What Local Music Scenes Taught Me About Travel

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There are many ways to travel that don’t involve leaving home. Most people can relate to feeling transported by media or fantasy in the form of movies, books, or even video games. When I was growing up in a small town in Southeast Texas, it was rock music that transported me to other towns and taught me how different people think.

The topics that bands from New Jersey or Chicago wrote about were so foreign to anything me and my friends were concerned with. Aside from the lyrics and rhythm, the culture around the music scenes in these other cities even clued me into details about those places that I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise. For instance, my favorite bands from New Jersey were always talking about playing VFW halls and “basement shows”, but on the Gulf Coast we didn’t have basements. Even the accents and vernacular used by punk bands in different regions could tell you something about how they lived.

The bands and local curators that spawn from a place provide insight to the shared experience of living there. At first glance every artist from a city is so different, but over time patterns arise that point to a common ethos.

What does a city’s music scene tell you about the experience of living there?

Why did Seattle in particular produce so many grunge bands in the 1990s? What was it about the dreary weather and local politics of this time and place that created a very specific musical movement and microcosm of young people who all felt disaffected? While this question has been put forth a few times on “behind the music” type programs obsessed with the grunge genre, I’ve rarely heard the same question asked about other music scenes around the world. As I’m most familiar with the United States, I put forth the following examples.

New Jersey

In the early 2000s, New Jersey was having its post-rock moment. Interviews with bands like Thursday and My Chemical Romance, descendants of The Misfits and Bouncing Souls, alluded to the idea that growing up in “New York’s armpit” instills a working class set of values and a need to prove oneself. These bands often shared a dark razor’s-edge sound, usually punctuated by screaming, that reminded me of the grittiness of Batman’s Gotham and the underhanded alleyway negotiations painted for us by the Sopranos TV series, which was on the air around the same time. Interviews and lyrics of these bands also frequently had a flavor of “small town boys take on the world”. In later years Titus Andronicus carried on this tradition: “Cause if I come in on a donkey, let me go out on a gurney; I want to realize too late I never should have left New Jersey”.

Los Angeles

I originally moved to Los Angeles looking for beautiful atmospheric doom metal and noodly math-rock because I admired record labels like Sargent House and had an internship at Hydra Head Records. I found it in abundance, but I also found freaky garage proto-punk experiments, beachy mirages and sun-stained psychedelia, robust desert rock, and costumed glam rock revival in The Growlers, Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Allah-Las, Cherry Glazerr, Starcrawler, Queens of the Stone Age, Desert Daze festival, and Beach Goth. Some bands from California truly sound as if they sprouted directly from the ocean, the desert, the skate park, or even the last gasps of the Viper Room. Bands in Los Angeles sometimes utilize theatrics, or are otherwise lazily riding the waves of a trip. I was also inspired by the way the community supported each other, quite the opposite of the Hollywood stereotype. I felt a part of an entire world separate from the rest of LA when I was engaged with the appropriate scene pillars like The Echo/Echoplex, Vacation Vinyl, Echo Park Rising, FYF Fest, and Power of the Riff.

New York City

Meanwhile, when I think of New York City I think of wild post-punk, noise rock, and disorienting soundscapes on the one side, with world-weary apathy and sluggish self examination on the other. I remember nights that never had to end, DIY venues that did (RIP Death By Audio and Glasslands), walls that are still standing only by the collective adhesive of thousands of band stickers compiled over the years, fire code violations, late night taco runs, drinking a “pink baby” at Baby’s All Right at 2am, weird electronic two-piece art school experimentation, the lackadaisical worldview of overly sophisticated and apathetic bands, and music with a little more grit and gravel than the theatrical West Coast. I think of A Place to Bury Strangers, Guerilla Toss, Surfbort, Parquet Courts, and Skeletons. I also think of international bands that I saw come through town who were widely welcomed by New Yorkers, like IDLES, The Wytches, Iceage, Sleaford Mods, Dilly Dally, Savages, and shame.

Boston

When I was in college in Boston, it was all about the incubation of ideas. Almost everyone that used to be a Massachusetts band or institution became New York-based (Guerilla Toss, Speedy Ortiz, Exploding in Sound Records), LA-based (Slothrust, Dirty Dishes, Potty Mouth, Hydra Head Records), or defunct (Krill, Supervolcano, King Orchid, Red Bellows, G House Records, Boston Counter Cultural Compass). A few factors influence this: the high turnover rate of college-aged musicians, fans, and collaborators who graduate and leave town, lack of opportunity for growth past a certain point, and a feeling within the community that ambition makes you disingenuous. But, man does this town churn artists out! It was an exciting place to be, surrounded by ideas and a regular crop-up of new DIY venues every time the cops shut down the last one (RIP Wadzilla). I’m sure there is a whole new landscape of incredible bands there now. During my time, Boston was the second coming of Dischord Records (the home of Fugazi and Minor Threat in Washington DC), sprinkled with pop-punk, hardcore, and jazz-laden head-trips that exist either as a product of or in reaction to Berklee; it’s unclear which. Kal Marks, Pile, and Grass is Green carried on the traditions of Cave-In and Morphine.

Austin

Austin, Texas was the holy land for artists who grew up anywhere else in Texas. There’s great music all over the state, particularly swampy southern gothic, but genres collide and expand here. I love the laid-back down-home vibe that you can’t truly find in big coastal cities. I guess you could compare it to Nashville because of the country threads running through, but it recalls the indie art-folk of Portland, Oregon or the weird psychedelia of Los Angeles more to me. The words “desert”, “swamp”, “outlaw”, “party” or “devil-may-care” come to mind far before “country”. All that wide open empty space leaves a lot of room for outlaws to do some soul-searching. The Black Angels, Zorch, Ghostland Observatory, Explosions in the Sky, The Jesus Lizard, Scratch Acid, Ringo Deathstarr, Daniel Johnston, and Holy Wave aim to fill that expansive space. To the west in El Paso, The Mars Volta (and their previous incarnation At the Drive-In) mix Latin flavors into an otherwise indiscernible genre all their own.

With these observations in mind, it’s difficult to pinpoint just one theory on what it’s like to visit or live in these different towns. Of course every individual has a unique experience which is influenced by other factors like income, gender, sexuality, age, family dynamic, race (I’m aware most of these bands are entirely white), and even what exact neighborhood you live in. Perhaps what we learn from these sonic patterns in local rock music scenes is simply the overarching mood of each city, or at least of the young people in that city. The music can’t spell it out for us, but it provides hints.

Nowadays I’m not so involved in any music scene. I dove into nomadic travel and outdoor adventure, though I still find myself listening to location-specific music. For instance, in Paris I sought out Edith Piaf and listened to Charles Aznavour on repeat, which has helped me with language learning. On long drives I still pull up my old location-specific road trip playlists that include a lot of the artists discussed above. Still, these days I learn about travel destinations by visiting museums, wandering the streets, watching documentaries, reading blogs, and the like. I wonder why that is. I feel as if I learned more about local cultures by diving into their music scenes than I’ve ever learned using all these other methods combined.

Perhaps it’s time I jump back in the fray, to “fling [myself] from off the belfry” in Los Angeles, “drown in some dead end bar” in New York City, “roll the dice, pay the price” in Austin, “find a warm place that will smile backwards at you” in Boston, “get drunk off all of grandma’s schnapps” in Atlanta, “wait for the cold to lift” in Chicago, “bloody some poor actor’s nose” in Philadelphia, or “go out on a gurney” in New Jersey.

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