Any local who sets foot in “hospitality duo” Marc Rose and Med Abrous' karaoke bar, Cross-Eyed Critters Watering Hole, deserves to be tarred and feathered.
Delia Jo Ramsey at Nashville Eater describes the bar opening next month in the Vanderbilt-adjacent Graduate Hotel:
In anticipation of the Graduate Nashville’s opening later this year, the hotel reveals that hospitality duo Marc Rose and Med Abrous’ first food and beverage spot to open will be an animatronic karaoke bar called Cross-Eyed Critters Watering Hole.Offering up a fun, over-the-top spin on a classic karaoke bar, expect black velvet paintings of iconic country western stars set against black walls with cold beer on tap, hot popcorn, and a taco trailer parked on the patio outside, to fuel late nights.
Even this curmudgeonly stick-in-the-mud has to admit that the idea of an animatronic karaoke bar sounds awesome. Like Chuck E. Cheese, but for adults. Then it goes off the rails.
I mean, what’s the fun here? A bunch of well-to-do people cosplaying country folks? Rich people who've built their wealth in a town that owes its whole social cache to country music now turning around and selling that to other rich people as hilarious kitsch?
We live in a state where thousands of people’s health care is them standing in line for hours outside, waiting for the kinds of medical teams we send into disaster areas to look at them. “Cross-Eyed Critters.” How quaint. How charming. How folksy. As if we don’t live in a state full of cross-eyed critters who can’t get the treatments they need for their conditions because we won’t expand Medicaid.
Maybe next, Rose and Abrous can open a boat-themed bar called Scurvy Dave’s. Maybe a 1950s cocktail house called Polio Kids Snack Shack. Just spitballing here. Trying to be helpful and neighborly.
Speaking of neighborly, Lord, can you imagine the first-generation college student from out in the country, coming to town with his folks to visit Belmont and Vanderbilt, who stumbles across this place? Can you imagine how his parents would feel, to see all the stuff they love, all the stuff they love about Nashville, being served up as some kind of joke to people who experience their culture as a lark?
I don’t know how you can claim to be neighborly or hospitable if you’re making people feel made fun of.
I keep looking at the announcement of this bar and thinking about Chris Crofton’s Advice King column from last week, in which he diagnoses one of the biggest social problems with Nashville. "In the case of Nashville, THE RESIDENTS are the attraction," Crofton writes. "There’s no ocean. No mountains. There’s just neighborhoods. The tourists roam — and reside — on the same streets where regular people are trying to do the soulful, serious business of living their lives.”
It’s hard enough to tolerate being commandeered into being an extra in the tourist version of Nashville every time you step outside. That’s super annoying. We’re all supposed to suck it up for the good of the city — tourists bring money, and we need money, so play along and show the tourists the town they expect to see. And mostly, we do that because the role we’re supposed to play is “nice local.” It’s annoying, but it’s not really a problem.
This is a bigger ask: that we all tolerate being a part of a fantasy in which rich tourists can play at being us, when their idea of who we are is, to them, a fun, tacky joke. More than that, that we let rich tourists and the businesses that cater to them buy into a stereotype of us as kitschy country folks that we know hurts the feelings of actual country folks who should always feel welcome here. Those country folks should always feel welcome here because they are the people — the original tourists, in many cases — who made this town what it is.
Expecting us to make tourists feel welcome like we’re all volunteer goodwill ambassadors in Adult Disney World already sucks. Expecting us to do that while you make a funny joke out of playing us?
That’s bullshit.
That’s it. That’s the thing important enough for me to come back to Pith in the Wind to say. Just fuck those dudes.
