I went down to Birmingham Friday night to see a little band called My Morning Jacket, for those of you who didn't catch them on Conan, or read something out their in the world of electronic/printed media, My Morning Jacket is like hearing the Flaming Lips do alt-country, it's a psychadellic, eye-opening, nasal-passage clearing experience.
Musically, seeing this band was a romp and a half.
Unfortunately, I saw them in my home town of Birmingham. Birmingham is maybe the most polarized city in America. Rich to upper middle class white people live in one swathe of suburbs, the lower middle class to poor white-trash white people live in another, and the black population in Birmingham is still in the immediate slums outside the downtown. Besides the fact that this socio-economic setup seems rather fishy, any place in which different income classes stay apart is a recipe for cultural stagnation.
Case in point Workplay theatre, host of My Morning Jacket, the entire audience of 400 people was white. This is not an exaggeration. Culturally, about 1/5 of these white people were whom you might expect at a My Morning Jacket show. You know, hipsters. The other 4/5 were what I can best describe as graduates of the Greek system. These people where wearing their fraternities and sororities on their sleeves. And unlike college students, these people where not 18, 19, 20, or 21 years old. No, they were more like 29. 30, 31, and 32. All beautiful, artificially, and all inebriated, they swayed back and forth with their whine glasses and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale's as if they were really connecting to the bunch of long-haired, wild eyed mountain men playing their guts out onstage. The experience was surreal to say the least.