybe even multiple times a day! With posts about their actual lives!
When I pitched Liz Garrigan, the Scene’s editor-in-chief at the time, on the idea of a music blog in which we could snark peanut-gallery-style about rock-scene happenings and hot goss (like, for instance, sightings of Features singer Matt Pelham at MacAuthority or Murfreesboro pop-punk almost-heroes Feable Weiner changing their proto-Diarrhea Planet band name) and write about the everyday weird stuff that illuminated life in a thriving, competitive rock scene, she nixed it immediately. Her reason: She admittedly didn’t really get it, and didn’t really think it was necessary. We had a music section after all. It sounded like we’d be posting pretty trivial stuff, in her view.
She was right about the trivial stuff. We wanted nothing more than a place where we could post about really dumb items that might never make the cut for a proper print feature, but would show readers what it was like to go to shows every night and drink too much and live in the world of a rock scene that had somehow thrived under the bootheel of country music.
It was our answer to VH1’s early-Aughts Survivor analog Bands on the Run, and we wanted to talk about all these acts who were on the hustle — Be Your Own Pet or Jetpack or How I Became the Bomb or De Novo Dahl or The Pink Spiders. Bands that probably don’t sound incredibly relevant to New Nashvillians, if they even recognize them at all.
But as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for — you just might get it. Months after pitching the Cream and being shot down, fate intervened in the form of a corporate imperative. Village Voice Media — the Scene’s parent company at the time — required every paper they owned to launch a music blog. It was 2006. MP3 blogs had only been around a few years, but they were hitting mainstream awareness and ire, cashing in on the same captive audience alt-weekly rags like the Scene once owned easily, offering music listings and critical takes, with a parochial focus on the conversations buzzing in their own backyards.
So we got what we wanted. And then we realized what that meant: We had to actually fill this thing with daily content. Early posts were totally trivial and inconsistent. A band having a new promo photo made for a heavy news day. A local musician was selling a microwave on Craigslist for extra cash? Stop the presses. (JK, there were no presses.) It felt like Christmas if we caught a scoop like a band releasing a new record, or (better yet) having a spat with another band over something like a stolen BeDazzler. (Remember those?) We lived for rumors that someone was getting signed, or someone was quitting a band, or someone like Sebadoh was actually coming to town. Rinse. Repeat. Argue.
And it’s got to be said: Any homage to Nashville Cream is an homage to Nashville Zine, a long-gone local music blog run by Todd Anderson, whose spirit we openly paid tribute to. We wanted arguments, debates, rivalries and real discussions about music-making on a local level. The only difference is, their posts were anonymous, and ours were bylined. In other words, we had to actually own what we wrote.
We wrote whatever we wanted, and it showed. We didn’t care — we just wanted to say something true. So we slobbered over our favorite local bands (ahem, JEFF the Brotherhood, who will headline the Cream anniversary party on Saturday), whether they liked it or not, whether readers liked it or not. That stoked ire beyond anyone’s most reflexive, cynical guesses, but hey, there’s a reason we often described the vitriol on Cream by paraphrasing a famous bitter quote about academia: It was vicious only because the stakes were so pathetically low.
JEFF the BrotherhoodWriting about this now, it all seems utterly unremarkable. But this was 2006. To cover the comings and goings of bands that no one — outside of a very small scene of club owners, showgoers, musicians and fans — would care about was a huge step toward taking Nashville’s rock scene seriously, and no one was doing it with any resources. (The truth was, Nashville has always had a rock scene; it’s just that the cresting of our wave happened to coincide with the cresting of the internet’s.)
The more we realized what could live there — the Scene’s live-review column The Spin had just started in print, and that went hand in hand with the blog’s growth — the more it grew. I don’t think many people realize that the Scene was not actually reviewing live shows of low-profile nobody rock bands until this era. (I will write the punchline for you: And that’s supposed to be a good thing?)
Early on, we were the top-read music blog (after New York and L.A. Weekly) in the Village Voice empire. The suits even (on occasion) praised us for using the space to navel-gaze about a scene no one else could cover as well as someone standing knee-deep in it, and generate so many comments.
We were a raging success. We felt vindicated. One of our earliest anniversary parties had the theme: Love us, hate us: Just keep the comments going. (Hate was nearly always the stronger compulsion.)
But people cared, and we churned on, and the suits demanded more posts, and it became a grind, and everyone grew up a little. And one day, years later, that once immature, petulant little snark machine with the drippy lettered logo was a legitimate news source on Nashville’s music scene. A source that, to this day, consistently and thoroughly publishes more relevant, helpful, funny, smart info than any game in town.
And that’s not just because it had to — though to be clear, from when I started it, it had nowhere to go but up — but because the scene demanded it, and it was reined in and fleshed out by a handful of much more patient influences over the years. Influences who nurtured it, as with a child, helping it grow into something like a real blog-person. It is so wonderful to see that happen to anything you create. I’m so glad it lived.
But I am still so so glad I don’t have anything to do with it now.
Email music@nashvillescene.com
