the day before the Brooklynites come: Basilica Music Festival in Hudson, NY

Hudson NY: the day before Basilica Music Festival, a set on Flickr.  For best results, view this set as a slideshow with captions on (click "Show Info"). One of the more interesting new festivals to launch this year is the Basilica Music Festival. Running three days starting tomorrow in the Hudson Valley city of Hudson, in upstate New York, this is a tiny event by concert industry standards. Organizers have said that no more than 1250 tickets will be sold; that's probably the room capacity for the Basilica Hudson, the event's primary venue.

Yet Basilica Music Festival (BMF) has the distinction of being sponsored by the kingmaking indie-rock blog Pitchfork, with the organizers seeking more of a curated approach. The lineup is chiefly composed of solo performances (by some well known indie musicians, e.g., the main guys from black metal groups Liturgy and Krallice), art/noise projects, and DJs specializing in unconventional club styles — hardly the stuff of high-ranking searches on the Pitchfork website. The spirit of the 3-day affair seems strongly informed by the fine and performance arts, with a final event designated for an offsite tour/panel discussion of artist Marina Abramovic's proposed Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art. At the less refined end of the spectrum, a riverboat has been chartered for a "sunset cruise" on the second day, while campground lodging in nearby Ghent has been incorporated into certain admission packages.

In keeping with the high-art currents, there further appears to be a site-specific ethos at work at BMF. No doubt performers and attendees alike will be struck immediately by Basilica Hudson's raw yet engaging post-industrial space. Originally a 19th century factory, the venue is located across the road from the Hudson River waterfront right next to the city's railroad station and still-operating industrial facilities. Inside the space, weathered brick walls, dusty concrete, the ceiling scaffolding's geometry and the odd broken panel on massive windows create an exciting ambiance for those not expecting the usual concert-hall amenities.

The architectural texture of distressed brick can be further seen throughout the city of Hudson. A small rustbelt city (2010 pop. 6,713), Hudson is one of the Hudson Valley's handful of cities set along the riverfront, industrial gateways to a largely rural area. Deindustrialization beginning in the mid-20th century hit Hudson particularly hard, and it still shows, with vacant factories and apartments dotting the city. Basilica Hudson's creative director Melissa Auf der Maur (former bassist of Hole and Smashing Pumpkins) has described the city's atmosphere as

the best of a picturesque historical antique town mixed with industrial wasteland, framed by Hudson river skies. It's a real urban mix set within a rural landscape, with a lot of Americana Lynch-ian charm. A cool melange of small town characters and big city visitors—totally nuts and beautiful. Best of all worlds combined!

But Hudson is no Brooklyn, no Wicker Park. Neobohemian "grit as glamour" (to quote sociologist Richard Lloyd) has emerged out of real rustbelt decline, indicated most notably by a population decrease of 10.8% from 2000-10. Economic distress registers in the socioeconomic conditions of Hudson residents today. In 2010, median household income in Hudson was $40,203, about a third less than the national figure. 21.8% of the population, and 39.3% of children under 18, live on incomes below the poverty level, which again exceed the national statistics (of 14.4% and 20.1%, respectively). 54.8% of the city's adults haven't attained an education beyond high school.

How has an indie-rock/high-art event like BMF come to a city like Hudson? It's a fascinating story too long to tell here, but the short version is that the hipsters have followed the trail blazed by metropolitan restructuring and shifting leisure/consumption patterns based in the New York City area. At some point in the late 20th century, Hudson's Warren Street changed from a down-on-its-knees commercial center to a thriving retail district for antique furniture and high-end design. Prices at these boutiques are well beyond the range of your average 20-something Brooklynite, never mind most Hudson locals. Commerce here is aimed largely at affluent metropolitans who make daytrips up to furnish their nests back in the city or in the swath of vacation homes from the Catskills across the river to the Bershires in the east.

If the pattern in Hudson is similar to most "quality-of-life destinations," the local Chamber of Commerce probably had little to do in initiating Hudson's transformation into an antique/design retail center. But who can blame them for urging on this transformation? Not that Hudson's boutique economy is the kind to generate much employment for the city's working class; entrepreneurialism and retail jobs of this nature require education and metropolitan savoir-faire. But the transformation does fill vacancies and boost rents, and so city boosters can only celebrate the aesthetic turn in the city's economy. Even more, they can designate Hudson as "the next Music Mecca."

I'm referring here to the slogan on Hudson Music Fest, which runs concurrently with BMF. 2012 is the second year for this annual event, which is mostly a free affair —local bars, coffeeshops, and outdoor tents hosting performances by bands and musicians whom (I'm hypothesizing) are local talent. Interestingly, the schedule for Hudson Music Fest includes listings for BMF, suggesting that there has been some coordination between the two events, perhaps even a civic gesture on the part of BMF's organizers to lend their support with a new high profile event. But that's an open question. BMF's website and promotional press has made no mention of Hudson Music Fest, whose online schedule clearly states, on the eve of the events' first day:

We are in the final stages of putting the schedule together. 75% of the musicians confirmed with 25% of those needing to change performance times along with the 25% who have not yet confirmed so the process is still in its fluid stage.

Thus, between BMF and Hudson Music Fest there seems to be an asymmetry of acumen about event organizing and promotion. Hudson Music Fest offers a wide array of musical styles, including the venerable nightclub genres of jazz, blues and rock, while BMF is going for a musical niche that will almost certainly alienate the average listener.  Some questions I'd like to investigate further are:

1. To what extent will the concert-goers of BMF catch some of the events associated with Hudson Music Fest? Basilica Hudson is located within easy walking distance of downtown Hudson, and Hudson Music Fest seems to have made some effort to schedule music outside of the nighttime blocks when BMF's main programming will be held. In short, there's going to be a lot of music downtown this weekend trying to reach the ears of BMF attendees — will they catch some of it in the public space of Hudson, or will they stay in a BMF bubble?

Just what is the relationship between BMF and Hudson Music Fest, specifically between its organizers: influential music tastemakers versus local music/business boosters? Did they coordinate the scheduling of their two events? Can the two parties gain something from each other?

Finally, how does BMF change the caché of Hudson, NY, to the metropolitan population whose economic weight is, for better or worse, driving most of the change in the city and throughout the Hudson Valley? As I've argued before, 20- and 30-somethings are in short supply throughout the Hudson Valley, celebrations and alarm over "the Brooklynization of [insert your favorite small town here]" notwithstanding. One indicator I've always looked to in this regard is the quality of indie rock (and other live music aimed at discerning music fans younger than baby boomers) to be found in the region; outside of the area's colleges, there's generally nothing to speak of. But just this last year, Club Helsinki in Hudson has been booking some really great acts (I caught a fantastic performance by Wye Oak last month). Is the Hudson Valley starting to establish a significant populace of (for lack of a better word) hipsters — or at least the destinations and designations of metropolitan cool that might attract them?

the dull ubiquity of placeless music festivals

Some questions for investigations here, presented in the form of a rant. As part of my research in musical urbanism, I consume a fair amount of music coverage in print and online. Jesus Christ, all I seem to find these days is "writing" about generic touring festivals headlined by Coldplay/Metallica/Fiona Apple/Beach House/you name it. News about new music festivals. News about cancelled music festivals. News about how the concert industry, which has put so much of its eggs in the festival basket, now outpaces the recording industry. And the evergreen question, what's the line-up for Coachella 2013? Look, I fully support the right of youth to indulge in the mass communion of bad sightlines, expensive food, sunburns and portapotty stench for the romantic pursuit of sex, drugs and [insert any pop genre here]. I've indulged in that myself.  Coachella, Glastonbury, Sasquatch, Werchter et al—by all means, let them be the gateway drug to a rich life as a music listener. But it's interesting and, frankly, discouraging that the generic, touring festival seems to be the end game for live music these days, with generally no thought being put to how live music might be presented more imaginatively and meaningfully for listeners and musicians alike. And, conversely, little attention is given to those more imaginative and meaningful festivals.   Place is an especially important concern here. While geography is what ostensibly differentiates one Live Nation mega-event from the next, inside the venues the performers, the lineups, the layout, the vendors etc. are generally undistinguishable and internchangeable across the events. They're carefully themed spaces that are paradoxically placeless, at least beyond the conceits of the event. The rise of generic touring festivals don't yet make me worry for the fate of cities, urban economies, or local music scenes. But I sometimes wonder if the dull ubiquity of big-money touring festivals makes younger audiences eager for the theming of their everday spaces: the commodification of colleges and universities, the insularity of the hipster neighborhood, and so on.

It's understandable why 'independent' music, which at one pre-ironic point in cultural history was opposed to such commodification, increasingly hitches its wagon to corporate music festivals today. Although touring the music-festival circuit can be a draining, exhausting slog, the promotional opportunity can't be beat, at least when these events are all any music publication or blog wants to write about. I suspect it also helps that "indie rock" is now mainly the purview of 20- and 30-somethings without dependents to tend to.

This is something that the EDM industry has especially figured out. The facts that this music thrives in nightclubs and other smaller venues, and that rock music has long dominated the festival circuit, make me think there's nothing intrinsically "rave" to the big-field setting for EDM festivals today. EDM has more likely thrived because the barriers to entry for performers are low. Bringing along a laptop or (for the old-school purist) a crate of records is all it takes for most DJs to hit the stage—no long load-ins or soundchecks necessary. Perhaps this infrastructural advantage is the real basis for the recurring rockist insult that "no talent is required to play electronic dance music."

At least those are my hypotheses. Here are a few more.

1. The context for this state of affairs isn't live music itself. Obviously, this is what happens after the recording industry loses its profit model. Live music is what David Harvey would call a spatial fix—a secondary circuit of accumulation that capital taps into when profits in the primary industrial circuit dry up. We're simply seeing the next iteration out from the recording industry's abandonment of artist development and its short-sighted embrace of the quick-profit singles market.

The above means let's not celebrate the initiative and entrepreneurialism of the "concert industry" just yet, since the high rate of event cancellations suggests they're still largely throwing business models against the wall to see what sticks. An important question for further investigation is, Just how distinct in name/experience/profile are the players and financial backers in the "concert industry" from the rest of the "music industry"?

2. If we might expect the bovine migration of the corporate sector to the music-festival sector, I'm more disheartened by the failure of imagination on the part of the music media to write about anything else. Their rote, uncritical coverage isn't limited to summertime, when festivals generally overshadow the release of noteworthy albums and (another dismaying phenomenon) the TV season for Idol, The Voice, etc. How many freakin' tweets have I read about Coachella: the bands, the fashions, the line-up for next year, the threat of its cancellation, yada yada yada? And South By Southwest... thank god for the SXSW tweet-blocker. I think at least three factors could be culprits:

a) the collapse of the publishing industry, which has shrunk staff, dried up money for original reporting (i.e., news that isn't "researched" via Twitter or a YouTube livestream), and made it hard for remaining music/arts & culture reporters—particularly at weekly alternative newspapers, still the source for the best local music coverage—to keep their ears to the local ground and make a living;

b) the tail-wags-dog rationale of bigger publications covering "what younger readers want." So Spin Magazine calls its July/August edition the "Outside Issue," etc. Implicitly, this further yields the album market to older/occasional listeners who (it will be assumed) want "the next Adele."

c) the convergence of culture reporting and business reporting that has been encouraged by the dominance of Richard Florida's creative-city paradigm. While the shrewd promoters will spin a line about how their event borrows from the SXSW model, city papers can now rationalize their arts coverage as a means to a more 'legitimate' end.

3. What's perhaps most surprising is the absence of traditional urban business community involvement in the music-festival sector. Why is this? The rare "post-rave growth coalition" notwithstanding, I suspect the players in most urban growth machines rarely overlap with the world of festival promoting. This may be because many of these events are held in big, exurban fields, which suggests that large-scale property owners will be the main node of connection. But so far I don't see much active participation (as opposed to passive profit-making) in festivals that happen in city environments either, short of a few notable exceptions—Austin, Berlin, etc.

Traditionally, being an urban booster on the chamber of commerce has been the antithesis of hip. Historically, this has been the basis for criticism of its philistine Babbitry. In these ironic, hipster-saturated times, it's a rare source of integrity for the urban business community. I happened upon a rare music event organized by a urban business improvement district recently: the Downtown Albany Blues Music Competition. Evidently the Chamber of Commerce even got to select the line-up of performing. How "hip" is that?

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?

my guest blog on Social Shutter re: Maryland Deathfest 2011

This week the visual urban sociology blog Social Shutter ran my photos and a new essay about Maryland Deathfest.  If you didn't see the post, I've reprinted it below.  And do check out Social Shutter, where Georgia State University sociologist Deirdre Oakley and her students offer some compelling and provocative photoessays.

Deathfest

Posted by Leonard Nevarez, BALTIMORE, MD -- The Maryland Deathfest (MDF) is the biggest festival for "extreme heavy metal" in the U.S. – and, so far as I know, the only urban festival in North America for heavy metal of any kind.  Since 2003, the event has drawn performers and fans from metal's most controversial sub-genres: death metal, grindcore, black metal, doom metal, crust punk, stoner rock, and their various hybrids.  These are the sounds that make parents around the world freak out if discovered in their kids' iPods.  On the whole, this music is bracing in its volume, speed, and discordance; the bands' names and lyrical content are intentionally blasphemous or stomach-churning; and vocalists' guttural growls and raspy screams convey the experience of eternal damnation and the despair at humanity's inevitable extinction. 

Needless to say, none of this music comes within miles of the music charts.  This is metal's deepest underground, historically overlooked by the corporate music industry. Yet it has become a significant industry of independent recording labels, music distributors, merchandise companies, music periodicals and blogs across the world.  While few of these bands could play to sizable crowds by themselves, MDF provides them a rare critical mass of consumers and media attention.  In turn, bands and listeners alike have lauded MDF for its discerning taste and global scan in selecting the most exciting and obscure bands in extreme metal.  This year the 63 bands on the festival schedule came from 17 nations across 4 continents.  Predictably, Scandinavia was well represented (Satanic black metal being almost synonymous with Norway), but even Greece and Saudi Arabia yielded excellent groups.

Admittedly, I'd lost touch with heavy metal's evolution since the 1980s and early 90s, the years when thrash metal (the first extreme sub-genre: Metallica, Slayer, etc.) flourished, and hardcore punk crossed over subculturally into the metal underground.  By that time, as cultural critics and sociologists of subculture have observed retrospectively, those musical developments contributed to the consolidation of the peculiarly omnivorous yet ironic cultural sensibility associated with the post-punk "neo-bohemia", captured so well in Richard Lloyd's Neo Bohemia and Ryan Moore's Sells Like Teen Spirit. Metal has since fallen largely under the pop-cultural radar, so I was eager for a quick submersion back into its underground.

As an urban sociologist, I was also interested in MDF’s social and geographic insertion into central-city Baltimore. Like so many other American rustbelt cities, Baltimore has continually lost population over the post-WWII era, having shrunk by almost a third since 1950.  Yet since 2000, according to the most recent American Community Survey, the 25-34 age group has increased, and now represents 16.7 percent of the city's total population. Evidence of a thriving bohemian enclave can be found around Baltimore, particularly the neighborhoods surrounding Johns Hopkins University. In these neighborhoods independently-owned coffeeshops flourish, along with renown record and zine stores; fashion boutiques and giftshops that incorporate with a wink the city's 1960s-era aesthetic (best captured by the films of local hero John Waters); and a small but celebrated local indie-rock scene (epitomized by Beach House, Dan Deacon, and Wye Oak).  Traditionally, heavy metal isn't associated with urban music scenes so much as state/national distinctions and the suburban landscapes of adolescent alienation.  However, I wondered if the elevated degree of musical/subcultural connoisseurship illustrated by MDF’s organizers and attendees reveals an emerging identification with the distressed-brick exteriors and haunted cityscapes favored by so many contemporary urban bohemians.

Three days in Baltimore at Deathfest provided much food for thought, if only speculative at this stage, as well as ringing ears.  Video footage from this year's MDF can be found all over the internet. Decibel Magazine's videos are a good place to start but watch the volume.

Leonard Nevarez is an associate professor of sociology at Vassar College.  He is the author of two books, Pursuing Quality of Life and New Money, Nice Town.  You can read more about Maryland Deathfest and view the rest of Leonard's photostream on his blog Musical Urbanism. He can be contacted at lenevarez@vassar.edu.

Maryland Deathfest 2011: my photos and a first take

Maryland Deathfest 2011, a set on Flickr.

So much to chew on from my weekend in Baltimore. Talked to a lot of folks, got a decent look at a few local areas, did some record shopping, and became acquainted with National Bohemian beer, a.k.a. Natty Bo, the cheap beer of choice in Baltimore. Plus, I woke up Saturday morning with a blood bruise in my eyeball that I have no idea how I got.

And Maryland Deathfest! I got a look at about 15 different bands over 3 days. The music was of inconsistent quality, but the scene was just great to soak up. Here are the photos I took on a cheap digital camera. View this as a slideshow and check out the descriptions ("Show info") for my commentary on the festival.