Shockoe and Awe

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may recall that I used to live in Richmond, where I sometimes found occasion to remark on the city's struggle to remake itself.

This is where I call a truce.

In fact, I want to make a peace offering to Jim Ukrop and all the people who've worked so hard to turn Richmond's downtown from an embarrassment into a disaster. In fact, it was Ukrop himself who once told me that his dad said it was better to make a fast nickel than a slow dime. By gum, Jim, here comes a fast nickel.

Last week, the Washington Post reported that Winchester, Va., and environs have begun to market themselves to federal agencies with an odd pitch: That they're far enough from the center of D.C. to survive a nuclear explosion.

That may seem Cold War-era thinking to people who don't remember the Cold War, when everyone on the East Coast assumed they'd die in a nuclear attack no matter where they lived. But this isn't about one country nuking us Day After style, it's about fears of a smaller-scale, though still deadly, terrorist attack.

Where does Richmond come into this? Stay with me.

Winchester is claiming that it's a safe place to relocate because it's 70 miles from downtown D.C. Well, Richmond is 90 miles from downtown D.C. That's fully 20 miles better than Winchester!

Of course, to make this marketing pitch work, you'll need to rally your best people. And you'll have to admit that there are advantages to staying in D.C. that are worth countering. That means--gulp--acknowledging that some might think D.C. is a more desirable place to live. So you can't sniff about the traffic, how you don't want "Richmond to turn into Northern Virginia," or act like you don't want to be closer to Ikea, anyway.

Here's your pitch: Anyone or anything that moves to Richmond effectively disappears off the nation's consciousness. It's entirely impossible that if, say, DEA moves to Richmond, most people will forget about the DEA! (Hey, it worked for Cracker.) Bad guys will grow complacent. Then DEA strikes! Substitute NEA or the Education Department, and conservatives are happy, too! Everybody wins.

But time is short. I hear Haymarket's making a serious play for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Act now, Jim.

Surely it's a better plan than this.

The Godfather of So...

James Brown, 1933-2006
In 2003, I was writing about Bonnaroo for Spin, and Ken Weinstein, the festival's publicist, got me, Mark Kemp from Rolling Stone, and I'm sorry but I forget his name from USA Today together and asked us if we'd be certain to ask James Brown questions during the press conference. It was the second year of the festival, and while there were a lot of smaller press outlets there, Ken wanted to make sure the Godfather felt some national-media love. We agreed, then realized we had to think of questions. I couldn't think of anything.

I called my friend Robert, who'd seen James Brown in New York a couple weeks earlier. "It was his birthday," he told me. "They wheeled out a cake for him and the whole crowd sang 'Happy Birthday.'" Not much of a question there. Finally, in a display that I'm sure would make all of our editors proud, the three of us conferred and hit on three questions we'd ask him strategically. Here's me asking him mine (1.4 MB). If you can get past my usual stammering, hamfisted interviewing "style," Brown's answer is worth waiting for, touching on his past as a janitor, the importance of a good education, SARS, Iraq, music at ballgames, and the meaning of life.

“There is no record business,” he said. “So whatever they are telling you is jive. That makes entertainment a little unstable.”

No one would ever contest that James Brown knew from unstable, or that he knew entertainment: During the show a few hours later, his valet stopped the proceedings and announced it was James Brown's birthday. They wheeled out a cake for him and the whole crowd sung him "Happy BIrthday."

Washington City Paper Music in Review 2006

The last couple of weeks I've been snowed under getting the City Paper's year-end music issue together, and it's out today. Leonard Roberge came out of retirement to edit the critics' poll one last time, and I was fortunate enough to cajole some of our amazing staffers and freelancers into writing a few great essays. I also wrote about Christmas music.

The Hotter They Come

Lately I've been listening to Hot 99.5. It's a radio station for people who care about Hotness. Last night I heard a contest in which people phoned in to vote on whether the new Nickelback song was "Sooo Hot" or "Soooo Not." It was Hot.

That got me thinking about Hot people. Hot people are the opposite of cool people. Cool people worry about being cool, about listening to the same music other cool people do, about filling in critics' polls and dressing cool, whether that be thrift-store chic or metrosexy.

Hot people don't think. Hot people do. Hot people wear product in their hair. Hot people use terms like "product." Hot people are on TV a lot. Like the people pictured at the top of the post.

Actually, they weren't on TV long. They were on my favorite show this summer, One Ocean View, which was entirely about hot people hooking up. Hot people hook up all the time. But they're nice about it, usually. Not like cool people, who are tormented. Critics hated One Ocean View, which was definitely Not Hot from my perspective. Critics aren't Hot. Except maybe Rob Sheffield.

Last night on Hot 99.5 I heard the new All-American Rejects song. I thought that band was kind of done, but I was mistaken--like Nickelback, they've just found the right audience: Hot people. Hot people don't care about musical boundaries--last night I heard Christina Aguilera and Ne-Yo, too. They just like music that sounds Hot. And there is a Hot sound. Everything on Hot 99.5 is EQ'd so the snare drums sizzle with mid-range glory, and singers' breaths between lines are prominent. There's a lot of treble.

Once I did a piece on the All-American Rejects. It was about how they were navigating the journey from punk to popularity. They were playing in Panama City, Fla., during Spring Break, for lots of Hot people. And strippers. The thing is, All-American Rejects were always music for Hot people. I must have been the only person who didn't get that. And now they and Nickelback and Hinder will never have to worry about eating again.

I, on the other hand, have dedicated my life to chronicling cool people. What an error! I will never look Hot, but goddammit I can write about people who do! Look for much Hotness coming from this direction in 2007, the year of Hot!

Act #2

I haven't had a lot of time to write this year (unless you count this badboy, which I actually wrote last year. For the last couple of months I've been working on a profile of Fugazi's Joe Lally. The story is out today. (Looks like the small caps dropped out on the Web version; the name of the Y-Not Stop in the first graf should be capitalized.)