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I always believed in that narrative but nowadays I do think there's some selection bias at work- no one mentions all the other places that have some creative pe
by awongh 1y ago
I always believed in that narrative but nowadays I do think there's some selection bias at work- no one mentions all the other places that have some creative people that were never the birthing ground for a cultural movement.
Because after a certain point I realized- lots of places are cheap (sure slightly less now) but not everywhere is going to produce some kind of large scale cultural movement.
The one that a lot of people seem to know is Detroit- for the last 20 years everyone has been saying wow, lots of artists, wow, you can buy a house for $10 or whatever, but that hasn't been enough.
Sadly a part of me believes that maybe physically localized culture isn't a thing anymore with the internet. Being able to make beats / tiktoks anywhere is too much of a counter-force to people being in the same physical space, no matter how much people seem to love the idea- and this is the true boring reason why this doesn't happen anymore, not that *blame the boomers* rent has gone up.
- msgodel 1y agoI think for localized culture to develop it needs to be exclusive in addition to the need for it to be cheap for people to focus on cultural rather than economic output. Outsiders hate being excluded though so the barriers all get knocked down. In face our modern social norm considers any kind of exclusion a moral failure, even excluding people who dislike the social norms. Maybe this results in a more efficient (perhaps even more pleasant) society but the cost is unique local culture.
- flir 1y agoI think it's more about Capitalism. It took about 6 weeks for grunge to make it from a Seattle basement to a Paris catwalk, and that was three decades ago. If it might make money, it'll get amplified.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoNirvana debuted in 1988 and it wasn't until 1991 that they hit it big and brought grunge to the larger music world outside of the region. We were drowning in crappy corporate driven pop prior to that for years (with bright spots like techno, industrial, etc.)
- awongh 1y agoidk, I think cultural elitism is alive and well.... no matter which area of culture you're in. If anything "curator" culture is making it worse, everything needs to be categorized, rated and put on tier lists.
- flir 1y agoShades of The Tipping Point. You can't replicate it because a slightly different melting pot is at the root of every cultural explosion. (But I reckon cheap rent, leisure time and a laissez faire attitude to drugs are almost always in the mix).
- twic 1y agoI think you need a place with cheap rents that is within striking distance of places with very expensive rents. Artists can afford the former, but their customers (literal art buyers, or culture vultures of various other kinds, media execs, journalists, etc) are located in the latter.
- quesera 1y agoRight. Necessary, but not sufficient. San Francisco was inexpensive up through the 1980s, and the non-commerical creative side of the city started draining out in the 1990s (first slowly, then much more quickly -- it's all long gone now. Apologies to anyone who would like to believe otherwise :). This is also true of New York, on approximately the same timeline. In the early 2000s, Austin and Portland tried to take up the creative mantle, with some success. Both are struggling to maintain it now, for the same reasons but on a slower timeline. Cheap rents are a prerequisite, but there are other sparks required for a place to catch fire. I don't know of any US cities that are doing anything interesting today. Not at the scale of SF and NYC certainly, but also not even at the scale of 20ya Portland and Austin. I think part of the issue is that rent is not adequately cheap in any US cities now that have critical mass plus tolerable living conditions (climate, economy, politics). This worries me.
- awongh 1y agoIt seems relevant that now it's extremely accessible for US people to move abroad to another country. It feels like Mexico City, Costa Rica, Bali, Thailand, etc. have taken up some of the slack from Austin and Portland. Edit: More specifically in terms of cost of living anyways.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoPittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chattanooga, the (far) suburbs of Nashville...
- IAmBroom 1y agoPittsburgh was on that list. Then we got Uber and Google, and our nationally-cheap housing prices have jumped up closer to the norm - which is too high for the bottom half of earnings population.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoI was close to moving to Pitt a while back and was stunned when the house I was looking at doubled in price in less than 6 months... Indianapolis has been going through the same thing (we are getting some of the overflow from the housing crunch in Nashville, etc.) I snagged a house at a decent price last year after looking for over a decade.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoWait until you read about how the CIA funded artists and other counter culture icons in the 60s. Yeah winners were artificially chosen. All in the name of convincing the youth of europe to follow western artists and culture vs slipping into communism with its supposed lack of culture.