Friday, October 17, 2014

10 real things about Nashville...

I am from Nashville and I love my hometown, I can't stand all the new and shallow media attention about my city though. I now live in Europe, but I am back home often enough, and the internet helps me keep in touch with what's going on in my home city so I decided to write my own article/list about Nashville.


10. There is no single thing called "Nashville".


Nashville is a sprawling, diverse, metropolitan area and can't be pigeonholed the way most writers want to do. We have lots of churches representing a ton of different Christian denominations, we also have quite a few mosques. The largest population of Kurds outside of Kurdistan lives in Nashville. Nashville is full of poor people and middle class people and rich people. Most Nashvillians don't work in the music industry, many never attend a concert in a given year. Many drink like fish while others are teetotalers. We are very different but we live in the same place, most of us are happy about that but some aren't, somehow we manage to get along most of the time.


9. Nashville is a food city.


Hot chicken is big in Nashville but a lot of people can't stand it. Nashville has a lot of great restaurants but most of us eat lunch at McDonald's or Hardees. We love biscuits and gravy and country ham but we also love foie gras and caviar. We love food, but how many people and cities don't? We are just lucky to have a wide range of restaurants serving a wide range of food (from New York style Jewish delis to slow smoked pork shoulder to vegetarian South Indian cuisine). There is no "Nashville cuisine" we just love to eat and love to have choices.


8. Nashville is friendly.


I didn't realize how friendly till I moved to Northern Europe, but if you are in Nashville you had better be ready to talk to people. We like to talk, sure, most of it is superficial and shallow, but we are looking for a reason to like you, if we see you twice we will probably consider you a friend.


7. Gospel music is bigger than country music here.


A lot of us like both gospel and country, but we also like punk and dance music and folk. Nashville is "Music City USA", not country music city USA. If you come to visit leave the honky tonks on Broadway behind for a while and see what else Nashville has to offer musically, you will be glad you did.


6. It gets cold in Nashville.


If you show up in January or February don't bring your swim suit. Yep, we get cold weather, really cold weather. The great thing is that while it might be below zero (Fahrenheit) one night it might be in the 60's the next day. In the winter be prepared for almost anything... from one hour to the next.


5. East Nashville isn't just hipsters.


Yes, there are a lot of hipsters in East Nashville, and that is great, but there are also a lot of people who you would never call hipsters, people who are more likely to wear pricey Air Jordans than vintage clothing store finds. People old enough to have worn those vintage clothing store finds when they were new. And people who just get up and get dressed to work every day. East Nashville is like most of Nashville, diverse and impossible to classify, but everyone in East Nashville agrees on one thing, "The rent is too damn high!"


4. In Nashville you can smoke in bars and many people do.


In Tennessee if you don't let anyone under the age of 21 through the doors smoking is OK. Some bars bane smoking but most allow it and this means it can get a bit hazy sometimes. That's OK, you can step outside whenever you want.


3. Nashville is a liberal city in a VERY conservative state.


When Jesse Jackson ran for president in the democratic primaries he won Nashville, Clinton won Nashville, Obama won Nashville, Nashville is very liberal. Step one foot outside of the city limits however and you are in a very conservative area no matter where you go. This means if you are in Nashville you will find people who are super liberal and super conservative and so it doesn't matter which side of the political fence you find yourself on, if you want to talk politics you better be able to back up what you say. Cause if you can't someone will call you on it.


2. Nashville doesn't hate tourists... but...


We can get kind of weary of them. Look, tourists come in to Nashville and try to blend in, but you don't. See Nashvillians don't normally wear cowboy hats or cowboy boots. We wear jeans and suits and Converse and high heels. We dress casually, we dress stylishly, we dress in drag, there is a naturist resort just outside of Nashville where people don't dress at all. The thing is that Nashvillians don't normally wear rhinestones or look like we are about to take the stage at the Ryman Auditorium, we just dress and look like pretty normal people, whatever you think that means.


1. Nashville is a great place.


Please, go to Nashville with no expectations, see as much of it as you can, you will probably fall in love with it. Just don't try to figure it out, it is too complex, too diverse, too wonderful to categorize. It is a city and has all of the good things and bad things that being a city entails. Just bring your car or rent one, cause public transportation sucks in Nashville.

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