Music scenes are fickle things. Artists in New York or Los Angeles will constantly create new music that zooms through the general population like fashion trends. If it’s already been done, it’s not worth talking about. Metropolitan areas with more than a million people have so much creative manpower crammed into such a small area that, by sheer luck, the right people can come together and make a sound the world has never heard before.
Madison has the reputation for being a great music city. It’s been placed comfortably on many online rankings as one of America’s best places for live music. Almost any night of the week, a great musician is performing in one of the various venues here. To be able to see Cashmere Cat and LVL UP on the same Friday night is a great privilege of which many Madisonians take advantage. However, many of these artists are not local, but coming through the city on a tour or a one-off show. The great schedule of shows in Madison only tells half the story, specifically the half that can be measured objectively and presented to the rest of the world in the form of a “Best Music Cities” listicle.
The other half is the local scene, which rarely gets discussed as much as the glamorous shows that dominate Songkick and The Isthmus. The question arises: Does Madison have the population and the spirit to become the habitat for a thriving local music scene?
Population-wise, Madison does not nearly have the numbers to run with the big guys like nearby Chicago and Minneapolis. Almost 250,000 people claim the area around the four lakes as their home, chump change when compared to other cities that dominate the “Best Music Scene” rankings. Statistically, the odds of a dedicated ensemble of musicians coming together to create something big is significantly more unlikely than somewhere like Wicker Park, Chicago, a neighborhood with more than 50,000 citizens in a single square mile. That’s one-fifth of the Madison population condensed into 1/80 of the size. In Chicago, ideas and people are bouncing around in such a small area that two are bound to collide and create a new sound on an atomic level.
Aside from sheer numbers, Madison’s weak public transportation does the arts scene no favors. The busses serve some utility when it comes to getting to a specific, planned-out destination, but they don’t have the flexibility of more developed systems like the CTA in Chicago. You can’t hop on a bus at a moment’s notice when you hear of a house show in a different neighborhood. Being on an isthmus, Madison is a city with a literal choke point that divides the population culturally and economically. The creatives of the Willy Street neighborhood have no reason to traverse to the west side of Madison, which has become a haven for professionals and wealthy, predominantly white, families. Oftentimes they wouldn’t even have the means, with bus commutes being more hassle than boon. This creates a very segregated cultural climate, with suburbanites staying in the suburbs and the hip crowd staying at the local bar.
But with one of the best public universities in the world and over 40,000 students, there must be some creative drive from the student population of Madison. Unfortunately, Madison suffers from creative brain drain as much as it does from academic brain drain. Because Madison doesn’t have the environment to foster a music scene worth sticking around for, many creatives use the city as a starting point, with eyes and aspirations set on bigger plans.
The position of the University of Wisconsin-Madison also leaves students in a musical purgatory. While close to venues like the Majestic, the university puts students just out of range for venues like Mickey’s Tavern, where true local musicians often strut their sounds. Electronic music-wise, the bars of State Street are more concerned with selling as much alcohol as possible than fostering an environment for dancing. It’s much more profitable to play viral songs that drunk patrons will know every lyric to than to have a DJ play music that gets people to put their Long Islands down and take up the dance floor.
Some of the most exciting innovations in music started in the most improbable places. Detroit was in economic shambles when techno began to dominate the city. Abandoned warehouses that used to represent the heart and soul of the American automotive industry were being repurposed to become hubs for a futuristic sound that nobody saw coming. Some might argue that the disparity in Detroit led to the heart and soul that can be heard in even the most robotic of Detroit techno tracks.
The final blow to Madison’s viability as a music-producing city is ironically how good it is. Madison tops lists for cities with the best quality of life more often than it tops lists for its music scene. Bike paths, great restaurants and friendly people are some of the many reasons that Madison is often recommended as a weekend getaway city, where visitors can get trashed on State Street, cheese curds in one hand and a Spotted Cow in the other. From Schenk-Atwood to Sunset Village, Madisonians can look around their community and be completely content with the way things are. But in the end, what fosters creation is a yearning for things to change, not for them to stay the same.
