Musicapolis

“You’re from Minneapolis? Right on. I hear there’s a great music scene there.”

If you’re into music, and if you travel at all, this is undoubtedly something you’ve heard while away from Home Sweet Frozen Tundra. I sure have, and it simultaneously gives me a warm fuzzy feeling and a smug little smirk of arrogance that I try in vain to disguise as hometown pride. It’s possible the look I’m going for bypasses both pride and arrogance and goes straight to pity for the poor chap on the receiving end who is not from MSP.

How did we achieve this reputation and join in the ranks of the Music Elite?

Did we pay off Clear Channel and wedge our way into the payola system in return for positive press leaked out via subliminal messages on the airwaves? Doubtful. If we can’t even afford to support public education (thank you, Mr. Pawlenty), then we probably don’t have enough to engage in an illicit affair with Clear Channel.

Are we still riding the wave of one Robert Zimmerman’s success with a decent segment of the American population knowing he was “from somewhere out in Minnesota”? Nope, that’s not enough. Especially considering many of Robert’s long-time followers are too permanently stoned to spread the Good Word in Musicdom.

Is it because Americans arrived in droves—airplanes, cars, buses, purple motorcycles, even!—in 1984 to purify themselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka? A lovely image of mass cleanliness, but again, the answer is no.

Then what, pray tell, is it?!? How did we get here?

It’s cultivating a Twin City-wide sense of culture and the arts. It’s knowing that on any given night of the week there is great live music right down the street. It’s producing and celebrating artists who create music, not just the next pop phenomenon marketed to over-sexed adolescents who will hear it approximately every third song on their local soul-less radio station. Let it be noted that this same crowd then puts said song on its collective iPod to listen to while working out—you know, just in case they didn’t hear enough Lady Gaga that day.

In short, the answer is this: The Twin Cities have proven themselves to be greater than the sum of their musical parts.

It is this “whole is greater than the sum” that creates the vibe and scene that this blog celebrates.

Musicapolis. Hell, yeah.