Nashville is a city established along the banks of a river and built by the railroad. The crisscrossing train tracks and waterways brought in people from all walks of life, a melting pot of Appalachian, southern, and mid-western culture. It’s a city which was once on the edge of the American project, where vagabonds, miscreants, and frontiersman would come to gamble, dance, drink and engage in every practice that would make a pearl-clutching-Puritan have a conniption. Nashville was a city where a penniless country boy with a heart full of songs and a six string on his back could blow into town and build something for himself by sheer grit and gumption, making a living writing songs that floated over radio waves to the hills and hollers and down rural back roads where country folk could hear songs written by and for people like them. It’s a city where Johnny Cash wrote songs that stuck a middle finger in the face of silver spooners only to now have his image and likeness commodified and posthumously and propped up in a dark and cramped museum off Broadway like a wax statue at Madam Tussaud’s. It’s a city hellbent on making weed illegal while romanticizing Willie Nelson and his stoner pals who once rolled joints in the home studios run out of basements and back houses on 16th street, studios which no longer exist but are memorialized on plaques in front of towering glass skyscrapers bearing major label logos. It’s a city that promises a carefree good time while seeking to pass legislation that would install a dystopian AI-driven panopticon to make sure that the party doesn’t get too out of hand. Nashville is caught in a near-constant state of contradictions.
Nashville is a city where true punks play free shows to small crowds in the empty lots where pay-for-parking profiteers plant signposts sporting QR codes to make a quick buck off of pavement plots they did nothing to warrant anyone paying a single penny for. It’s a city where ravers dance in rotting mobile homes tucked away off of Nolensville Pike while cutting-edge clubs downtown host world class DJs playing to stagnant dance floors lined by Patagonia-wearing businessmen standing with their hands in their pockets until they get bored and go axe throwing next door. It’s a city where you can go line dancing across from the Grand Ole Opry but where the regulars glare at anyone who doesn’t know the moves by heart (I felt more in the way than invited to learn when I went with friends to The Nashville Palace, I ended up ditching the dance floor to play a round or two of pool with strangers before leaving). It’s a city where country stars from across the sea gaze out onto the skyline from their hilltop mansions in Brentwood between trips to California where they’re writing their next multi-platinum record. It’s a city where Southern hospitality has been usurped by city folk who don’t care to talk to their neighbors. It’s a city that wipes its historic buildings off the map save for pockets of Historic East Nashville and Germantown where realtors refurbish and flip Victorian manors for label executives who need a spot to crash in town while they aren’t at their vacation homes in the Tennessee countryside sipping whiskey.
It’s a city where every coffee shop is staffed by incredibly talented musicians who serve $10 lattes to young creative professionals from all over the country who couldn’t name a single Chet Atkins song if they tried (it takes one to know one, I’m afraid to admit). It’s a city where scrappy indie artists attend small venue shows on weeknights to shake hands and network with other musicians who are more their competition than their comrades. It’s a city where hard working singer/songwriters attend open jam sessions to play second fiddle to the in-crowd, the same cliques that wax poetic about community while gatekeeping their footholds on notoriety. It’s a soulless façade of a town where inoffensive art is hyper-commercialized and elevated to the highest status of celebrity while rough-and-tumble artists struggle for a leg up playing to empty bars. It’s a city where the underground communities that once shared in the spotlight are being pushed into the shadows. It’s a city with a thriving queer culture (I saw god at a drag show at PLAY) that unites in solidarity to dance the night away while state politicians a mile down the road turn their vitriol into laws designed to eradicate their very personhood. I met Trans organizers who gave their every fighting breath to aid those in their community living without the resources necessary to serve them. It’s a healthcare hub with no care for those who need it most.
It’s the most rapidly gentrifying city in America whose priciest apartments tower over what was once an industrial rail yard (in a neighborhood aptly named The Gulch). It’s a city whose signature dish of Hot Chicken was first fried up in greasy spoons that now languish in obscurity while tourists on Broadway stand in lines around the block to eat the same commodified chicken sandwich I could get all the way over in Texas (Hattie B’s just opened a location in Dallas, the power of franchise continues its death march towards American monoculture). It’s a city built on a warped memory of its history and being built by a confused vision about its present. It’s a city fixated on re-creating the past while constructing a future antithetical to the values which once gave it identity.
I came to Nashville in 2023 in search of the mythical Music City, but the city I’m now leaving is one that was born in the era of radio and records and is dying on the altar of the streaming age. After a year in town, I moved to East Nashville. In the 18 months I lived there, I witnessed firsthand the city’s mutation. I watched from the back porch of my DADU while single family homes across the street were boarded up, torn down, and replaced by town homes made of papier-mâché and cardboard meant to host success-seeking transplants who DoorDash $18 salad bowls while living just across the street from a local soul food restaurant serving up home cooked meals for Black churchgoers on Sunday afternoons. It’s a city alienated from itself.
I had hoped that Nashville would have no shortage of shows, events, and activities to keep me occupied, but on most weekends the precipitous cost of Ubering downtown (that is, if you decided that the cheaper Sisyphusian undertaking of driving downtown and trying to find free parking yourself was too much of a hassle) for a necessarily expensive night out would usually keep my friends and I in our respective homes. Some nights I would opt instead to wander the back streets of East Nashville, waving wordlessly to my hometown neighbors as they tended to their gardens, caring for the land while it was still theirs to sow. On my walks I passed shuttered pool halls and saloons, local churches that sat vacant and boarded up after their congregants had been scattered to the winds, and multi-family homes of immigrant workers who were afraid to leave for groceries while masked ICE agents prowled the streets of Middle Tennessee. I paced aimlessly along the sidewalks which offered no benches upon which to rest my laurels, a faux-cowboy without a post to hitch his tired horse to. What’s a southern boy to do when no one wants to go to the honky-tonk?
But I did seek ways to put down roots in my new city. I attended weekly community meals in what was once a beautiful neighborhood church that had been abandoned by its congregation after the main sanctuary was burnt from the inside by a fire. In its side building, disconnected out-of-towners like myself broke bread with displaced locals. I spoke one night to a woman who told me with tears in her eyes about how she had spent her whole life in a house down the street, caring for her dying father while the medical bills piled up. Eventually, the crushing debt of acquiring medicine in Healthcare City left her unhoused and on the streets of the neighborhood she had once called home. It shook me to my core to realize what role the inundation of people like myself was playing in the hollowing out of zombified Nashville.
Occasionally, in the shadow of the still-being-constructed new Nissan stadium, I joined the local DSA chapter in serving meals to encampments of unhoused folk scraping by on the muddy banks of the Cumberland, sheltering under the highway bridge that leads to City Hall where politicians signed off on plans to harass them into fleeing before the innocent eyes of Titans tailgaters and Taylor Swift concertgoers on the weekends could witness the indecency of their suffering only a railroad’s width away. Under a highway overpass on the other side of town, a whole community of unhoused folks was bulldozed to make room for amenity apartment buildings soon to be rented out to young professionals, a not-insignificant number of them likely working in the music industry. Nashville is continually torn between serving its working class locals and attracting white collar business from out of town whom the city hopes will bring prosperity to the local economy. Prosperity for whom, I wonder?
Despite my many grievances, though, I still found a lot to love in Nashville. I met venue owners who were dedicated to fanning the embers of the underground music scene, enterprising small business owners who created third spaces for creatives in a city increasingly without them, and community organizers endeavoring to bring people together for a good time to get through these dark days. Below is a selection of my favorite parts of Nashville’s home grown music culture.
Artists:
The best live performance I have seen from the current shoegaze revival. The drummer is an absolute machine and the vocalist is a dead ringer for Belinda Butcher. They played to DRKMTTR like it was CBGB in the ‘80s.
Their show at SOFT JUNK was the most ridiculous musical spectacle I have seen in a very long time. When the punk show has stage puppetry you know it’s going to be insane in there. This scuzzy punk rock band feels like Carrot Top played through a distortion pedal.
A home town hero in the truest sense of the word. He played a solo set to DRKMTTR that quieted a room that usually has some kind of dirtbag mosh pit activity going on.
Folk historian and sound artist Daniel Bachman makes music that speaks to the haunting eeriness of Appalachia. Hillbilly Hauntology (and I use that label as the highest compliment).
Their cover of Forever Young was a staple on my road trip playlist. They’re staying true to the roots of ‘80s synth pop and new wave but with a modern polish.
A larger than life soul and an entertainer in every sense. The physical embodiment of Animal from The Muppets. I saw his set at Musician’s Corner in Centennial Park and it was overwhelming for most of the audience. He’s a big fish in this small pond.
His set at Bummeroo 2024 made me want to mess around making music on my laptop again, and his stage presence is singularly unique. His music is what I imagine Nes from Smash Bros might make.
Eve was the first Nashville musician I found out about through Bandcamp, and I ended up seeing them all the time at indie music events in town. Their set during the 6 hour Nashville Drone event was insane. Synth heads tap in.
Every time Relica was behind the decks I knew the set was about to go crazy. They spin exclusively music to throw ass to.
Big Dreamy Head is such a sweet song and it makes me wish that more pop country sounded like this.
I saw his set at Pride 2023 and he’s since moved to New York to pursue hyperpop stardom. Dude was giving Britney Spears level concert choreo at the smallest stage at Pride and that tells me all I need to know about this guy’s talent.
Events/Venues/Scenes:
An all ages grassroots punk venue and community organizing hub for radical leftists with a penchant for mosh pits and anarchy. The lead singer of Anxious clocked me in the jaw while throwing windmills in the pit when they played here. It rocked.
A performance space, venue, and art gallery, and community space with impeccable taste
Truly one of the most unusual venues I’ve ever seen a show at and the site of one of my hardest pictures I’ve ever taken. The mosh pit during Snooper’s show here was transcendent.
Whoever the organizers for this were, y’all need to keep doing it. Bummerroo 2024 was a backyard twee-pop music festival with tons of heart and incredibly talented performers. I cried, danced, and had some really good pizza here.
If this venue only existed so that I could see a Skream DJ set than it will have all been worth it. This club has taste that is wasted on this town.
Nashville needs more reasons to rave and more people like this with the know how to build the scene they want to see. These ladies have a killer soundsystem and a pure ethos for dance culture.
Whichever queen it was who did Hair Caught in the Shower Drain as their costume for Halloween 2023 will forever live in my Halloween Mt. Rushmore. The surest spot in town to have a good time.
A yearly music festival hosted at Bicentennial park (as opposed to Straight Centennial Park, ahaha), I got to see some crazy sets here and tickets were like $10. Slayyyter, Saucy Santana, and Four Non Blondes were some highlights for me.
The first one was an insanely good time that I weathered blizzard conditions to attend and I’m forever upset that I had a fever and missed the second one. Hearing a cover of Temporary Secretary live is a rare treat, especially when performed by an incredibly solid band in front of a packed room.
Disctrix
Listening to dubstep played in a trailer home was truly the epitome of cybergoths under the bridge-core. Disctrix is for the furries, the tweakers, and the rave heads.
When no one else had me, I knew Marty’s had me.
While doing work at my regular coffee shop during my last week in Nashville, I struck up a conversation with a musician who I had seen perform a few weeks earlier at The East Room. I told her that I had enjoyed her set. As we spoke, she explained that she had moved to town from Canada to pursue songwriting, and that she was working as a barista in between making music and touring. She confessed to me how much she hated playing to Nashville crowds. The rooms she performed in would empty out before the main act’s set had even started, and good sound guys were few and far between. She mentioned that she felt better received by audiences in other cities when she played on the road, “and I can actually make money touring in Canada,” she told me in frustration, “which I can’t do in the states.” I told her that I wished the version of Nashville musicians were moving to town for was more accessible to them. But Nashville is not my city to grieve, so I’ll let the words of Haley Williams speak to the experiences of Nashvillians who wake up each passing day to a city they no longer recognize and the musicians who blow into town only to get the stars knocked out of their eyes. The general sentiment of all the locals I’ve spoken with, though, is something to the tune of “Nashville, I love you, but you’re bringing me down.”
One night later that same week, I walked out of my apartment and down the alley, walking two blocks uphill and then across Cleveland Park along the train tracks. I crossed the four lanes of traffic on the eponymous Cleveland Street and up onto the bridge overlooking Ellington Parkway. The silhouette of the Batman Building stood distant against a gray and orange sky. I lifted up a middle finger to the skyline and took a picture of it on my phone, well aware how the oncoming traffic below me might be interpreting the bird. It was a silly and crass gesture communicating a deeply individual negative association to an otherwise entirely oblivious metropolitan area of three-quarters-of-a-million people, a meaningless display of rebellion directed towards everything and nothing, but it was a an expression of my personal frustration at the tail end of a time during which I had tried and failed to make Nashville feel like home.
Despite the pervading sense of pessimism and futility in Nashville’s indie music scene, there are still pockets of those who are dedicated to pursuing art no matter the cost. These scenes are supported on the shoulders of musicians and creatives who still cling to the belief that there is something authentic and valuable simmering beneath the polished surface of New Nashville. All the locals I met were hardworking and friendly salt-of-the-earth people who take care of their kin and kind and who incessantly root with hoarse breath for their losing home team that will never bring home another victory. I sincerely hope, however, that someday it will.