Observations from a Seattle Vacation
The touring musician is a geographical dilettante. Unless blessed by an abnormally lenient schedule, they are far better acquainted with the highways leading into a given city than the city itself. How much can you learn about a city from a venue, the restaurant with the best prices nearest to it, and the gas station on the way to the next gig? Enough to lubricate a conversation with a local at a party or distill into quip for the folks back home, but hardly enough to stand in for real familiarity.
Pittsburgh? Sure is hilly! Phoenix? Sure is hot! Los Angeles? A collection of strip malls ruled over by a gargantuan Minion.
Even the tourist, armed as they are with free time and a guidebook, has a greater chance of seeing a representative slice of a city than the touring musician, if they choose to look up from their phones of course. It is for this reason that despite my upcoming month-long tour across the states, I carved out time at the start of July to take an honest to god vacation to Seattle, enough time to see more than a green room and a coffee shop in the morning.
Of course, since I am the kind of person that mulls over which song I should listen to on the sub-five-minute walk to and from the grocery store, my vacation was still organized around live music. At the center of my six day stay in Seattle sat Northwest Terror Fest, a three-day long heavy metal festival that since 2017 has transformed an unsuspecting block in Capitol Hill into a swarming nest of black t-shirts, leather jackets, and long hair.
This wasn’t my first time at this particular rodeo. In 2017 I covered the last two days of Northwest Terror Fest for Invisible Oranges (you can read that report here, although please forgive some egregious editing errors if you choose to do so). I had a great time during that trip, unexpected brush with auto-vehicular violence notwithstanding, though I barely left the festival grounds except to eat and sleep. This time around I gave myself a few buffer days on either end of the festival to explore the city and made sure to block off each morning for less sonically taxing sight-seeing.
Well, here’s what I saw:
Observation 1: Seattle has a color palate
Traveling north through the city by train, car, and foot on the day that I arrived in Seattle, I was struck by the consistency of its appearance. No other major American city that I’ve visited has so completely dedicated itself to a single aesthetic. What struck me first was the green. From SEATAC airport to Ballard, Seattle is littered with trees. All of that green pops out because of another omnipresent color in the city: grey. Yes, the rumors are true. It is often overcast in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle’s architects seem to have accepted this as an immutable fact and cast the city’s buildings in greyscale colors suited to low exposure. These greys rub shoulders with blues that range from maritime-deep to primary-bright. The final touch in this color palate is yellow accents, which once you start spotting them show up everywhere you look.
I haven’t told you anything you wouldn’t already know if you were familiar with Seattle’s sports teams, active and defunct. But hey, it’s not like everything in New York City is orange and blue.
Seattle’s visual homogeneity extends beyond its choice of color. The city presents a vision of a world where “Gentrification Serif” wins the war. You see these blocky minimal, nondescript modern houses everywhere in American cities these days. Usually they contend for space with older, more flavorful designs and stick out like a a grip of sore thumbs. In Seattle they are so high in frequency that the older buildings are the ones that seem out of place. As an uninformed observer, I hesitate to make any sweeping claims about how or why Seattle settled on this look - blame the tech money or the latent influence of Nordic architecture - but despite my general aversion to this aesthetic elsewhere, I can’t deny that given free reign over the face of the city it makes a pleasurable impression.
Observation 2: Everyone Rock Climbs
For the duration of my trip I stayed with my cousin, his partner, and his roommate in the northern end of the city. All three are avid rock climbers. At the coffee shop near their house where I’d compile notes each morning I overheard the baristas chatting about rock climbing on their off hours. The fish and chips spot that I grabbed lunch at one afternoon was right next to a climbing gym. When I found myself in the middle of a hike with my podcast cohost Joseph Schaffer1 and a duo of No Clean Singing writers after the end of Northwest Terror Fest, I could contain myself no further and blurted out a Seinfeldian “what’s the deal with…” about the whole affair.
With my heart rate resting at a leisurely pace, the answer isn’t that hard to suss out. Despite being one of the main hubs of the Inside-Boy-Industrial-Complex, Seattle is uniquely accommodating to outdoorsy types. On the obligatorily rainy day during my visit, I got the impression that the sudden ubiquity of REI was the Seattlites version of their Sunday best. Can’t say I blame them. If I were boxed in by lakes, beaches, and mountains I’d probably spend more time touching grass too. Instead, covered in seven layers of pizza grease and subway slime I gawked like a yokel at the sight of a beaver swimming by on the lakeshore.
Observation 3: Pop Culture is Dead
On the morning before the third day of Northwest Terror Fest I spent a few hours in the Pop Culture Museum, located in the shadow of the Space Needle. When I told the woman at the box office that I was in town for a heavy metal festival she smized over her mask and told me that it “made perfect sense” that I would want to see the museum too. I chuckled politely and struggled to keep myself from blurting out an incredulous “does it make sense, really?”
As I write this Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” is on the billboard charts for the first time thanks to a prominent placement in the latest and last season of Stranger Things, so clearly some heavy metal is pop culture on top of being old enough to belong in a museum. Whether that’s true of the rest of the genre is harder to say. Instead of debating a customer service representative I let my unspoken question permeate my point of view for the duration of my time in the museum.
In order to determine whether heavy metal is part of pop culture I first had to see what else made the cut. I started with exhibits about music. First, a photo gallery dedicated to hip-hop, a sure-fire inclusion as any music critic in the last ten years will gladly tell you. I watched hype beast teens swarm around a MF DOOM mask while I marveled at Rakim’s Follow The Leader jacket. I made a note of how strange it was to have travelled to the other side of the country just to look at pictures taken a train ride away from my house. Next I passed a collection of guitars sourced from rock stars, no sign of a metal shredder among them. Rounding out the musical wing were three exhibits dedicated to homegrown heroes, two dead one living. The dead, Hendrix and Cobain, were memorialized by ephemera, jewelry worn in photoshoots and notes left from high school. The living, the eternal Pearl Jam, loomed over the rest of the museum in a shrine at the very top of the building. The former made me feel gross, like I was on line in the cafeteria for bone marrow. The latter, like all things related to Pearl Jam, perplexed me to the point of alienation from my fellow man.
Bereft of metal where you’d expect to find it, I had to get metaphysical and look for traces of heavy metal’s spirit. Luckily the museum had three exhibits focused on genres that have long offered inspiration to metal bands. It was here in the Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror triumvirate that looking for spirits in this museum would be a needle in a haystack situation. What I mean is that this wing was lousy with ghosts. Each exhibit boiled down to a collection of props and concept art from movies held together by sub-Meow Wolf interactive decor. Much of the collection comes directly from Paul Allen, the former Microsoft executive and Portland Trailblazers owner. Taken on their own any one of these props would have been interesting. Taken together they made me feel like I had wandered into a pop culture mausoleum. It is a familiar feeling.
Another question that I found myself asking again and again was “who is this place for?”. I kept picturing some tech drone fresh out of the package, looking to catch up on all of this human culture they’re heard so much about. I kept wondering why they’d bother with a museum when you could just, I don’t know, go to the movies instead. Pop culture in 2022 is already a museum of itself. Whole wings of popular art are devoted to trotting out the relics of the past, urging us to remember their significance before shuffling us over to the gift shop. If you wanted to walk the halls of a rich man’s private collection of pop culture artifacts, why not fire up Disney+ and save yourself a bus trip?2
I was going to include a fourth section about the first two days of Northwest Terror Fest. However I have been struck by some extremely perplexing technical errors on my computer that are rendering me incapable of thinking about anything else for more than three seconds at a time. My hope is that these issues will be sorted out by next week so that I can return to Drumming Upstream. See you then!
I want you to know that season 2 of The Human Instrumentality Podcast is short at hand. We have a date set, we have multiple episodes primed and ready to go. All will be revealed soon. Thank you for your patience.
Incidentally, Seattle’s bus system is one of the more unforgiving that I’ve come across. Missed your bus? Good luck, the next one is in half an hour. Unacceptable imo.