Locals complain about St Louis more than any out-of-towner. Since high school most everyone I know in music has complained about the lack of talent, resources and cool shows. Since I’ve been involved (2001-ish) I’ve witnessed scenes grow, gain momentum and then slowly die. Usually the scene couldn’t take it to the next level and lost steam; transitioning from teens to twenties to thirties usually means less time and money to keep going; or people left to pursue music in a bigger city. For St Louis, this doesn’t just happen in music either, but we see art (BEIGE) and startups (Square) leave too. The main reasons:

We lack the local resources to support our communities We’re too fragmented and need more cross-community collaborations Lack of access to capital for emerging practices and projects

These issues don’t address risk — the focus of this post — and are actually a topic I discuss in forthcoming post; however, lack of risk-taking is a symptom of these problems. Even so, let’s tackle the lack of capacity for risk in St Louis first.

They won’t get it

I caught myself saying this recently. I’m planning a new music series with The Luminary called Heavy Meddle and while brainstorming on a concept and lineup I initially picked a very niche aesthetic and worried that it would be poorly received because people wouldn’t get it. I thought maybe I needed to start with something less subtle than a JACK댄스-inspired, hyper-sacchrine-pop party. (Sidenote: I later scrapped the idea because it was a meh idea and not because it was inaccessible.) A few days later I'm talking with Grant Nikseresht from KSLU and he said something spot on (paraphrased)—

We need to quit planning things based on what will be received well. We all want to push the St Louis music community further but we ditch risky projects to avoid the complaining from the people that won’t get it and lack of turnout, which continues to lower the bar for quality.

Even your one-time avoidance of risk affects the community on a macro level. If you’re familiar with risk homeostasis you know that people will increase risk if they feel more protected. In the case of St Louis music, if people feel that the community supports risk they’ll take more. By illustration, the safer skydiving gear becomes, the more insane the risks people attempt; The safer it is to take risk in the music community, the more bold the risks will be.

Another reason we falter in this category is because we don’t have competition in St Louis like New York, London and California does so we’ve become comfortable. Our music scene is like some big industry leader that’s become too big to care about innovation. It became vanilla and clumsy. Ripe for cooler tech companies to remove it from it’s position. That’s St Louis. Or it was.

(Incomplete) History interlude

I’d like to say things have come a long way — but is that true? I think St Louis has been cyclical with some big spikes from time to time. We have moments but they’re fleeting. Like our cool but forgotten post-punk movement (Jet Lag Magazine, Raymilland) to the early aughts shallow hip hop spotlight, to our faded out indie scene (which peaked and barely broke out of the Midwest in the mid to late 2000s); our music history in the late-20th to 21st century has been fun but always unsustaining. Probably our most consistent scene is noise, punk and hardcore.

I’m not suggesting that success is determined by a scene lasting forever or importance determined by popularity (case in point: Jeremy Kannapell aka Ghost Ice is one of the most important artist to come out of St Louis and is just now getting modestly recognized). I’m suggesting that we need to minimize the troughs to keep momentum and continue growing to prevent from becoming stale.

However, there’s a renewed feeling of electricity that’s stronger than ever before. Will it last?

(By the way, I know there is a handful of people that have been unyielding to make the music community better. I don’t want to make that list because I’ll screw it up. Feel free to make your own list in the notes.)