Fear and Loathing in Nashvegas
On visiting Nashville for my 40th birthday — They close the streets off to cars on Broadway at night so that the pilgrims can stumble and vomit wantonly. They keep them doped on bright lights, flat beer, Fireball, and loud grooves. Nashville’s Lower End has all the cultish energy of Mecca or the Stations of the Cross. They’ve come from everywhere to kneel to porcelain gods. They screech, slur, sing, and curse at Uber drivers. They come for “fun” but leave cow-eyed and possessed.
They travel on bikes that are bars, on the backs of buses that are dance floors, or are ferried by farm equipment; booze fueled tractor-taxis sow steady rows of crapulence. They move in packs and dress alike. They wear imitation cowboy hats or trucker hats, tank tops with bachelorette party slogans, and cheap leather boots.
Some come to watch the beasts. They bring their cameras. They arrive early and leave early. But not before they witness the opening liturgy of the Bacchanal. These gray-haired voyeurs — they are the only ones awake early enough to eat breakfast the next day. With their intense gaze, they are trying to tap and drain the pool of youthful energy that wells below 5th Avenue.
This daily festival is State sponsored. Tax incentives, police in neon vests directing the Hajj, ribbon cutting ceremonies. Everywhere you look they are building towers to hold more pilgrims. They’ve buried a lodestone somewhere, rumor is. They’ve built monuments and museums to memorialize the ritual.
I feel the sickness set in. The fear and loathing rises from a sense that we are really just glutinous beasts, that civilization runs on a stupefying mix of greed and hedonism. This is what pure id looks like in Western ware.
The honky tonks and bars, though, are penned in by churches. The Ryman stands apart, a red-bricked testament to pure spirit. Believers sit in pews and feel the pulse of life in every descending bass line and drum fill. The “mother church” is where the profane spectacle transforms into the sacred. If there’s any salvation or dignity off Broadway, it can be found in this ballast.
There is plenty of great music being made in Nashville. You trip over premiere musical talent at every turn. Most even play on Broadway. Art is made here, it seems to me, despite it being commoditized and fetishized by soulless profiteers. There’s being and life in Nashville. You just have to fight through the wasted herd to find it.
