Scene and be Seen

So the thing about the New York music scene is... well come on, it's New York. See, the bitch about being a native of the most talented and imposing art scene on the continent (don't complain to me, west coast. Even the Beats hung out in Patterson)
is that breaking into it in a meaningful way is damn *hard*. The scene here is so big and well-developed that you need to be popular somewhere else before you can run with the hip crowd here. Usually that somewhere else is wherever it is your from (for instance, The Hold Steady hails from the midwest). That works fine, unless you're from here. And yeah, technically I hail from hudson county, and yeah Hoboken had a scene for a while, gave rise to some noted greatness, but the damn place is so yuppified and stroller-friendly now that the chances of the next big thing in rock getting a start in Hoboken are pretty bad.

There are bands that make it though. That work hard for years until a scene that digs them comes into being and then *bam!* they're locked in to an environ of adoring fans, positive press, general rock-star-dom. Yes I'm talking about TV on the Radio, and yes, I'm talking about Williamsburg. And this brings me to something I was thinking about the other day, talking to a fellow musician about the potential of a scene of the same magnitude forming in Bushwick.

Architecture.

SOHO, Greenwich Village, Hoboken, Williamsburg--all these locations that go through an artistic renaissance before their inevitable fall into yuppification--have some unique architectural features. Lofts, abandoned warehouses, old industrial architecture that can be put to public purpose, that can become venues and galleries and studios. Look at downtown Jersey City, which was mostly brownstones and vacant lots, five or six years ago: it skipped the "scene" step entirely. The more and more I think about it, the more it seems that pre-existing architecture is the dominant factor in determining the path of gentrification, at least in this part of the world, already well flooded with individuals wanting to make art.