It’s a very Nashville way of dressing up standard-issue gentrification in the familiar textures of the city’s heritage — akin to the fiddles and banjos tacked onto pop-country songs that share more musical DNA with hair metal than the Highwaymen. “Authenticity is very important in Nashville,” someone once told me. “If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
...
Leonard Cohen, who recorded two of his best albums in Nashville, once sang, “We are ugly, but we have the music.” After every block is lined with towering fake bungalows, after every dive bar is either plowed under or rebranded with artisanal cocktails, after every plank of reclaimed barn wood has been upcycled to provide ambience for boutique comfort food that only the already-comfortable can afford, after every bit of character has been scrubbed out of the alleys and arcades, we may wonder if Music City still has the music after all, and ponder what we lost when we gazed into our gleaming new towers and fell in love with the reflection. (via)
