what's local? a review of "The Dears: Lost in the Plot" by Lorraine Carpenter

Does it diminish a musician's accomplishments to view them through his or her place of origin?  Does the prism of the "hometown" assign the stigma of parochialism or, worse, artistic failure, implying that the musician never got out of the minor leagues, or never wanted to?

Consider how we don't find it fundamentally necessary to know where the "truly great" artists come from.  We don't understand, say, David Bowie or Keith Richards primarily their local origins.  Yes, they were children of the suburbs and provinces, perhaps, but these places' identities (Bromley, Dartford) and qualities are fairly incidental and transcended by the non-local inspirations and global impacts of the music they made at their prime.  If we're interested in the geography of their work, it's usually to mark the place of inspiration in a peripatetic career: Bowie's Berlin albums, the Stones' recordings in Richards' tax exile home on the coast of France. 

Beyond a historian's documentary interest, what's there to be learned from contextualizing a band within the place where it formed and rose to prominence?   This is the question begged and not adequately answered by Lorraine Carpenter's The Dears: Lost in the Plot (Invisible, 2011).  91 pages in length, the book is basically an extended feature article on the Dears, the vastly underrated and unfairly overlooked legends of Montreal indie-rock.  Through interviews with members past and present, Carpenter provides a convincing narrative about the band's musical triumphs and career frustrations.  But she further proposes that the Dears' story is also a story about musical Montreal:

The Dears are as good a band as any Canadian act of the aughts.  But why didn't they get the glory?  Being "ahead of the curve," as Lightburn said, or simply victims of bad timing.  The hype behind the band, particularly in North American, peaked just prior to the rise of social media and blogs, before online trumpeting could propel a band as far as it can today.  Perhaps that why, when the Montreal scene was being feted in a succession of major publications, their name was usually absent—the only organization to shine the spotlight on The Dears in a Montreal-scene piece was CBC's The National, Canada's nightly news show (pg. 8).

So the stakes have been raised: how can the Dears—their biographies, aspirations, and music—be understood in the context of Montreal?  Unfortunately, The Dears: Lost in the Plot doesn't really develop many insights about the group's relationship to their city of origin.  However, it does offers some provocative material for such a project —or, rather, it sketches out what this material might look like—almost despite Carpenter's best intentions.

By highlighting such shortcomings, let me make clear at the onset that I'm not here to fault Lorraine Carpenter for failing to write a different book.  That's a cheap form of criticism, and it dismisses what the author brings to the table (and what Invisible Publishing is trying to do with the slim volumes it releases).  Furtheremore, I'll happily gobble up any lengthy treatise on the Dears, and Lost in the Plot works well as a documentation of the group's career and a critical review of their work.  A Montreal journalist, Carpenter has known the band personally for a long time, she's very familiar with their recordings (including the very early ones that are maybe best overlooked), and she's not afraid to call it like she sees it in their typically brilliant yet inconsistent body of recordings.  (I for one appreciate her advice to skip the first four tracks on Gang of Losers; a false start, these songs betray the Dears' Britpop influences a little too earnestly in their anthemic, swing-for-the-bleachers stylings, postponing the band's more interesting aesthetic development until track #5.) 

More to the point, the Dears needn't be listened to or understood as a "Montreal group" first and foremost.  Really, in my book they're not even a "Canadian group," just a great band.  But by pushing at the urban/local angle that Carpenter uses to document the Dears, I want to use this review to think about some questions of inquiry and methods for analyzing musical urbanism.

An appreciation

To begin, hands up for folks who've given the Dears a few listens...  Not that many?  Okay, that's simply unacceptable. 

The Dears' sound—dramatic, tuneful, majestic, witty, able to shoulder the burden of the listener's own heartbreak and anguish—is probably best conveyed by the title of their 2001 EP, Orchestral Pop Noir Romantique.  Unlike some other '00s groups around whom that category could loosely fit (Stereolab, Air), the Dears continued to evolve in musical scope and theme.  Perhaps that evolution hasn't been quite as flashy as Pitchfork (whose coolness toward the Dears is notorious) and other music bloggers might like, but it has been uncontrived and hard earned.  In over fifteen years of operation, the Dears have produced five albums, two EPs and other recorded odds and ends characterized by remarkable musical and emotional substance. I find myself returning to these records again and again; each album is rewarding on its own and further comprises an fascinating career arc comparable to their influences—the Smiths/Morrissey, Suede, Pulp, and (I never see anyone mention this) Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry.  After today's trends have faded into obsolescence five, fifteen, fifty years from now, I suspect the Dears' music will still sound great.

The Dears probably garnered the most attention between 2003 and 2006, a period bookended by their astonishing breakthrough No Cities Left (one of the great albums of the last decade) and the Polaris Music Prize-nominated Gang of Losers.  Then, for a variety of personal and business reasons that this book chars, the band imploded down to the kernel of singer Murray Lightburn and keyboardist Natalia Yanchak, just as the media spotlight on Montreal shifted to Arcade Fire (Yanchak half-seriously calls AF frontman Win Butler an early Dears "cyberstalker").  And, for many, that seems to close the book on the group, despite the fact that they put out two more really good albums.  Today, when they get any attention, the Dears are generaly summarized by one of three points:

1. the singer sounds like a black Morrissey


2. they're that torchy, miserablist group fronted by a husband-and-wife duo


3. they're the Montreal band who never quite made it

The last point, undoubtedly the least trivializing of the three, in turn calls attention to the broader musical scene in Montreal.

So what's so Montreal about the Dears?

If rock music is a genre that doesn't particularly charge its performers to report on or identify with specific places, the ways that hip hop or maybe folk music might, then perhaps it's perhaps a natural instinct to think about the "urban" aspects of a rock group by looking to the scene of local bands, musicians, venues, media and institutions that it comes from.  (Certainly, that's the ready-made angle, by now a little tired, that the media has used to understand musicians coming from Montreal and Canada's other major music cities).  Canada is a huge territory with almost one-third of its population concentrated in its three largest cities' metropolitan area.  In that setting, the locations of musicians and other creatives won't generally be accidental; patterns of migration, intermingling, and sharing of resources will fundamentally shape the creative milieu.  In Montreal, this dynamism extends back much further than the city's current prosperity in the creative economy:

Of course Montreal is unique.  It's the urban centre of a French province on an English and Spanish continent, with all the quirks, wonders and troubles that such a politically tense and culturally fruitful juxtaposition brings.  But in many ways, Montreal is also a typical North American city: a piece of land (an island) that was founded, settled and developed by conquerors and immigrants, one that's famous for cultural touchstones that have flourished here, but originated in our old countries, sometimes by way of the superpower to the south.

In the late '70s, the rise of nationalist fervour inspired a slow exodus of English-speaking (anglo) Montrealers that would last for two decades.  But once the threat of a separation from Canada subsided, taking the recession down with it, not only did native anglos stay put, but a segment of the steady influx of students from other provinces and countries began to plant roots.  Some of them formed bands, founded festivals or otherwise created and hustled to enrich the local art scene.

English musicians from these parts used to take their quest for a career to Toronto, the national hub of the music industry.  Now, it's not uncommon to hear about bands relocating from their city to Montreal, to tap into the storied recording studios, live venues, hipster hangouts and cheap rents that fed the successes of the mid-aughts.

That scene remains small, and with 68 percent of the city being francophone, Québécois culture looms large.  But despite this, the past decade has given us a pack of anglo bands and a scene to be proud of, to the particular delight of pop music connoisseurs and indie-label patrons (pp. 5-6).

This promising overture notwithstanding, The Dears: Lost in the Plot is not the definitive book on the Montreal anglo indie-rock scene.  It's not even close, really.  Montreal bands that Carpenter mentions are the most usual of suspects (Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, the Godspeed You! Black Emperor collective) and then only in the briefest of passing.  When Murray Lightburn is reported to have enticed guitarist Patrick Krief back into the Dears in 2009 by praising the latter's band—"When I heard the Black Diamond Bay record, I wish I had been a part of it"—and the reader has by this point no idea who Black Diamond Bay is (they even included another ex-Dears member, drummer George Donoso), you realize an opportunity has been lost to dive further into the constellation of Montreal bands and say a little more about their modes of/occasions for recombination. 

Furthermore, Carpenter gives local francophone bands like Les Georges Leningrad, Pas Chic Chic and Les Breastfeeders only a tantalizing footnote.  In this case, Carpenter is up-front about her focus on Montreal's anglo indie-rock scene.  But while that focus gives The Dears: Lost in the Plot a coherence of narrative, I can't help but wonder why she had to strive for coherence at all.  Why not instead foreground the contradictory perspectives and ambitions of a scene's participants, cliques, and neighborhoods?  The excellent oral history of the Germs illustrates how even the focus on a single band can entertain a multiplicity of local viewpoints and opinions. 

A different urban angle might be to situate the Dears within an indigenous tradition of place-based culture and history.  In the case of Montreal, presumably such an argument could be drawn from the city's famed cultural heterogeneity.  Wisely, Carpenter backs off from assessments of Montreal's musical terroir, which are vulnerable to highly romanticized, overly simplicistic claims about a place.

Interestingly, she reports that Lightburn employs such a Montreal rhetoric from time to time, usually to deflect  the charge that "he's a black guy in a 'white' musical realm":

Lightburn took pride in the band's mixed heritage: "George moved here from chile when he was nine, Martin is as Quebec as it gets, au boutte, Natalia is a Pollack/Ukranian from a Pollack area of Toronto, Valérie is half American, Benvie is a straight-up Canadian white guy and I'm the son of immigrants from Central America," he said.  (For the record, Krief is a Jew with roots in Morocco.) (pg. 61)

If, as this example suggests, urban(e) rhetorics are used to engage what are essentially non-urban issues (in this case, the unspoken racialization of indie rock), then does anything of sui generis relevance remain to the urban story of the Dears?  Is there anything gained by further barking up this tree? 

The Dears and everyday life

In fact, The Dears: Lost in the Plot hints at another way of thinking about the urban context surrounding the Dears.  It comes at the very beginning of the book, in a preface entitled "Full Disclosure":

I was 16 when I moved into the master bedroom in my parents' apartment, a room previously inhabited by my older brother, and my older sister before him.  I vividly remember watching the video for "How Soon Is Now" by The Smiths the night my family moved into the top floor of that triplex in 1985.  But not much Smiths was played on the turntable there; my musical education was dominated by my siblings' records, mostly David Bowie, The Beatles, Roxy Music and The Velvet Underground, along with a range of questionable '80s bands.

It was only in the '90s, when I was a Suede fanatic, that I truly became enamoured with The Smiths.  And in that bedroom (in a beautiful old building, incidentally) I heard The Smiths not only on my stereo, but through the wall.

It was shocking to me then that someone else, someone right next door, was listening to this vaguely gay, English '80s band in the era of Pearl Jam.  I know now that I was hardly alone, as young Britpop fans everywhere had found The Smiths the way I had, just as teenagers in the aughts took the cue from emo idols like My Chemical Romance or Fallout Boy (I've seen the homemade Smiths t-shirts to prove it).  Even on that one block in Montreal, there was a kindred spirit.  Years later, I found out that person was Murray Lighburn (pp. 1-2).

Here is a glimpse onto a real, tangible place, one that articulates both non-local contexts (adolescence, maybe a particular Canadian slant on Anglophilia) and local contexts (a racial-ethnic composition that made Lightburn "the one black guy at all the Britpop concerts" in Montreal) into a concrete spatial formation for the conduct of everyday life.  The scenario Carpenter describes could be played out in a number of places, yet the reader intuits it's genuinely Montreal.  On the surface it's a silly episode related from a 16-year-old's vantage point, but were it developed into a coherent biographical arc that encompasses the Dears in their messy adult lives, it could form the basis for a very serious documentation and analysis of Montreal urbanism.

It's disappointing but maybe not surprising that Carpenter backs away early on from this view into the Dears' mundane relationship to Montreal.  To make their voice credible, journalists are supposed to stick to objective facts and not make themselves the subjects of their story, which are just what this episode appears to threaten; hence she invokes the journalistic duty of "full disclosure", thereby dismissing this provocative nugget of data from serious analytical consideration.  (Subjectivity is legitimate, of course, when Carpenter shifts into the role as musical critic, a transition that her writing carries out rather seamlessly.)  Perhaps the lived experience that Carpenter shares with the Dears and other participants of the Montreal music scene is too close to even notice, much less analyze adequately.  Yet beneath the book's musical history and critical review, windows onto Montreal urbanism appear everywhere, even in a passing reference to the difficulties of maintaining distance from her subjects:

Anglo Montreal is such a small town that no editor has ever accused me of being biased.  It's as normal for local writers to know their subject personally or professionally, or at least be separated by very few degrees, as it is for my conversations with Murray to shift in and out of interview mode, on and off the record.  That's how our friendship began (pg. 3).

Again, I don't want to criticize Carpenter for not being a proper ethnographer, which would be just as unfair as slamming her for not writing a different book than the one she did.  But her subjective relationship is the most promising lead that Carpenter has into a greater understanding of the Dears' Montreal urbanism, whatever that might be.  Given the proper analytical treatment, subjectivity transcends gossip or personal opinion (if we want to give the authors' nemeses those names) to become the window onto everyday life, musical or otherwise.

institutionalizing utopia: the predicament of the music festival

These are fat days for music festivals, it seems.  Festivals for alternative music, heavy metal, electronic and dance, classical and jazz, festivals featuring music and film, festivals featuring music and academic lectures, festivals featuring acts who reunite just to play festivals—a whole lot of music festivals!  Not to mention the music festival's baby brothers and sisters: the street fairs with music, the outdoor music concert series sponsored by municipal governments, the one-off events organized by your alternative weekly publications or your lifestyle retailers...  And let's not forget the festival's cranky old aunts and uncles: state and county fairs, village carnivals, and any other traditional event where they plonk together an outdoor stage and line up a bill of performers...

Yet this is a moment of transition and even peril for the music festival and its kin:

1. This summer has seen a nightmare of tragedies and near-misses on outdoor concert stages at Pukkelpop, the Indiana State Fair (Sugarland), Ottawa Bluesfest (Cheap Trick) and Tulsa (Flaming Lips).  These accidents have brought to light the fact that few regulations or government agencies enforce the safety of outdoor stages, leaving the concert industry to oversee itself voluntarily and inconsistently.  Few industry insiders expect the state of affairs to remain laissez-faire for long.

 

2. A number of festivals have been cancelled in the U.S.  Just this summer in New York state, a second year for the Truck US Festival (an export of the UK's independent music festival,) slated for the Catskills was aborted, and the launch of Music to Know, a new "boutique festival" scheduled in the East Hamptons never got off the ground.  The NY Times reports:

Music to Know joins a long list of New York City-area festivals that have flamed out before the first power chord sounded, or died after a couple years of disappointing ticket sales. Festival promoters face tough going in this region: labor costs are high, the permit process is difficult, and competition with the city’s rich cultural calendar is fierce. In addition, there are few large sites near the city with access to mass transit or enough camping for thousands of music fans.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles's hipster stronghold of Silverlake, the fabled Sunset Junction Street Fair was cancelled after organizers failed to pay $141,000 in advance fees to the city.  Having fond memories of seeing the Geraldine Fibbers there in the late 90s, I was surprised to hear so many L.A. friends bid good riddance to the event, but then I hadn't heard that it had since started charging admission.

In recent years, many residents and business owners have complained about the festival's fenced-off boundaries and the admission fee, which they say has changed its character from a neighborhood event to a commercial affair.

Mark Thompson, who moved to the neighborhood 25 years ago, said he and his partner stopped attending the festival for three reasons: "Too many unknown people, too expensive, and overly commercial."

"I think it has a confused identity," said Sarah Dale, who owns a clothing store near Sunset Junction, where Sunset and Santa Monica boulevards meet. "Is it free street fair? Is it a music festival? There's a reason that Coachella happens in a field. There's a reason Woodstock happened at a farm. If you're throwing a major music festival, I don't think you do it on a narrow city street."

Apparently Britain has a greater economic appetite for music fesivals than the U.S.  Certainly, a recession that makes people's discretionary income vanish doesn't help.  Still, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that we're also living in a glut of music festivals, as the concert sector overreaches in response to the savior role it's been assigned by an ailing music industry.  But there's more. 

Regulation, market competition, the emergence of specialized niches—for sociologists, these are the tell-tale signs of institutionalization.  (One might call this commercialization, a special case of institutionalization, but it's not clear that all music festivals are primarily profit-oriented ventures, even if they have to survive in a capitalist environment.)  Institutionalization suggests, sociologically speaking, that the larger ecology or "field" for a social phenomenon (in this case, music festivals) has been entered by second actors—government, monopoly-seeking firms, secondary services (a festival-finding website, anyone?), and so on—whose non-coordinated actions effectively routinize the reproduction of the phenomenon itself.  Culturally, institutionalization is experienced as a taken-for-granted state of affairs.  The phenomenon acquires normative value for its participants as a general end in itself; no longer is it an instrumental means to a once-specific end.

And what was this original "end"?  What was the whole point of music festivals?  It was always more than just a good time.  Wasn't it... the communal establishment of a temporary utopian city?  Since I dedicated some space to Woodstock in my last post, let me shine some light on the origins of England's Glastonbury Fair.  Rob Young's exciting history of British folk music, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music (Faber and Faber, 2010), reports how Glastonbury summoned utopian visions long before rock and roll:

If Canterbury, the locus of pilgrimage, is the official capital of the Church of England, Glastonbury has long been its heathen obverse.  The enormous Tor, or earthen mound, that dominates its topography, topped with a lonely ruined tower, has exerted a magnetic pull on alternative pilgrims drawn by the local legends of the first English Christian church, the alleged hiding place of the Holy Grail, secreted somewhere by Joseph of Arimathea, and its supposed conjunction of ly lines and earth energies.  The writer and occultist Dion Fortune, a Glastonbury resident in the early 1920s, believed Tor to be a 'Hill of Vision' at the centre of a gateway to the Unseen'—a spiritual-architectural complex sheltering the slumbering spirit of Albion.

[British composer Rutland] Boughton settled in Glastonbury in order to create his own conditions for carrying out his dreams, building a musical Jerusalem far from the metropolis.  Music performed outdoors, in the unpredictable acoustics of the open air, always appealed to him, and the summer schools he ran in order to make money placed emphasis on communal activities such as games, picnics and pilgrimages to romantic and historic local beauty spots.  The Glastonbury Festival continued until 1927, a valuable platform for new British music and an experimental base for new ideas and crazes to be worked through....

Something of the flavour of the conflicting claims upon the soul of Glastonbury at the time can be gleaned from John Cowper Powys's 1932 novel, A Glastonbury Romance, in which an idealistic mayor who tries to turn the town into a centre for Grail worship gets caught in the crossfire between a group of anarchists and Marxists who have formed a commune and the profitable designs of a local business tycoon.  At the beginning of the 1970s Glastonbury's peculiar energies were rediscovered by the hippy movement, kicking off an event that has grown into a huge annual pop festival, a temporary city that appears for three days and then vanishes.  The Hill of Vision shows no sign of shutting its eyes (pp. 95-6).

Rich Deakin's Keep it Together: Cosmic Boogie with the Deviants and the Pink Fairies (Headpress, 2007) describes that first revival of the Glastonbury Fair (or Fayre, to cite the bootleg recording of the Pink Fairies' notorious performance):

Frendz reproted that the only real problem with Glastonbury Fair, at least as far as mainstream news was concerned, was that so little went wrong: "[F]or the people who came it was all they could have asked for.  About 8,000 together for nearly a week to hear thirty five groups, all in the sun, get stoned, make love, and roam around the countryside—all for free."  The report stated that: "Glastonbury Fair was precisely what it was because of the extent of the organisation...  And despite the many notices in Glastonbury shops and café windows 'No Hippies or such like served here' the villagers never actually rose in armed pitchfork rebellion against the freaks."

 

Phun City provided a tantalising microcosm of how an alternative society might work, and upon this the organisers of Glastonbury brought the possibilities closer to reality.  Ostensibly experiments in alternative living, these free festivals undoubtedly provided the inspiration for the alternative travelling culture lifestyle that grew up in the 1970s.  Interviewed in 1999, Mick Farren stressed the significance of festivals like Phun City and Glastonbury on the travelling culture lifestyle: "They were the absolute start of the whole thing.  Prior to the festivals, a few beats hitchhiked around during the summer but mainly headed for seaside resorts and London.  The festivals really provided a focus for what you might call potlatch tribal gatherings or clan meets.  Phun City and Glastonbury also proved that a festival could be staged on an economic wing and prayer" (pg. 204).

Now, travelling culture might not be your thing—smelly port-a-potties might definitely not be your thing—but it's worth considering what's happened to the utopian impulse as the music festival has become institutionalized.  British musical journalist David Hepworth put it so well recently:

I’ve never been a big festival goer. I watch with interest as the people I know who are big ones for Glastonbury stiffen as the big weekend approaches. In the world I inhabit, where some kind of privileged access is what people are used to, the jockeying for position started months ago. Have you got the right kind of ticket with the right kind of pass and the right access to the right car park or camp site? Have you got the right equipment? Bin bags? Wellies? Wet wipes? Plastic bottle full of ready mixed gin and tonic? Insurance? Insect spray? Anxiety pills?

I seem to remember that in the late sixties and early seventies people set off to festivals with a tenner in their pocket and a carefree skip in their stride. Nowadays they seem to take with them all the comforts and anxieties of home. A friend of a friend’s daughter turned up at Glastonbury a few years ago with a pull-along suitcase and some hair straighteners. I thought this was funny until I saw, at last year’s Latitude, a special tent where one could go and, for a fee, plug in your hair and beauty aids.

What’s even more surprising is that while the original festival goers set off to the country intent on shrugging off the hierarchies and strictures of everyday society and getting back to the garden, nowadays people go to the country in order to obey the festival organiser's rules, codes which are far more draconian and much less amenable to reason than any they would expect to deal with in their daily life. If ever you think the law of the land is unreasonable, think again. Try arguing with a festival steward over whether you’ve got the right wrist band. That’s when you learn about unreasonable authority and how a dog's obeyed in office. But nobody seems to mind. They accept it as the price of taking part. It particularly amuses me how my daughter and friends keep the wristbands on for months afterwards – as if they’d like to prolong their weekend serfdom.

Is this price worth it?  What would a genuine alternative to the institutionalized music festival of today look like?

under the shadow of Woodstock: listening to the Hudson Valley

Another problem with the "Brooklynization of Hudson River Valley" thesis that I discussed in my last post is that the music in these parts isn't very hip.  That's not a judgment, just a statement of fact if by "hip" we mean the product or embrace of 20-something hipsters who disproportionately reside in Brooklyn. 

However, the Hudson Valley does have a musical soundtrack, if you will—a distinct set of styles, artists, and local events that are used to musically represent the region to the world at large.  Separately, there's some noteworthy musical creativity going on in the region.  That these two scales of activity don't coincide in the same way that we think of, say, Brooklyn indie rock or New Orleans jazz tells you something about how music contributes the cultural geography of the Hudson Valley.

Maybe I've overgeneralize in this post too much.  I'd be eager to hear others provide counterevidence to this thesis.  But first, let's look at the music and musical lifestyles currently found in the Hudson River Valley.

MUSICAL CREATIVITY

To begin, let me acknowledge that despite the fact I've lived in this area for 12 years and have always been curious about the music created here, I'm still no expert.  In part that's because this is a big, six-county region, and a comprehensive, balanced view of its musical geography isn't easy to access.  But also, my investigations in local music are significantly directed by my tastes, which tend toward new and exciting stuff out of the rock tradition broadly speaking, e.g., indie, electronic, dance, punk, metal, and so on.  If I'm a modernist in expecting music to innovate and move forward, I can also be historical and sentimental in my musical tastes—one reason I have oldies and classic rock on the radio a lot.  In truth, I'll go see almost any live performance if it fits my working dad hours (which tends to keep me from seeing 75% of the decent concerts around here) and is reasonably close to where I live (which takes out another 22%).

Indie rock

Since I've been talking about the Brooklynization of the Hudson Valley, I'll begin here by noting that indie rock, the sound of Brooklyn today, is conspicuously underrepresented in this region.  None of the big nightclubs, theaters, or commercial performance venues specializes in it; no "alternative" or independent commercial radio stations play it.  Occasionally one of the bigger acts of this genre come to one of the area's bigger concert venues, usually only if they have some sort of crossover appeal with an older demographic who can pay higher prices for tickets.  For instance, Bright Eyes and Dr. Dog are coming to Poughkeepsie's Mid-Hudson Civic Center, a 3000-seated venue, in September; tickets are well into the $40 range once service charges are added, and unless the area's college kids find about it (few live here when school is out), I suspect the show will be undersold.  The draw would probably be larger if the show were in the southern part of the Hudson Valley, like Peekskill in Putnam County, but then a lot of touring bands are prevented from playing here by the 100-mile radius restriction in their concert contracts with NYC venues.

The oases in the indie-rock desert around here are the area's colleges.  I know the three four-year liberal arts colleges in Dutchess County best: Vassar, Bard, and Marist.  The first two are (to put it crudely) notorious hipster colleges, and not surprisingly they've graduated a number of indie-rock musicians.  In the past decade, bands like Beach House, Throw Me The Statue, and the Bravery came from Vassar.  Bard College has gone so far as to officially inventory all the bands that ever formed at Vassar, the most famous being Steely Dan (who recall the college in Annandale-on-Hudson scathingly in "My Old School"). 

The other big college in the area—the biggest, in fact, with about 8,000 students—is SUNY New Paltz in Ulster County.  The town of New Paltz itself is probably the only real college town of note in the Hudson Valley.  Located next to the Shawangunk Ridge, a Northeastern destination for serious rock climbers, the town draws an outdoorsy constituency across age brackets, and I've always thought of SUNY New Paltz as having an appropriate musical aesthetic: jam bands, roots reggae, and folksingers.  However, a Vassar student described it to me as also "something of a folk-punk mecca" that draws touring DIY performers like Paul Baribeau, so I stand corrected.

Significantly, few bands of any note actually formed while college students in the Hudson Valley.  From Vassar, I know so far of three exceptions: Alan Licht's early 90s post-punk group Love Child, their lo-fi contemporaries the Sweet Things, and mid-'00s post-metal iconoclasts Genghis Tron.  Otherwise, the general pattern is for musicians to move away after graduation and form bands elsewhere, usually in the big cities; they may continue to collaborate with fellow alumni (again, see Steely Dan), but more often they'll find musicians along lines other college alma mater.  Here as in other regards (recall my last post), this is a region that characteristically exports people once they hit the post-college age bracket.

Hip hop

The Hudson Valley is comprised of swelling suburbs (particularly in its southern half along the main parkways and thruways), historic towns and villages, quite rural hamlets, and a handful of cities.  Of its six counties, only half of them have municipalities registered officially as "cities", and of these there are only seven: Middletown, Newburgh and Port Jervis (of Orange County), Beacon and Poughkeepsie (of Dutchess County), Kingston (of Ulster County), and Hudson (of Columbia County).  Generally, these cities reveal the history of rustbelt industrialization, as river, canal and railroad made them well-placed locations between NYC and its hinterlands to the north, east and (via the canals) midwest.  Demographically, the cities were built upon the waves of ethnic immigrations associated with NYC, including substantial numbers of Irish, German, Italian, and African-American groups through the WWII era, and continuing in recent decades with West Indian, South Asian, and Latino residents.  And as is the norm for ethnic hierarchies in the Northeast, white ethnics largely moved on to the Hudson Valley's towns and villages while blacks and Latinos remain disproportionately concentrated in cities still struggling to emerge from the post-WWII urban crisis.

This, as you might expect, is a fertile geography for hip hop to bloom in, and it's probably not a stretch to say that hip hop is the go-to music among the cities' African American and Puerto Rican youth, maybe West Indian youth as well (particularly in its dancehall hybrids).  Of course, hip hop is the favorite music for many white kids in the suburbs and colleges as well, but I'm not sure how many venture into the cities' clubs where hip hop plays on the speakers.  While hip hop performers will play to fanatical student audiences in the colleges, theirs is a different environment for hip hop than the inner cities that many youth of color would recognize in Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Hudson and Kingston.  Ghetto realism and hedonistic materialism are the themes of the clubs, while high school students might find older rappers teaching consciousness in hiphop-oriented school programs and community organizations.

So who are the Hudson Valley rappers?  I'm out of my area of expertise here, but I imagine an enterprising visitor to the area's hip hop clubs could walk away with dozens of mixtapes and CD-Rs.  (Whether they're good enough to interest non-locals, I couldn't say.)  Yet it seems very few MCs or DJs of wide regard have come from the region.  My Vassar colleague Hua Hsu thinks the most important one is probably J Rock from Newburgh, whose 1991 album Streetwise is a minor classic of ghetto reportage.  In the early 90s, a 20-year-old redhead MC going by the name of Sarai dropped a major-label debut album and gathered a lot of hype as a "female Eminem."  (Am I correct in recalling she made the cover of Hudson Valley Magazine as well?)  Now she goes by the name Miss Eighty 6 and works the TV/film soundtrack angle.

It may be that the Hudson Valley's hip hop scene is overshadowed geographically and musically by New York City to the south.  Cities like Newburgh and Poughkeepsie often appear in NYC hip hop narratives as satellites of "the City" and its urban hustle.  With its entrenched gang violence, Newburgh is sometimes called the "sixth borough" of NYC, while Poughkeepsie (at the end of the commuter rail) is commemorated in "'98 Thug Paradise" by Tragedy, Capone and Infinity as a place for NYC's drug dealers go to cool out:

Capone bag the keys

Let's move like a gypsy

It's hot out here

Relocate to Poughkeepsie

 

Reggae and Latin music

There are two very different genres, but their similarity appears in the regional context.  Namely, the Hudson Valley's West Indian and Latino populations have expanded sufficiently to support concerts featuring acts from the West Indies and Latin America.  These events are rarely announced in the cultural calendars and concert listings that most white residents peruse.  But go to the ethnic stores, and you'll find the slickly printed color flyers announcing the latest dates.

Contemporary Jamaican acts with dancehall riddims and lyrical slackness play the Hudson Valley's urban nightclubs around (I'm estimating) 5-10 times a year.  Vintage roots reggae performers like the Mighty Diamonds, Burning Spear, and Culture might also play these venues, although they also have a significant constituency in the bucolic hippie/jam-band stronghold of Woodstock—hence the Woodstock Reggae Festival.  I couldn't tell you how much audience crossover there is along lines of race and age across reggae's "murrrdah!"/"one love divide," but it's an interesting question to investigate.

The Hudson Valley's immigrant Latino population has boomed in just the last 10 years, another small milestone in the new immigration outside the U.S. Southwest.  In cities like Poughkeepsie, the new Latino presence has significantly revitalized a downtown once known for its vacant storefronts.  Mexican tiendas and restaurants play corridas on the jukeboxes and cable TV; now, performers from that genre are touring the area.  (There's a smaller but growing Central American population in the Hudson Valley, but so far I haven't detected a corresponding musical presence.) 

For reggae and Latin music, I don't see local performers performing these styles at a significant scale (i.e., beyond the sound systems and DJs for hire).  Maybe that's the point: these are non-U.S. acts performing for an immigrant audience.  As West Indian and Latino families put their kids in local schools, another interesting question is whether they'll give up the taste for reggae and corrida for "native" music like hip hop and rock, much like they do the traditional foods their parents want them to send them to school with.  Alternately, maybe they'll be drawn to the urban genres that fuse the old and new worlds: reggaeton, merengue, and other sounds easily heard on the streets of NYC.

Rock and heavy metal

One of my favorite deep cuts from Blue Öyster Cult is "Dominance and Submission" from the 1981 album Extraterrestrial Live.  This particular track was recorded live in Poughkeepsie, and about 2:30 minutes in, the band vamps as Eric Bloom addresses the crowd:

"Here we are in Poughkeepsie, New York!"  [audience cheers] " Yeah, I see we are sold out to the maximum!" [audience cheers louder]  "You know, we like coming up here once or twice a year because—we like coming up here from New York City because we know Poughkeepsie is SERIOUS about rock and roll!!"  [audience goes nuts]

And so it goes.  With its white blue-collar base, the Hudson Valley (like all of upstate New York) is a natural stronghold for rock.  Classic and alternative rock abounds on the radio and in the bars.  The biggest annual fair around these parts (in Dutchess County) draws graying stadium rockers like Foreigner and REO Speedwagon.  And the concert venues draws B-list and C-list reunions and classic-rock bills that can't quite sell out NYC venues.  (Boston Legends All Star Concert, anyone?)  Age and/or upscale the act a little more, maybe broaden the parameters of "rock" to include blues, vintage new wave and R&B, and you get a sense of the acts that play nice theaters like Poughkeepsie's Bardavon or Kingston's UPAC: Ray Davies, the Temptations, David Byrne, Pat Benatar, Los Lobos, Patti Smith, et al.  Demographically, it's not a mystery what's going on here.  With its aging population, there's a sizable market in the region for rock and pop of the baby boom and its Gen X successors. 

But what about the kids who just wanna rock?  Young bands playing metal, emo, metalcore, and guitar-heavy "alternative" can be found at busy venues like the Poughkeepsie Chance Theater or (just north of the Hudson Valley, past Albany) the Northern Lights venue.  This is a real meat-and-potatoes rock circuit, and, importantly, here you find a lot of local bands.  Replace the flyers with myspace pages, and it feels like a smaller version of the hair-metal scene found in most major American cities in the late 80s.  So far as I can tell, no bands of this ilk have "made it"  in a big way.  Maybe that's because none is any good, or because this scene seems rather tied to the conventional record-and-tour model of a rock music industry that's increasingly difficult to bust out of.

Some of you may recall that I have a special place in my heart for crazy black and death metal.  It's not for everyone, but its intrinsically esoteric, extreme nature offers a useful perspective to evaluate the metal scene in the Hudson Valley.  Occasionally I find myself browsing the local concert calendars looking for bands of this nature, and generally I find nothing.  A couple of years back I did go see Skeletonwitch, Toxic Holocaust and Trap Them at the Chance Theater.  It was a great show, and the first two bands in particular excelled in the unexpected retro-thrash sub-genre that brings 80s hold-outs like myself together with younger metal fans.  But that's just it: the bill satisfied both connoisseuring sensibilities and rather mainstream contemporary tastes in metal, but it was probably the latter that brought most of the kids out, and it's the latter that the local bands traffic in.  Until I find the real crazy stuff that tries to push the metal envelope forward in a serious way, that's my hypothesis about the Hudson Valley metal scene.

One final note: around 2006, when Genghis Tron were still Vassar College students, I recall that a Time Out New York listing for one of their NYC shows indicated they were "from Poughkeepsie."  This is a very rare regional identification for a Vassar College, but it makes sense in a metal context.  For one thing, most metal bands don't go around announcing they're kids; given the genre's proletarian aesthetics, that's quite likely a kiss of death.  (Google "hipster metal" for similarly scathing backlash.)  But also Poughkeepsie's hard-on-its-luck reputation provides a special aesthetic grain for post-metal groups trying to urbanize a genre typically associated with oppressive suburbs and Scandinavian forests.

Folk, blues and jazz

Here's another disparate set of genres united by local context. Go to any open-mic night at one of the Hudson Valley's many coffeeshops, and you won't have to wait very long before you hear folk music played, particularly in the Dylan/Laurel Canyon singer/songwriter traditions.  Turn on "Poughkeepsie Live!," the public access TV show featuring regional musicians, and it's a good bet you'll catch a guitarist wailing on the blues.  Go to a nice restaurant on a late weekend evening, and if there's live music, it's most likely going to be jazz.  Folk, blues and jazz are the default soundtrack for the amenity settings and quality-of-life districts of the Hudson Valley.  And, as I argued in my last post, these destinations characteristically serve an older, 45-and-up clientele; even if the musicians themselves don't come from that bracket, that's the audience their music reaches.  In short, it's lifestyle background music, by no means unique to the Hudson Valley, but certainly redolent of the rural getaways and intimate "third places" with which this region attracts baby boomers and well-to-do urban migrants.

Of course, the Hudson Valley is home to some serious practioners of these genres.  Folk legend Pete Seeger has lived in Beacon since 1941.  Jazz saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Joe Lovano live in Dutchess and Putnam Counties, respectively.  It's a separate question whether artists such as these can be considered local musicians—not simply local residents, but contributors to a local music scene.  A strong case could be made for Pete Seeger, whose presence in the region's various post-WWII left-wing camps and chataquas and whose activism on behalf of the Hudson River's health have created lasting local legacies.  This could be parsing an unhelpful distinction, but perhaps Seeger's local contribution as a folksinger has been political more than musical—at least, that's a hypothesis.

By contrast, the case is more straightforward for Sonny Rollins and Joe Lovano.  Nominally associated with the NYC jazz scene, these are clearly artists of an international caliber for whom the Hudson Valley is essentially just a home base.  Their careers are so developed, they don't need NYC's jazz scene to get gigs and make a living.   Whether they desire the collaborations made possible by living and working among other jazz musicians is another question altogether, but I suspect there's a lot of musicians who would drop whatever they're doing for an invitation to jam at the Hudson Valley home of Sonny Rollins or Joe Lovano.

MUSICAL REPRESENTATIONS

Now we get to the more famous musical associations, histories, and symbolic geographies of the Hudson River Valley.  In contrast to the hard work and promotional hustle that characterizes most of the artists I've talked about so far, at this level the musical "economy" is far more developed and successful.  A key reason is because the underlying demand for the musical representations of the Hudson Valley is national and even international in scope.  But let's be clear here: the demand isn't for musical recordings and performances, but for regional aesthetics and lifestyles made meaningful in some part by their association with music.

Second homes and the quality-of-life district

Pete Seeger, Sonny Rollins and Joe Lovano are hardly the only musicians living in the Hudson Valley.  A load of popular musicians have homes in the area: off the top of my head, I can think of Natalie Merchant, David Bowie, Chris Stein of Blondie, Levon Helms of the Band, and Graham Parker.  Aside from these famous names, there's probably as many successful session musicians, technicians, promoters, agents and music industry executives. 

What characterizes these musicians' relationship to the Hudson Valley is choice made possible by their success.  Many of them are in states of semi-retirement; some pursue their non-musical passions for writing, painting, entrepreneurialism (the B-52s' Kate Pierson runs a rather curious B&B in the old Catskill resort area), and other elective avocations, just like many non-musician Hudson Valley migrants of their career success do.  Although they may live rather private lives in rustic idylls—you don't really see David Bowie and Imani picking up vegan burritos in Woodstock, do you?—their proximity to the entertainment industry center of NYC is a key asset.  Through industry contacts, fellow musicians, and major airports in the city, they can shift their activity into higher gear for a recording session, long tour or even just a rare concert guest appearance.  It's in this sense that their Hudson Valley location isn't really local.  Whether their residence here is actually a second (or third, fourth, etc.) home or not, this region serves as an exurban residential enclave for artists with significant autonomy over the substance, schedule and location of their work. 

In this way, these musicians are perhaps no different than your garden variety doctor or publishing executive who's bought a home in the Hudson Valley: all move here to consume the region's scenic amenities, residential/outdoor opportunities, and local quality of life as a private experience.  Or so it might seem.  In fact, the major difference between musicians and other quality-of-life migrants is that we don't hear about the famous medical history or publishing history of the Hudson Valley.  Yet we hear about the musical history of the region—specifically, of one place, Woodstock—all the time, and that cultural discourse precedes and heavily informs these musicians' relationship to this area.  Indeed, in some way it informs every Hudson Valley resident's relationship to the area.

Woodstock

I can't believe that as I write, today is the 42nd anniversary of the Woodstock Festival.  There's so much to be said about Woodstock, and I can hardly do it justice here.  I would contend that like Hollywood, Woodstock can be understood as a place, an industry, and a sensibility; and only in a very narrow slice of a Venn diagram do these three definitions overlap. 

• The place is the town in Ulster County.  It wasn't the site of the 1969 festival (that was Bethel, in neighboring Sullivan County), but that hasn't deterred a continual stream of visitors to Woodstock the town.  (Bob Dylan did have his motorcycle accident here, however.) 


• The industry is the industry of history, memorabilia, and nostalgia associated with the famous music festival and its cultural import.  The Museum at Bethel Woods is an official gatekeeper of this memory ("The Story of the Sixties and Woodstock", its main exhibit promises), but a hundred books, a hundred documentaries, and a thousand and one bootleg t-shirts (preferably tie-dyed) also keep the flame alight.


• The sensibility is... well, do I have to spell it out?  A reverence and optimism for the dream of 1960s peace, love and freedom embodied by the festival, perhaps, and an aptitude for tuning in and turning on this dream, through drugs or other forms of consciousness heightening. 

Woodstock is a place-based musical sensibility if there ever was one.  It can be discerned in the jam-band festival and the "one love" roots reggae ethos, but it skews heavily toward the 1960s and 70s rock baby boom demographic enamoured of classic rock and related 60s genres (particularly folk and blues).  Every summer weekend, people come to Woodstock the place by the hundreds and patronize Woodstock the industry in order to partake of this Woodstock sensibility.  It seems alive in the town's mountains, streams, and architectural landmarks; it feels sustained within the bookstores, record stores, health food restaurants, galleries, art-house cinema, flea markets, benches, and patches of grass of the town. 

I don't want to suggest this is merely the simplistic, commodified Woodstock sensibility that you can buy on a PBS pledge drive.  If David Bowie, hardly the pop-culture symbol of natural living and spiritual authenticity, can find himself drawn to the symbolic geography and lifestyle zone of Woodstock, then it's clear we're talking about a complex, multivalent discourse that can withstand diverse interpretations and critical artistic/intellectual gestures.  Even cynical indie-rockers are negotiating their peace with Woodstock's symbolic geography, as illustrated in the recent indie-rock music festivals, All Tomorrow's Parties and the Truck Festival US, that were scheduled (and in the latter case cancelled) nearby.  Understanding what Woodstock means and how it sustains a creative life isn't a simple, commodifiable experience.  It can be a worthwhile, long-term project, and it's one that has drawn many people, musicians and others.

If it's not clear by now, there's really no current music scene in Woodstock to speak of.  The town has some great performance venues, and musicians still record in various studios in and around the area.  Occasionally a "Woodstock native" will play locally, the most famous being Levon Helms' monthly Midnight Ramble.   Usually, just the local knowledge that famous musicians have long lived, and still do live, here or nearby is enough to sustain the enchantment of the region's musical geography, even if it's not something you can hear on a recording or take home with you.

Probably Woodstock's most important musical export nowadays is the independently-owned radio station, WDST.  With a playlist combining the contemporary and vintage sounds of jam bands, alternative, blues, singer-songwriters rock, and reggae, it's become a model of "adult alternative" radio that's rarely heard outside of subscription-based satellite radio.  Locally, WDST fills the airwaves with what must feel like the living sound of Woodstock and the Hudson Valley more broadly to anyone who travels to the area.  The region's other radio stations with bigger market shares provide functionalless, place accompaniments to everyday life.  By contrast, WDST enables consumption of a distinct sense of place.  No doubt its random discovery of the car radio dial has tipped the scales toward moving to the Hudson Valley for more than one migrant.

If Woodstock is the chief metonym for the musical representations of the Hudson Valley, its global recognition underscores how almost no Hudson Valley musician or genre today can carve out a successful, global profile under its shadow.  Woodstock continually evokes the past, thereby eclipsing most anything musically exciting in the present.  It's the sound of baby boom dreams that lull residents and newcomers into privatized, domestic lives in quaint villages and rural idylls—and compels everyone else in the Hudson Valley to live with the burden of that market demand.  No, the Hudson Valley is not becoming the next Brooklyn.  Rather, Woodstock is absorbing aging Brooklynites, wherever it is that they actually come from.

looking for the Hudson Valley hipster

In the town where I live, there's been a lot of chatter over a recent NY Times article which reports how Brooklynites (an apparent synonym for NYC's mobile, creative types) are descending upon the Hudson Valley area some 75 miles north of the city to live, visit, consume, and generally do their Brooklyn thing.  Local businesses, restaurateurs and tourism bureaus have enthusiastically forwarded and tweeted this article, while locals cluck at the metropolitan hype surrounding the next big thing.

Credit: Michael Sloan

for the NY Times

(A choice Facebook exchange about the article:

"Some nuggets of truth and infuriating stereotypes."

"You've just described every lifestyle article the Times prints.")

As an urban sociologist who has lived in the Hudson Valley for 12 years (which is chump change among my neighbors) and studied amenity-based urban economies for even longer, I thought I might weigh in on a few issues raised by the article and subsequent debate.  If the topic today is a local one, I hope readers can appreciate how the dynamics I discuss extend much further than New York.

A FAMILIAR STORY?

Peter Applebome, the reporter on this article, is known to be a smart guy when it comes to deciphering the significance of regions and social landscapes.  I haven't read his 1996 book Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics and Culture, but it comes highly recommended.  About midway through the Times article, Applebome hones in on a key set of underlying dynamics:

The migration north began with the weekender incursions in the ’80s and ’90s, gained a more urgent and permanent tone after 9/11, stumbled during the real estate bust and is now finding its way again. But, for all the images of upstate decay, the population of the Hudson Valley is growing more than twice as fast as that of the rest of the state — 5.8 percent over the past decade, compared with 2.1 percent for New York State and New York City. (While there are no universally accepted boundaries to the Hudson Valley, this reference includes the counties north of suburban Rockland and Westchester and south of the capital region: Putnam, Orange, Dutchess, Ulster, Columbia and Greene.)

Add in disparate institutions with some shared sensibilities — Bard, Vassar and SUNY New Paltz; the Culinary Institute of America and the sustainable agriculture Glynwood Institute; the New Age Omega Institute, Dia:Beacon, the Storm King Art Center, the green, hip and upscale Chronogram Magazine — you can posit a synergy that is gaining critical mass.

Some of the growth is an extension of suburban New York into Putnam and Orange Counties. The rest is an exurban phenomenon facilitated at least in part by new technology, the limitations of space and cost in the five boroughs and the natural search for something new.

These assessments are valid, if a little too narrow in their geography (a number of migrants have fled Westchester County and other outerlying NYC suburbs), and they point to the central structural shifts in NYC's metropolitan economy that are driving the cultural and physical transformations in Hudson Valley life.  However, it's in understanding those transformations, particularly the cultural ones, that the article raises flags.  Per journalistic convention, Applebome stokes the human-interest angle by drawing heavily on speculative assessments and generalizations made by his informants, who are divided between inquisitive, enthusiastic Brooklyn transplants...

THERE is a parlor game people sometimes play, comparing Hudson Valley towns with New York neighborhoods, said Sari Botton, a freelance writer in Rosendale.

For instance, Rhinebeck might be the Upper East Side, Woodstock the West Village, New Paltz the Upper West Side, Beacon the East Village, Rosendale and High Falls different parts of Williamsburg. Tivoli could be compared to Greenpoint, Hudson to Chelsea, Catskill to Bushwick, Kingston to a mix of Fort Greene and Carroll Gardens.

...and skeptical-to-embittered locals: 

Not long ago, Hudson was notorious for drugs, prostitution and post-industrial torpor. Now, Warren Street, with its antique stores, galleries and hip restaurants, is a vision of the Hudson Valley reborn. And it was the scene of perhaps the last great battle between the old industrial Hudson Valley and the new one, when a coalition of interest groups came together to defeat a proposed coal-fired cement plant with a 40-story smokestack capable of producing two million tons of cement a year. Opponents said it would be an environmental disaster that would cut off access to the river and go against everything Hudson was becoming. They made an overwhelming case. But in the housing projects and poor neighborhoods just off Warren Street, strangers in the new landscape, it doesn’t seem so clear.

Sitting in a downtown park, Calvin Wilson Sr., 63, said it was nice to see the revival on Warren Street, but it didn’t offer much for him or for young people growing up in a town whose population is almost a third black and Latino, and in which one in five residents is living below the poverty level. “All those old factory jobs, they’ve all dried up,” Mr. Wilson said. “So, where those people going to work? Me, I wished they’d built that cement plant.”

The drama of a story familiar to NYC residents is further heightened by the article's title ("Williamsburg on the Hudson") and the title that appears at the top of your web browser when you load the article's URL ("Hudson River Valley Draws Brooklynites").  Then there's the language used to describe the transplants' profiles.  In the article, "artist," "creative" and "scene" appear three times in their arts-based urban revitalization connotations.  "Hip" also appears three times, four if you count this derivative:

Call it the Brooklynization of the Hudson Valley, the steady hipness creep with its locavore cuisine, its Williamsburgian bars, its Gyrotonic exercise, feng shui consultants and deep clay art therapy and, most of all, its recent arrivals from New York City.

Neither "hipster" or "scenester" appears once, but by now maybe you can see where this is going.  The elements of an overdetermined discourse of Brooklyn's gentrification — certainly one of the most important stories of NYC over the last 20 years, but one so accessible, so gut-level, so knee-jerk that it's blinded many to the city's more troubling roles in privatizing urban governance and triggering the economic downturn — have predictably surfaced.  Not just in the article itself, but in the larger cultural context that this article reports and in fact epitomizes.  Consider this paraphrasing from a provocatively titled piece, "Brooklyn Hipster Virus Spreads to Hudson Valley," in a popular NYC blog:

In Hudson, a "coalition of interest groups" (translation: hipsters) successfully stopped a coal-fired cement plant from being built and harshing the idyllic vibe...   Longtime local residents displaced by gentrifying scenester transplants?

SO WHERE ARE THE HUDSON VALLEY'S HIPSTERS?

Now, I confess not to being up on the latest trends for NYC hipsters might be, but I suspect that feng shui and $25 locavore entrées aren't everyday fare for your twenty-something aficionado of witch house and lop-sided haircuts.  Maybe this is all just semantics in regards to "hipster," that increasingly derogatory and overused term used to label almost any connoisseur of au-courant tastes we don't like.  Still, it's easy to lose sight of how the 20-something demographic, the age-bracket generally associated with the hipster, is the most important force behind "Brooklynization."

 

Census data from the last decade provide some supporting numbers (click on the table for a closer view).  In the "total population" columns, you see the 5.8% and 2.1% growth that Applebome cites for the Hudson Valley and NYC, respectively.  These are remarkable figures for a Rustbelt state; further upstate, New York has steadily bled population continually for well over the past decade.

Now notice the 25-34 age bracket, peak years for creative/enterpreneurial/DIY activities and a hipster lifestyle before thoughts turn for many to building relationships, homes and families.  The 9.2% growth of this age bracket is the key demographic indicator for "Brooklynization".  The other NYC boroughs can hardly keep up with it, nor can the Hudson Valley, which has lost this age bracket by roughly the same percent of change.

Turn to the 35-44 age bracket, a key period of life for consolidating a career, buying a home and (at least in a prior era) building a family.  Brooklyn thins out in this age bracket, but so does the Hudson Valley at even greater rates.  (I see evidence of this in my hometown of Rhinebeck, where the number of kindergarten classrooms in the public school dropped from four to three last year.)

The pattern shifts when you get to the last age bracket here, age 45-54.  Brooklyn's population here has grown, albeit not as greatly as the rest of the city.  (Is this a peak age bracket for buying Brooklyn brownstones?)  Meanwhile, the Hudson Valley's general growth really comes into focus with the 45-54 bracket.  This isn't simply the pattern of proportionate growth amidst absolute population decline (i.e., by this age people become less likely to move out) found further upstate.  This is absolute, positive growth of a population who, we can confidently infer, comes from somewhere else—certainly NYC, but no doubt many other places as well.

THE HUDSON VALLEY QUALITY-OF-LIFE DISTRICT

Hence the one word I'd use to describe the cultural appeal of the Hudson Valley: sleepy.  Five-and-dime stores and village business districts may be doing okay so far, especially when the farmers market's in town, but they're hardly support an energetic streetside scene of the kind we associate with Williamsburg.  Restaurants may vie for choice downtown locations, but it's not a make-or-break issue; their customers "eat the Hudson Valley" mostly via chefs' pedigree (a number of Culinary Institute graduates don't leave the area) and regional agriculture (a lot of squash), as filtered through not-just-New-York culinary/environmental principles (locavorism, CSA agriculture, etc.) — less via scenic views from their tableside window.

I'd argue the real amenity consumption in the Hudson Valley goes on in private spaces and natural solitude: the primary residences, vacation rentals and second homes where urbane residents and tourists enjoy the scenic idyll and a tranquil quality of life they can't find in NYC, its suburbs or other hustling-and-bustling locations.  A number of these residents commute back to NYC and environs for work, so that here they and their families can enjoy any number of local draws: more square footage for a home theater or art studio, good public schools, a winter that isn't quite as harsh as it gets further upstate.  Others simply make a routine of their weekend sojourn, as suggested by the noticeable fraction of NYC kids at my 5-year-old's Saturday soccer practice.  

Significantly, the second-homers and day-trippers don't show up in the Census population figures.  And no doubt a hipster segment ages 25-34 is visiting the art institutions, village downtowns, lakes and nature preserves.  But so far, this group doesn't live here, and they're a difficult clientele to build a visitor-based business upon.  In their local consumption patterns, they follow the lead of the older migrants and visitors, as witnessed on Warren Street in downtown Hudson.  It has a handful of great stores selling used records, vintage clothing, antique curios, and other cool stuff, but most of the other stores sell carefully curated, high-priced antiques to affluent customers looking to furnish their homes or businesses.  So for Williamsburg's 20-something hipsters, a day on Warren Street is spent mostly browsing.  Maybe browsing antiques in such an "unexpected" location can be fun, but it also provides an education for a future of domestic furnishing and tasteful connoisseurship when they're a little older and a little more affluent.

Credit: Benjamin Norman

for the NY Times

To return to my larger point, the newcomers whose money and tastes are transforming the Hudson Valley aren't really the hipsters that bloggers love to deride.  For every middle-aged photographer or Etsy vendor with blue hair, there's probably 50 lawyers, writers, architects, and other creative professionals living much more conventionally.  But maybe Brooklyn's hipsters include these future middle-aged quality-of-life migrants.  The Hudson Valley has to be understood not as just offering a particular kind of quality-of-life niche, to be contrasted with other metropolitan getaways like the Hamptons or the Jersey Shore, but also supporting an age-specific pursuit. 

Furthermore, the sociologist in me contends that these quality-of-life preferences aren't just random; they don't simply activate once people reach a certain age.  No, it's the metropolitan rat-race of "everyone for themselves" and "winner takes all" — all the occupational autonomy, best housing, private-school spaces, etc. — that structures these pursuits.  (By contrast, consider the IBM "company men" [and women] who were historically based in the Hudson Valley and still live around in significant numbers: locavorism and feng shu aren't their calling cards.)  The corollary is that the Hudson Valley's local qualities and opportunities aren't intrinsically attractive, no matter what local boosters and Brooklyn enthusiasts might say.  Rather, these become more attractive as NYC's economy drives change throughout the metropolis, differentiating and revalorizing its cultural landscape by class, race, ideological disposition, and age.

There's so much more to say about how local nuances and conflicts manifest along these divides.  For the time being, I'm going to punt on those.  In my next post, I'll discuss the music that accompanies the changes in the Hudson Valley.