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The
Shield Around the K: Candice Pedersen (above) packs serious
scene heat
www.emplive
.com
Admission
to EMP is pegged at a hefty $19.95 a head. Memberships,
which allow multiple visits and other privileges, start
at $35.
EMP
has reportedly gathered nearly 100,000 artifacts, of which
only about 1,400 will be displayed at any one time.
Sub
Pop Records, the label that defined the so-called "Seattle
sound" 10 years ago, has helped the Project assemble a pair
of compilations for EMP.
Mark
Arm and Steve Turner of Mudhoney worked on EMP exhibits,
as did Wordsayer, the razor MC of Seattle hip-hop veterans
Source of Labor.
Later
this summer, virtual representations of hundreds of artifacts
will be available in a "digital collection" on EMP's website.
The
Project's deep pockets allowed staffers to splash plenty
of cash around for artifacts. "When we were working on hip-hop,
people were used to folks coming in and just asking them
to give stuff away," Jim Fricke says. "But my attitude was,
if I was trying to talk someone out of a poster for one
of the key events in the history of hip-hop culture, I was
going to give them a price that reflected that importance."
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Yes, the building refuses to be ignored. The Experience
Music Project swells from the lawns of the Seattle Center
like lava billowing from a crack in the earth. It's a $240
million mad science project, a looping feedback scream in
a city dominated by quiet architecture. Even though the
public took a look at EMP's innards last weekend, atom-splitting
architect Frank Gehry's eruption is almost all anyone talks
about.
Small surprise. Even inside, the building's insane. The
first thing to confront a visitor is Sky Church, a vastly
vaulted bad-trip cathedral dominated by a three-story video
screen. Everything is cool blue and sleek to the point of
surreality. It's as though you've beamed down to one of
those conveniently unicultural planets the Star Trek gangs
always visit. Greetings, spacefarer...we are the Groovy
People, yeah...come you in peace?
Yet, if you look beyond EMP's daunting scale, you find
that software oligarch Paul Allen bought himself more than
a high-tech trophy. The cash Allen splashed out to build
a temple to the music he happens to dig also stirs a team
of curators, editors, writers, tech nerds, librarians, fixers,
arrangers, professional scenesters, lawyers and flacks--a
deep-funded think tank, essentially, dedicated to American
music.
What those people are trying to do is even more ambitious
than the building they work in. They're trying to create
a rock-and-roll museum that isn't dumb.
That's tough, because in principle, nothing is as tragically
uncool as a "rock-and-roll museum." The very notion
is so laden with doom that even academics, who labor daily
in the most ossified of intellectual environments, aren't
sure it could ever work.
"By a certain logic, if you're a rock act, as soon as you're
embraced by something like a museum, you're finished," says
professor Robert Thompson, who teaches American pop culture
at Syracuse University. "As soon as the curators discover
it, how cool could it be?"
The thing is, it turns out that the Experience Music Project
is pretty cool, and not because its headquarters
contain enough digital cable to giftwrap the planet. Three
factors save EMP from drowning in cheese: where it is, who
works there and the philosophy they embrace.
Indie-rock credentials don't come more ironclad than Candice
Pedersen's. She helped found K Records, the label that chronicles
and drives the tremendously prolific underground music scene
in Olympia, Wash. Lo-fi, quirky and ruggedly successful,
K became such an icon of Northwest music that Kurt Cobain
got a tattoo of the label's logo.
Last year, though, Pedersen sold her interest in K and
took a job with the Experience Music Project.
"It's really a very conservative time in music right now,"
Pedersen says. "The major labels are too scared of the new
technologies to let people do their jobs. On an indie level,
there are a lot of people like me who've been doing label
work for a long time.
"I asked myself, where are all the smart people going?
Where's the excitement? And I realized that they were going
to Internet companies."
In that sense, Pedersen is just another brainiac '49er
in the vaunted new-economy gold rush. But as far as Paul
Allen is concerned, she may as well be made of solid gold
herself. Her reputation and formidable Rolodex have won
over indie and punk scenesters who might ordinarily treat
the indulgence of a middle-aged Microsoft billionaire as
just another of the Man's one thousand evil arms.
The Project has already pulled off a symposium on riot
grrl, the punk subgenre that challenged the white-male stranglehold
on underground rock before the media raided its style gestures.
For people like Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile or Jean Smith
of Mecca Normal, both of whom were central to that early
'90s cause celebre, suspicion of all things mainstream is
an article of faith. Yet they dutifully gathered in Olympia
and recorded lengthy oral histories of their riot grrl salad
days at EMP's behest.
"I have a lot of contacts, and so we're able to do things
that we might not otherwise be able to do," she says. "People
say, well, if Candice says its alright, it must be alright."
In large part because of Pedersen's touch, visitors to
EMP's website read about the prickly Olympia trio Unwound
and ex-Spinanes singer Rebecca Gates. Instead of endless
hagiography of, say, the Beatles, the Project's exhibits
feature the painfully hip ladies of Sleater-Kinney here,
there and everywhere.
Pedersen's influence highlights EMP's biggest natural advantage:
its habitat. The Northwest spawned two of the most influential
American subcultures of the '90s: the underground rock scene
that found its commercial flagbearers in bands like Nirvana
and Pearl Jam, and the global tech revolution epicentered
on the Microsoft campus.
That conjunction gives EMP not only the vast capital of
hometown boy Allen, but also access to a phenomenal concentrated
talent pool. The Project's website and interactive attractions
have some of the sharpest geeks in the biz at the helm,
delivering "content" prepared, in many cases, by some of
the smartest and most experienced people ever to grace the
Northwest's music scene.
"It's natural that the pool of people working here would
draw on people that have been involved in the music scene
here for years," says Peter Blecha, EMP's senior curator.
Blecha himself has played in bands, worked as an editor
and DJ and generally specialized in Northwest rock for nearly
20 years. He oversaw the meticulous Hendrix exhibit, which
meshes a trove of artifacts with a slick digital rendering
of the sainted guitarist's own lyric book by Portland web-design
company Second Story.
It would be easy to treat the synergy between the Northwest's
rockers and cyber-soldiers as seamless good luck. The truth
is less tidy. The recession-era Seattle bohemia that produced
the rock revolution of the early and mid-'90s has been carpetbombed
out of existence by high-tech wealth, a takeover also seen,
to a less dramatic extent, elsewhere in the Northwest. There's
still an active music scene, of course, but many of the
city's musicians and artists have lit out for the hills,
escaping rocketing rents and the smug triumph of Dotcomopolis.
For every fleeing scenester, though, there's another who
wants in on the fun. A rich guy in the market for a rock-and-roll
dream team couldn't have picked a better place or moment.
"I'm 34 years old," Pedersen says, with slightly rueful
but realistic honesty. "I needed to make some decisions
that had to do with security."
So what, exactly, is the Experience supposed to be?
If all those whip-smart staffers make one thing crystal
clear, it's that they don't want the Experience Music Project
to be the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, West Coast Division.
Everyone at EMP is assiduously nice about the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame. Still, it's plain that, to a certain extent,
they're defining themselves against that Claptonized shrine
to classic rock.
"We're not so interested in telling the stories of individual
bands or artists," Blecha says. "The Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame already honors individual achievement. We're more
interested in documenting regional scenes and telling a
broader story, making the connections between scenes.
"We did not want this to be a Boomer-oriented thing."
To that end, EMP complements the Hendrix exhibit with detailed
explorations of punk and hip-hop. The punk exhibit delves
beyond the usual reduced tales of the Ramones and Sex Pistols
to harvest testimony from Los Angeles, D.C., Minneapolis
and elsewhere. The Project's take on hip-hop doesn't run
as deep (the highlight is a tent-like three-button suit
Notorious B.I.G. wore), but it's still a fair attempt to
deal with a protean and underdocumented genre.
The idea seems to be to bait the Hard Rock Cafe crowd with
a king-hell big memorabilia horde and lure tech junkies
with bells and whistles. And then, for the true hardcores,
there's a vast sea of information, documentation and analysis
lurking just beneath EMP's slick surface.
"We've built a collection with an eye to supporting scholarship,"
says Jim Fricke, a curator who worked on EMP's exhibits
on the sainted Hendrix and oversaw its stabs at punk and
hip-hop. "We've compiled over 200 oral histories. Long after
our opening-day exhibits are forgotten, people are going
to be looking to us when they want to discover the roots
of different trends in pop culture and their importance.
That's my hope, anyway."
Why does that matter? Well, maybe it doesn't. It's only
rock and roll, after all. But after three early-morning
hours in the belly of Gehry's maverick beast, I came away
honestly excited about the maze-like history of pop music,
about the connections the Project succeeds in drawing between
dusty jazz 78s and hip-hop's sonic graffitti, between decline-and-fall
L.A. hardcore and lilting indie rock.
There are glaring omissions. The city of Portland, for
example, gets the shaft in the Northwest music exhibit (the
Wipers, anyone?). Techno, metal and reggae will have to
wait for the Project treatment, apparently. For every shortcoming,
though, EMP offers an impressive piece of archaeology. A
solid dose of Seattle's Jackson Street jazz scene of the
'20s, '30s and '40s, for instance, makes you wonder why
today's Northwest scene is so lily-white.
Beyond its specific successes and failures, EMP certainly
represents the most comprehensive effort yet to chart the
roiling seas of pop culture. Given the blood and toil spent
on creating America's sprawling music, that seems like a
worthy mission.
"This could be a museum that describes and deals with contemporary
culture in ways that the universities and high schools refuse
to," Syracuse's Thompson says. "I encounter people every
day who think it's ridiculous that I teach about popular
culture at a university. But if this stuff is one-tenth
as important as everyone in the political world, liberal
and conservative, acts like it is, then it's absolutely
essential that we look at it, and the universities have
entirely shirked their obligations in that sense."
Regardless of whether these high-brow aims are ever met,
EMP will remain an impressive extravagance, a chaotic rebuke
to the clean New Frontier futurism of the neighboring Space
Needle and dull commercial architecture everywhere. It's
the vanity project of a fabulously rich terminal dork whose
spending habits evidence a serious case of arrested development.
Ironically, though, in a city increasingly beholden to the
cold calculations of big money and sterile upscale culture,
blowing a quarter-billion on a zany monument to noise may
be the most punk-rock thing anyone has done in a while.
"It could turn into a cutesy piece of kitsch," says Jonathan
Poneman, who runs Sub Pop, the label that defined the "Seattle
sound" of a decade ago. "A lot of rock music ends up that
way anyway. For every sleek, exciting young Elvis, there's
a fat, bloated old Elvis.
"That said, I'm definitely betting that the museum will
have a positive impact on Seattle, if only because here
we have a person with tremendous resources endorsing a culture
and a lifestyle that have been much maligned in recent years."
Poneman, whose label still promises "world domination"
in its promotional material years after its reign as rock's
hippest imprint ended, appreciates the value of a dramatic
gesture. And Allen's high-ticket move into the world of
rock, he suggests, might be just the infusion of energy
Northwest music needs.
"I'm glad someone is going to infuse music with some controversy,"
he says. "Even if it is in the form of a museum."
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