Intern Callie Enlow has been reading the paper. She is surprised by what she’s learned.
Last Sunday, my hometown of Denton, Texas, made it into the special “music issue” of the New York Times Travel section.
The opening paragraph presents Lil’ d (as opposed to Big D, Dallas, 35 miles to the south) as a classic Texas town as imagined by a New Yorker. Piggly-Wiggly supermarkets! Pawnshops! Football fever! Yee-Haw!
Yes we have Piggly-Wigglys, lovingly referred to as “the pig” and barely patronized. Yes, we have pawnshops. So does NYC. Yes, one of our local colleges, University of North Texas (Texas’s fourth largest university) has a football team. Last year our record was two and twelve and our home games averaged 18,000 fans. The average for other NCAA Division IA games? 46,000. Yep. We’re crazy about our football, just like Texan stereotypes should be.
Curiously, our gourmet sushi restaurant, historic home district, and “South Denton” shopping haven, complete with such bourgeois trappings as a Barnes and Noble bookstore, Starbucks and multiplex theater, went unreported.
However, the Piggly-Wiggly and the sushi ain’t why anybody’s writing about Denton. It’s our music scene, which has just been discovered by the popular press thanks to Midlake, a critically acclaimed indie rock band.Imagine! A “prairie town” whose university developed the nation’s first jazz studies program might have a few more good bands than the next one-horse town! We also just hosted the Neville Brothers at our 28th annual Arts and Jazz festival. Another popular band, the Polyphonic Spree, debuted at our now defunct annual Fry Street Fair. While the concept that currently one “might hear musical acts like the Shins or Modest Mouse” at the 200-capacity Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studio is laughable, Denton has been a regular stop on the indie-rock circuit for years.
A British paper, The Guardian, nailed Denton’s music scene in February 2007. That article inspired Popmatters.com to give a thoughtful exploration of their own in May 2007. So, the Times is not exactly covering new ground. In fact, after my mom read the article she said, “that was such a Yankee write-up. I couldn’t figure out what their point was.” Me neither, Mom.
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