Denver's Music and Arts

Word Count: 2246
Read Time: 10 min

I'm of the opinion that equipment doesn't matter. Give a man with a heart a $25, beat-up guitar, and he'll fight his demons right there in front of you--be it a cheap guitar or a hired orchestra. And there's no show capable of crossing that vast ocean between people like witnessing another’s intelligent being challenged by his own struggle to live. In the music scene of Denver, Colorado, men and women come together battling their soul-body conflict in the open, producing the finest melodies they can sing and the finest selection of lyrics they can assemble.

When they perform, they communicate with their heroes, transcending the humdrum of daily life, transcending the body-soul duality, getting above language and time to enter the arena with those who have come before them and with those who will come after. Anyone playing music in the town is a hero, giving to the community their life-blood with voluntary public lacerations. These artists’ live, defecating performances are afforded by the sincere attention and respect offered by the Denver audiences.

Listening sets Denver apart from the music scene of Austin, TX. In Austin, a musician can get gigs, play regularly, and be heralded by an audience. But Austin lacks listening. People in Austin go in with an intent guided by their unique pleasure-seeking motives and have no intention to hear something new. Why should they? They're in a town that seems to be doing it right.

In 2018, Austin's at the pinnacle of success. It had the foundation for it in the 60’s and 70’s when the blues stars were smoking weed in the local bars, but didn’t catch on to popular culture until about 2006. Twelve years later, Austin is at an all-time high and there is no turning back. Austin’s reached star status with 20 cranes applying an industrial makeover and it will be years before there’s any blemish tarnishing its vanity. It is a booming tech economy, with great food, a cooperative government, and only people aged 22-36 walking the streets. It’s a social club and the price to entry is a high rent price, a specialized set of technical skills, and a high tolerance for the work-hard, play-hard lifestyle.

The problem is music is celebrated in Austin like it is a commodity. It’s as common as cocaine and girls’ year-round, polka-dotted sun dresses. Members of the club go on East Austin‘s First Friday art walks to get drunk and take a selfie just so everyone in their network knows they’re “cultured.” They partake in appreciating art for art’s sake, and wouldn’t hear of stopping to pause and allow the art to take them out of the confines of their exceptional social position into a new mode of being.

Austin has shows and the shows have attendance. But where the life is good, music is celebrated. In Denver, music is treasured. Denver fights for acceptance as an art community. It’s the underdog laughed and scoffed at by places like Austin, Los Angeles, and New York City. Denver’s government is a huge supporter of the arts, but that’s like showing up to the party and patting yourself on the back while everyone around you is in a circle-jerk. Denver’s off their radar, and it shouldn’t be.

In its own dogfight, Denver’s music has a similar purpose to that of the old slave songs, where the oppressed people are united through song. Austin’s music is meant to keep everyone at the top of the hill, Denver’s music is meant to get everyone to the top of the hill. Spontaneous singing occurs on streets. These aren’t just buskers. These aren’t self-serving shower-singers or car-singers. These are people singing out in the open to get out of their skin and to take everyone with them. They share their accomplishment with others. They find pleasure in the vibrations in their chest and announcing to the world their conquered grief. They sing a melody to bind a people, to reach beyond their condition. Each song belted out, saying, “We are contributing members of humanity.”

One group of homeless men congregates religiously around a dried up fountain on the fault-line of gentrification where the tectonic plates of Denver’s Uptown and Five Points districts meet. On shaky ground, a man will stand up and pronounce with a melody, “I’m goin’ to get my check today. Oh baby, I’m goin’ to get my check today.” The others circling the fountain clap their hands and sing with him and encourage him, “Get it! Yes! Get it!”

At a café on the northwest side of town, a girl storms into the joint, throws her bag on the table, sits and rests her head in her hands. After three minutes of intense sobbing, she rises and goes to talk with the baristas. It's clear she’d befriended them with previous encounters while possessed by this similar state, and they talk her down from it with compassion. 20 minutes later, one of the two baristas ends his shift and picks up the guitar from the corner of the shop and sits at a table with the girl. He plays guitar and she sings soulfully, ridding the air of an honest pain.

LA jokers may approach creating the content for a story like, “This will be a funny bit. Others will like it. If not, well…we tried. And we have the resources to try a lot! One will strike!” The players of Denver say, “I like this, and others will listen.” That’s an incredible bond between artist and audience. Their creations are granted an unequaled power when they’re not restricted by a like button. The musician’s melody exists for only that moment in time’s passing. Diversity in musical acts branch out in many directions because there is no mirror to conform the artist’s path. The artist lives through the lives of its audience, not the eyes of its reflection. In this configuration, the artist is granted the ability to follow his own curiosity. The path down the rabbit hole is welcomed. It’s sacred. And the audience champions it, following the artist in hopes to be taken somewhere unusual.

Lacking a mirror doesn’t diminish the artist’s awareness of other art scenes. This pairing only amplifies the artist’s competence and productivity. Denver artists know they're an underdog and fight like hell to make something of it. They continue adding to their pile of treasure like a mass with building potential energy.

And the energy can grow because there’s little atmospheric noise. There's money in the coastal towns. They've got heart, too. But their art is wrapped within the noise of the dialogue they're in. With a dampened noise, Denver can create simple art statements that carry true through other cultures. It’s like articulating the prime number that exists within other larger numbers. A California artist can make a statement challenging gender norms by bedazzling a bunch of punching bags, the larger number, which will make sense in the communities where people associate punching bags and boxing to masculinity (along with an artist’s statement about how they wanted to challenge gender norms), but Denver can tackle art on gender norms with a much simpler statement, like stating the prime, “non-binary”. Denver sets the prompt for other artists and bows its head in humility when the coastal societies only add and run-off in the dialogue it reified.

The population of Denver is a selective sample of willing participants designed to capture a culture that values less noise and more listening. Denver’s the go-to destination for one of the first massive migrations of social outcasts. People who think about their current situation, “I don’t want to be a part of this game,” now have the ease of travel and the availability of jobs to move! First, the job market is strong. Second, with the internet and quick communication, the job market is shedding its physical restraints and taking on a “work-remotely” structure. Now, all these people who don’t want to be a part of the social culling in their own town have mobility, and have found refuge in Denver where that ugly, culling feature of society is ignored, or, simply, allowed to inhibit the culture gracefully.

This new workforce of America is engaged in a huge social experiment with millions of migrants choosing where they wish to belong, and all those avoiding the daily social grind choose Denver. Denver must have travel billboards posted in towns across America, or catchy hashtags, advertising it as: The last place on earth to just…be.

This movement of people used to be imperceptible at the scale of “a nation,” and was reserved for the analysis of cities. A railroad or a highway used to be the separator of black and white neighborhoods. The communities used to be of only a few thousand people- maybe tens of thousands. Now, with the mobility of people at an all-time ease, it is cities, not neighborhoods, that symbolize some set of beliefs, and the independent workers are quickly resituating themselves accordingly. No longer will it be a street that divides the communities, but it can be whole mountain ranges, or even oceans, placing distance between people and their differences.

All these people whom left their towns, left for some peace and quiet. Their tolerance for the status quo piqued and they abandoned the noise of their calls to dress a certain way, to stay tuned to the tweets, to fight with the Jones’, just to be somewhere else. So Denver’s an engineered audience where everyone is open to listening. Listening is embedded into Denver’s cultural code and the dance between artist and audience marches onward, quietly, skillfully, with a potential energy ready to explode.

I must turn my attention, now, towards Denver’s primary independent paper, and bare with me as I express my disdain. I applied a couple times and one of the journalists there told me my writing needed work. But I’d just read a self-indulgent article of his, where he’d attended a Kesha concert. He spent time in his article to hate on the fan-girls at the pop artist’s concert. That’s not a story. And what does a journalist take his audience for if that’s the kind of reporting being conducted?

The Westword’s “Arts and Culture” section is composed of marijuana advertisements, band announcements, and new writer announcements. It’s a bulletin board of local acts and offers no literature within its own medium of journalism revealing something about Denver’s culture itself- showing human behaviors and the choices people make, for example. Instead, the primary Arts and Culture writer has a thing for commenting on the obsessive nature of the fan girls for the show he’s been paid to attend, and rejects his reporting responsibility, being accountable for his gaze, to make nods within a pre-set aesthetic of behavioral values where the real work of writing has already been done for him. He doesn’t have to define the moral basis for that which moves him! He takes the easy way out. He can say a line-

“Next to me sat a massive, gruff young man…He didn’t say hello, even though our bodies were touching... He was a lone wolf, waiting for the show, and I couldn’t help but worry why he was there, in an ocean of teenagers,”

- he can say that line because an audience already gets that writing, gets that irresponsible condition, and can get an easy laugh. If the standard he sets in his writing is to speak up because of some socially, mandated courtesy, such as, “He didn’t say hello,” then the author failed to meet the expectations of his own standard. Their touching clearly bothered him; he was accountable to say something as well. Why is the burden of responsibility only on the other guy?

I wish the paper would follow some druggies to cover the opioid story of Denver. Go talk to the Frack’ers in North Denver to see what they’re uptight about. Cover the changing cultural condition of Colfax. Place me, as a reader, inside these environments of these people. Don’t attend a fleeting pop artist concert passing through like a Barnum & Bailey circus, and pronounce “good journalism” because you chose a bag of peanuts over cotton candy because licking the salt from your hands from peanuts is easier than licking off the sugar from the cotton candy. Way to avoid a mess.

But it’s not just the Westword. Poor reporting has become an industry norm. Writing has taken on some short-form of a ten-list framework and seems to require a literalism which used to only be reserved for instructions to a science experiment and M.D.’s who’d better exchange the prescription data to the pharmacies precisely- no patient should wind up with the wrong treatment.

Society’s quest for the truth, lately, comes in continuous quick bursts of meaning through top-ten lists, life-hacks, short-lived memes, and an imbalanced value for “The Whistleblower”, and becomes void whenever there is empty space between moments. Truth, now, is the acquisition of self-knowledge through an external probe of data and Psychology Today articles telling a person how and who she is. This methodology creates a society desperately reaching for the truth to be spoon-fed to them in a way that only gets more and more frantic. The descent into hell is taking both audience and journalists with it, and quality journalism needs a renaissance. Journalists can rise and be a bigger man, and readers can demand more of its journalists.