The Accidental Gentrifist: Maim that Tune - Living Next Door to Greatness
Editors’ note: The opinions and ideas expressed in The Accidental Gentrifist are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook and belief of anyone else in the Ist network.
I live next door to real-live musicians. I suppose that since they’ve aggregated into a kind of group, they should technically be referred to as a ‘band’. Whatever. As far as I’m concerned, their most impressive feature is the presence of a drummer. Because, as many of you are aware, percussive reverberation tends to permeate wood and sheetrock and blocks of cinder in ways that higher-range sonic vibrations don’t. This means that if he wants to practice his atonal, arrhythmic pounding at the same hour I want to listen to Mystery White Boy at a low volume, record a new answering machine greeting, or form a semi-complex thought—well, as my mom used to say, I’m just shit outta luck.
I consider it a microcosm of the latest chapter in the epic battle between Austin culture and those who seek to destroy it. By which I mean the “condo people” and the latest target of their soulless fury: live music over 75 decibels.
Oh, Austin, we are in love with ourselves, and we love to count the ways. Number one: how different we are from everywhere else in America. After all, we’re far too removed from the senseless fray to ever be terrified by ‘the Other’, to lose sleep contemplating how many anthrax-snorting, box-cutter-wielding Wahhabis are currently giving out free night-vision goggles to pregnant teenagers from Coahuila. Of course not.
(But Ben, our conflict is real. Those wart-faced So-Cal condo dwellers just won’t rest until they’ve subjugated the whole city under their homogenizing chokehold. I mean, of course you wouldn’t mind a condo or two cropping up here or there. It’s dense and it’s good for revenue. But would you really want your daughter dating a condominium dweller? Her naked body tangled up in silk sheets, her pale skin goosefleshed by central air, her blue eyes all soft and sleepy, equally opiated by a breathtaking view of the lower Colorado and never having to look for parking? You know what they say: once you go condo, you’ll move to Redondo.)
Oh, Lordy.
Yes, I love rock. No, I’m not in love with 100% of the city’s recent development. And while I have spent a fair share of my privileged time in this venue ridiculing those ‘if you don’t like it, move’ people who are responsible for 98% of the shittiness still to be found in this city, I hafta stand with them on this one. Well, I don’t want the condo-ers to move, necessarily. I mean, how offensive can they be, 140 feet off the ground with windows that don’t even open? It’s actually kind of lucky, as if the dumbest people in town all spontaneously volunteered to live in terrariums. If anything, I want them to go higher, in either of two senses: either move to the penthouse, where I can’t see you and you can’t hear the music, or smoke this and chill the fuck out.
Because my musician neighbors and I live on the ground, we are left with only the latter option, either literally or figuratively. My real estate agent didn’t disclose that my house was situated a dozen feet from an amateur percussionist with a penchant for banging skins at tea time, but, if someone would have asked me, I’d have been forced to admit that it was squarely within the realm of possibility. Even if I scoff at Austin’s self-anointment, ‘live music capital of the world,’ I’m more than capable of realizing others take it at face value. And I’m not one to move to Bangalore and bitch about the smell of curry.
But apparently others are. And these noise complainers are no figments, no bogeymen. At a recent town hall meeting on proposed noise ordinance changes, no fewer than “a small handful” of supporters showed up to lend their voices, presumably at a reasonable volume.
And then there is the legend of ‘That Guy Who Lived Across the Street from Stubb’s.’
(Okay, what I’m about to tell you may not be true. So don’t hold me to it. And anyway, the point of its telling isn’t veracity, but rather the very real fact that it was [justly or un] canonized by bar employees, show goers, and the rest of the whiskey-breath'd throngs of Sixth Street and Red River, circa three or four years ago.)
Apparently, the cat who lived across the street from Stubb’s was quite vocal in his complaints of late-night music. So vocal that the proprietors of the venue offered him recompense in the form of employment. Instead of turning down their amps to whisper levels, they gave their neighbor a lucrative bartending job with a twelve second commute. Apparently, he was less than loved among his fellow Singapore slingers, because the nature of his situation meant he couldn’t get fired, no matter how poorly he twisted his limes or forgot to put the parasol in the Blue Hawaii.
Now, there’s only so much Rilo Kiley/Reckless Kelly/30-odd Foot Fall of Grunting Cunts one can take. But live shows really are about the best thing this town’s got going at night. And it’s becoming this defining moment for free expression and generic civil liberty. Whereas a person can make the valid argument ‘your rights end where mine begin,’ I personally believe that the whole point of a real, functional democracy within a free society is that the freedom of the individual is never infringed upon by the hypothetical good of the many. Because ‘the many’ is in actuality a group of individuals, any of whom may find themselves opposed to a different ‘many’ at a later ideological juncture.
But then again, a concert crowd is also a group of individuals who, in theory, have a right to hear music loud enough to drown out the asshole trying to talk on his cell phone during a St. Vincent encore.
For years, the block facing Club Deville (and what is now Mohawk) housed nothing more than the decayed remains of the Reddy Ice building, where rats and raccoons ran roughshod over soiled sleeping bags and broken crack pipes. An ideal neighbor for a live music venue. But what happens when real estate potential overturns entropy, and that lot becomes a different kind of rats' nest, specifically a condo development based on the Seattle mixed-use model? Will Richard Buckner or the Starlight Mints have to cut their sets short because somebody across the street has a poli-sci midterm in the morning? Or because they just want to sleep and don't particularly care what’s going on across the street?
This is the little-discussed alternative future: the idea that this city’s character is aging. That Austin has finally graduated from its late-twenties, has outgrown its tight jeans and patch-quilted hoodie, and has begun to set its sights on more mature pastimes. That this city, like a former concert-goer grown older, now cares more for the attendant rights of real estate than spiraling ticket prices, relegates the idea of 'music' to their iPod, and at night wants nothing more than network programming and a little peace and quiet.
All things must pass. It is distinctly possible that rock n' roll is organic, and cannot be created by nor protected from any committee whose minutes are kept by mortal men—meaning it was never possible that any worthwhile elements of this tourism-industry conceit, this mantle of ‘live music capital’, could have lasted forever anyway. It was merely one extension of our local personality, and like any good rock entity, was from the outset destined to die young, bloated, and slumped over a vomit-filled toilet bowl.
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