Sunday, February 06, 2005

Shocktroops of Gentrification, Mythologization!

The usual cacophony of internet voices (this author included) have swelled up in disaffected resentment with the publication of the heavily-anticipated (you're lying if you say you weren't looking for it) NY Times article, which appeared in syndicated papers a couple of days prior, and follows Spin magazine's guide to Montreal. The prime complaint, as it always is and always will be, was that the article was unrepresentative of the actual music community and distorts what people are involved in. I'm of the opinion that most of music is a not entirely unappetizing mixture of sounds, artifice and posturing, and that these complaints are predicated on the existence of the authenticity of one particular's scenes creative endeavours, or at the least the striving for that authenticity, which is (once again) false, and a rather boring little way to box one's self and others in.

Then again, I'm a late-comer to the city, am still enchanted by it, even the quaint aspects that I should be shunning, and have none of the foresight of the more established veterans, who toil away on post-rock operettas and self-published chapbooks and home-brewed beer, and regard this as a, uhh, tsunami of hype that will wash over and in its wake, drag away those unable to clutch onto the palm trees of authentic creative experience. (To top that bit of tastelessness, I will later on be defending gentrification as the last hope for the crumbling inner cities with a variety of Sudden Infant-Death Syndrome metaphors...)

At the least, I would hope that many can use this article as an excuse to justify to Ontarian parents the lazy, shiftless, slumming bohemian lifestyle.

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