Community, Even If I Hate Living In It
Self-aggregating a pair of pieces I wrote about community organizers in Nashville.
I haven’t been using my Substack account much recently, because — total honesty here — I haven’t had anything worth saying. But I did want to highlight two pieces in this week’s issue of The Nashville Scene with overlapping themes of community organizing in Nashville. Writing these felt a bit hypocritical since at this point I would rather live elsewhere, but the fact remains that although I feel like an alien in my own town, I do still live here and I do want the community to take care of our own.
I have always taken inspiration from the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, who used his strange melodramas to covertly talk about topics most film studios would have shunned, subjects like queer issues, religion, or the lives of formerly incarcerated. The master director knew you could hide discussions of taboos in plain sight if you just knew where the opposition wouldn’t be inclined to look. So any time I can sneak in propaganda from a leftist ideology with something I write about the city, I do.
This first piece in this week’s issue is an interview with my friend Olive Scibelli, a longtime activist and musician in Nashville. As half of the team that runs DIY music venue DRKMTTR Collective, Olive does a lot on the community side, organizing events like food distribution to folks in need, several recent protests of the genocide in Gaza, and creating education spaces. DRKMTTR has started opening the doors during non-show hours for community events. One particular favorite is their Social Club programming, affectionately called “Leftist WeWork” by participants.
The other piece I wanted to highlight was the live review I wrote about local rappers Chuck Indigo and Mike Floss at Third Man Records’s Blue Room. The show was a rain check event after the first attempt was snowed out a month prior. Both Indigo and Floss are in leadership roles with The Southern Movement Committee. SMC does a lot of really important work in the black community of Music City. I wrote a bit about both of them in January, interviewing Chuck Indigo back on New Year’s Day and mentioning Floss's work with SMC at a recent hardcore show to raise money and awareness for three great Nashville activist groups.
Both of these pieces are in the print and digital versions of The Scene. And both of these organizations do important work in my town.