slate.com: Until the morning he decided to shut it down, Will Eastman had been planning a 10th anniversary bash for U Street Music Hall, his much-loved, no-frills dance club in the District of Columbia. Nestled along one of the city’s main nightlife drags, it’s a plain, black-walled basement space with a sternum-shaking sound system, where in the days before the coronavirus, 500 people could get sweaty to some underground deep house or drum and bass, catch an indie band, or hear a set from one of the bigger acts like Four Tet, Disclosure, Robyn, or Diplo who would sometimes stop by. To mark a decade of U Hall—as its devoted fans call it—Eastman had booked the biggest batch of events of his career as a promoter and DJ.
4 comments:
Music venues seem really screwed. This was not a community I had thought about in terms of people really hurting due to this pandemic. The amount of people really feeling the decline of revenue from their businesses not operating in this pandemic is staggering. And this article asks a really good question -- How did we let this happen? How did Americans simply stop attending concerts at music venues or their local theatre or even their local jazz nightclub? The past six months have been a rude awakening of what is ‘necessary’ and what is not. Any form of live industry work is paralyzed right now. We cannot do anything except create zoom productions for online alternatives to our normal processes. What’s also sad is how many venues, at this point in the pandemic, cannot afford to reopen. And what’s really crazy is that people that own club venues still need to pay rent. Financial pressure is so real right now.
Part of my anger in all of this is that we allow sports to happen, but still can’t allow for the restarting of live events. Recently here in PA there was a big fight over high school sports and parents fighting the state to let their kids play otherwise they would be demoralized, and the state said yes. Pitiful. Sports still come before the arts. Our independent venues are hurting, but members of Congress care more about their summer vacation than they do about small businesses. Certain members of Congress don’t support small businesses because they can’t contribute to re-election campaigns the same way a multi-national corporation can. It’s a shame. We know who to blame but it is getting to the point where no matter how much shouting we do, it is ignored because in the grand scheme of things, we in the arts don’t matter because a certain political party does not see us as relevant to the economy.
Music venues are truly at the bottom of the pile in terms of reopening. The whole damn point is to gather as many people as humanly possible into the largest space you can find to create the most incredible energy you possibly can while listening to your favorite artists. At this point, this kind of place is deemed “frivolous”. I understand that the priority is schools and post offices and grocery stores, but just last week I was commenting about how dearly I miss the atmosphere of actually attending live theatre. There are these small moments that come with being in these spaces where you realize that that experience, in that moment, in that place is a divine moment of connection. These places are harbingers for human connection. While you enter strangers, you leave with this shared experience that connects you all. Unfortunately, the value of these places is not registered by our government. There have been no attempts to save these venues that will feel the pain of this pandemic the longest.
In the wake of everything happening with coronavirus, I feel like we have seen a lot of music artists finding creative ways to support themselves and still release music, which as definitely been incredible, but it’s easy to forget about the music venues that are usually the catalyst for where these are performed. We focus a lot on supporting these artists, but I think we forget a lot about the venues and companies (and people working at these venues and companies) that provide the space to support these artists outside of coronavirus. Our support of music artists needs to also extend to the venues, administrators, and teams that have allowed for these artists to flourish and create art we can enjoy regularly. I personally have always loved concerts and the collective nature of enjoying any art form, so it is particularly upsetting to me to know that there will be fewer of these venues to be able to provide spaces for these events to occur after we recover from the pandemic.
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