What's the fundamental difference between an authentically cool city and a contrived, gentrified one? What makes a great music and arts scene, and can deliberate government action actually make a city cool? That’s the topic we take up with our guest (and Gen X contemporary), the legendary indie rock frontman of The Long Winters and one time Seattle City Council candidate John Roderick, now the host of the popular (and omnivorous!) Omnibus podcast that he founded with Jeopardy host Ken Jennings.
In the episode, we nostalgia trip with John about the fading of the hipster scenes of our youth, starting with our cohort’s misconceived impulse to 'facilitate' an art scene, as if urban cool can be jumpstarted with a couple of free parking spots outside local music venues. Roderick calls bullshit: the scenes from the '80s and '90s that we wax nostalgic about weren't created. They gestated organically because kids were bored and had something to rebel against, space was dirt cheap, and the grittiness of the urban environment was real.
That more authentic youth culture, born in abandoned light manufacturing spaces in declining cities, has evaporated in this era of blue city affluence and progressive permissiveness, Roderick argues, adding that cosmopolitan adults’ indulgent embrace of 'pure justice' and 'absolute equality' has stripped teen life of its necessary friction. What's left, he contends, is a culture marked by 'disconnect and malaise and bitching.'
As our paean to the past continues, we get into how Gen X, perpetually the punching bag, never stood up for itself, allowing Millennials to define new cultural rules that were simultaneously affirming and uptight. But true urban cool may be poised for a comeback: Roderick has hope that Gen Z, rebelling against the cultural conformism that took root in the 2010s, are starting to tell older generations to "shut up and leave us alone." That desire for distance and defiance is what cool cities are built from, from the bottom up, even if, all three of us conclude, we are entirely unqualified to opine on what the hell the kids are planning to do next.
Our editor is Quinn Waller.
Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com
[00:00:11] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues, a podcast featuring smart guests talking about the problems facing blue cities and how to fix them. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. And Sandeep, I'm not sure what's going on with this podcast lately. Like recently we did that episode about B-cities and how great they are and it was kind of uplifting. And today we've got this kind of positive vibes topic as well, like what makes cool cities, what makes great music scenes.
[00:00:40] It feels like maybe the blues is the wrong genre for this podcast. We might have to rename it. Yeah, well, maybe we could actually turn it into a podcast about the real blues, like the music blues, as opposed to the blues that we like to wallow in, which is like the shitty governance blues. Come to think of it, I don't know, man, maybe that would make for a good title of a blues song, the shitty governance blues. We can ask our guest about that.
[00:01:05] We will ask him about that. Why not? Since our guest today is former Seattle City Council candidate and indie rock music legend and podcaster, John Roderick, the lead singer of The Long Winters, co-host of Roderick on the Line, a podcast, and also the host of one of my favorite podcasts, Omnibus. Check out the Omnibus if you've not heard it. Topics ranging from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald to the single tax movement. John Roderick, thanks so much for joining us.
[00:01:34] It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. It's like a Seattle triumvirate here. It's something like that, yeah. I mean, John, coming back to the indie rock thing for a moment, just to start this off, if I remember the story correctly, you originally formed The Long Winters with my former colleague from The Stranger, the Alt Weekly here in Seattle, Sean Nelson.
[00:01:59] Yeah. In the late 90s, right about the time that Harvey Danger took off, I had a band called the Western State Hurricanes. And Sean was doing triple duty in the late 90s. He was in a band, but he was also writing about music for The Stranger. And, you know, that was at a time when getting a little two inches of column space in the Stranger music section was a big, that was a big coup for a startup band.
[00:02:28] To die for, right? And Sean wrote some, you know, some very small amount of praise of my band prior to that, like, hey, you should check out this band. And so I always had really positive feelings for him. And then Harvey Danger took off and my band didn't get signed and do all that, but we were kind of the band of the moment for a few months. And then Sean asked me if I would join Harvey Danger.
[00:02:53] And I did. I was in Harvey Danger for a year and a half, toured the country with him. And at the end of that, he said that he was going to help me make a record of my tunes. And so Sean kind of midwifed that first Long Winters record into being. Yeah. Now we should get into, you know, who in the music scene was fucking who in the mid 90s. Just at The Stranger. I mean, just at The Stranger.
[00:03:21] We can do that about The Stranger too. There are stories I could tell, but maybe we should move on. All right. So let's pick up on the, I mean, I would like to ask, but let's pick up on the touring aspect of this. I was looking at, like, there's a website that shows all of the places that the Long Winters went over the years. You know, Europe, Asia, you've been in all the United States. Never Asia, sadly. Oh, is that right?
[00:03:50] No, we were one. In Asia, if your band is popular, it's kind of like being popular in France. Nobody can tell why. Everyone in Europe will love your band, but the French won't care at all. And then they'll pick a band out of the American selection. And they'll just be like, this is a band. And no one else cares about them and they're not popular anywhere else. And in Japan, it's different. They will just pick who they want, you know?
[00:04:20] And it's like the fastbacks are huge, but the Long Winters couldn't get arrested. And what can you do, you know? Yeah. I mean, you weren't Spinal Tap, right? Didn't they make their comeback in a... Yeah, France, right. I lived in Tokyo for a year, but I wanted to ask about your favorite American city, you know, touring and a place that you went and thought, you know, this makes a great music town. Well, it's funny because the first time you play in New York, you kind of can't believe it, you know?
[00:04:49] And especially we were lucky enough to get to New York right as our first record came out and playing a show where you look out and people are singing your music and it's in New York City. I mean, I couldn't... There wasn't a higher thing. There was no amount of money you could have given me at that moment that would have mattered more than to look out at people in New York singing your songs.
[00:05:17] But when you tour across the country and you play kind of every wide spot on the road, you get this same thing, you know, why is a band popular in France but not in Spain and vice versa? And there are music cities all across the country that are... That it's just a real pleasure to be adopted by that city. And I'm thinking in our case, Pittsburgh, St. Louis for sure, Cincinnati. Cincinnati, like we were... We had a great following in Cincinnati.
[00:05:46] We were very popular on the radio there. But in Cleveland, it was a different story. And to be on tour and to play Cincinnati one night to like a great reception and a big crowd and then go to Cleveland and it's sort of like, meh, you know? You just get this... You get how different towns are. It would be like here playing in Spokane to nobody or there are bands that are huge in Spokane and they can't get arrested in Seattle.
[00:06:14] So there were lots of towns across the country that we thought of as like, this is our place. Like we're coming into St. Louis and we're going to have a great night. And we always did. But then you go into, you know, a city that you would expect, you know, like Dallas, where it's like, this is a massive city and this is going to be a huge show. And it's like, yeah, there's a lot about Dallas that never really... I mean, of course, Austin is great. Dallas, man.
[00:06:44] Well, let's talk a little bit about what makes a cool city. Because John, you're, I would say, an art and nightlife guy. And if I remember correctly, that was the centerpiece of your, shall I say, somewhat quixotic campaign for public office back in 2015. Yeah, it was. You know, I was on the Seattle Music Commission.
[00:07:03] I was part of that generation of people in the music community who were trying to make the case to the city that the music scene was an industry. We were bringing hundreds of millions of dollars into the city coffers and we were still being treated as a fire hazard, basically, by the city government.
[00:07:25] And it was a case that we had a lot of people in government who wanted to support that case. Mike McGinn did. Obviously, Dow Constantine was a huge supporter of the local music scene. Former mayor and King County executive for our part of Seattle audience. And Kate Becker at the city was part of this, like, real push to make the case, not just to the music, not just to the city government, but to the scene as a whole.
[00:07:51] Like, we're an industry, we're a economic driver that's on par with a PAC car, you know, like we should, we should have a voice at the table. The problem, of course, is that that, that group was sort of dominated by club owners.
[00:08:09] And as you said, the, the, the term was nightlife people and nightlife people and musicians have very different needs, very different goals. They were all really in the business of selling booze and they had really different, uh, needs and they had different like pet causes than musicians did.
[00:08:39] And artists did. And often what a club owner wants and what a, what benefits musicians is completely different opposite. And so there was, you know, all this advocacy and all this lobbying on the part of the nightlife community, but no musicians were at the table.
[00:09:01] There was Dave Minert and it was all these people that were, that were kind of running the show and, and had the ear of local politicians. So I was added to the music commission, which was, you know, headed by Kate Becker, who was a great advocate of culture. And she still is at the County now. I was the only musician on the, on the panel.
[00:09:24] And I think the only reason I was there was that I've, a was still around and I could kind of hold my own right at the, at that, at that level. I'm just like, wait a minute, you know, whatever you've been in the music business a long enough. You can, you can smell a rat or, you know, and I, and I like being in that environment, right?
[00:09:44] I like saying on behalf of all people that work for a living, let me just push back on this idea that, you know, what we really want is like cheap booze and musician parking or whatever that is.
[00:09:58] And so, yeah, I ran for city council with this, with this, as you say, exotic idea that we needed actual arts people in the, in the political conversation, the larger conversation, not realizing. And I think the number one thing I took away from running for city council is that being a politician is a profession on par with being a doctor, right?
[00:10:27] You, you spend your life learning the business and you, you're good at it. If you're good at it and you become a surgeon, if you're a surgeon and it's not, we talk all the time about, Oh, we need outsiders in government. It's the last thing you need is outsiders in government. You know, it's just the whole idea. The conservatives believe we need business people in government and, and liberals believe we need activists in government and we need neither thing.
[00:10:54] We need competent people who are, have studied government and who understand government and have worked in government and come up through the ranks in government. So I'm running for city council, like I'm here to change everything. And I just, over the course of the whole campaign, I was like, my God, I'm so out of my depth. And three quarters of the people running for city council are out of their depth.
[00:11:18] I'm hearing my fellow candidates talk about whatever, you know, there, I was running against a guy who was like a housing advocate and he didn't have a thought in his head. He had one idea and he's running for a citywide position and he's so mad, you know, and he's just so like mad.
[00:11:36] So, so, so I realized that I got a real dose of, um, of insight into the way the city runs, but, but as, um, as a musician that kind of pivoted or was welcomed into that larger, larger civic space where, where, uh, people that were in politics recognize my face. They recognized my voice.
[00:12:02] They knew I wasn't stoned and that I could kind of articulate what musicians might be thinking in this context. I mean, I've, I've enjoyed a seat at the table ever since, which makes me glad, you know, what, what am I doing on KUOW with you, Sandy? I've, I'm being asked to comment on the news of the week again, as a, as a artist. And why does anybody care what an artist thinks about the news of the week?
[00:12:29] And it's, it's, you know, in a way it's kind of a little bit of a carve out I've made, uh, that didn't maybe exist before. You know, it's a, it's like a, like a, a, a small voice. If you're enjoying this podcast, can you please do us a favor? Spread the word, tell your friends, your family, your coworkers, anyone who's interested in the future of blue cities and better governance.
[00:12:55] Basically anyone who thinks that the conversation in blue cities is kind of stagnated and thinks we need to be hearing from more smart people, even people that we might disagree with about many things. And one more favor to ask. If you want this podcast to continue, can you take a minute right now to give us a five-star review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts? Because the way the algorithm works, it's the five-star reviews that give other folks a chance to discover the podcast.
[00:13:23] And finally, we want your feedback, positive, critical, whatever. Please send that to us directly. You can email us, bluecitypodcast at gmail.com. That's bluecitypodcast at gmail.com. And send along show ideas, guest ideas. Sandeep and I would really appreciate that as well. Okay, back to the show.
[00:13:48] When I think about you and that period, I had just moved here, it seems like when the long winters was the thing, like a big thing here in Seattle, kind of in the aughts, right? Capitol Hill had this kind of grittier, queer, cool vibe. Ballard was sort of this fisherman, railroad worker, gentrifying indie rock vibe. And both Sandeep and I lived in Portland back in the 1980s. You know, the music scene just sort of happened organically.
[00:14:18] It wasn't like government stepped in and did something. That Northwest music scene just kind of emerged. And then things got affluent. And that kind of sucks because affluence kind of ruins those scenes and sort of ruins cities because people can't afford to have cheap rent and start bands and do art or whatever, right?
[00:14:40] But, you know, people talk about like, I'm wondering what you were talking about in 2015 or what we should be talking about today in terms of building better scenes or cooler cities. Like, you know, beyond like, okay, I read last year, Bruce Harrell, you know, passed an ordinance creating free parking, three spaces for bands outside of venues, things like that, which seem pretty insignificant in the larger scheme of things. So just what can government really do to create cool cities?
[00:15:09] I mean, if you were in Portland in the 80s, then you remember one of the things about Portland into the 2000s was that Portland sucked. It was shitty. It was poor. It was garbage. It was half hippies, half lumberjacks. There was like sex trade in the parks. The good old days. Yeah. Yeah. You, yeah, you could live there. You could live there on $6,000 a year.
[00:15:39] Yeah. It was just like. Black tar heroin had arrived and it was everywhere. Oh yeah. It was gnarly. It was gnarly. And Seattle was also gross. It was, it was mostly poor. There was a real middle class. Most neighborhoods South Madison were sketchy. Uh, downtown was not a place really. Um, and so, and it wasn't that the city didn't take an interest in music.
[00:16:05] The city was openly hostile to art and to rock and roll, especially they, like I say, the fire department and the cops treated rock shows like they were things to be busted.
[00:16:20] Um, the thing about generation X that is, that's kind of unique in this situation is that our response as we got affluent or as we got older, uh, we thought that one contribution we could make to the world was to facilitate the rock scene that we had built for the next generation and make it easy for them. So they didn't have to do all this.
[00:16:49] They didn't have to put on shows in people's, not just basements, but like in abandoned spaces. We were going to, we were going to build an infrastructure that made it that handed instruments to teens, gave them a safe space to play. And we were going to cultivate a rock scene. I mean, and we were going to, we were going to make special institutions to cultivate rock and roll in teen girls.
[00:17:14] We were going to make it, you know, hand every teen girl that wanted a guitar. We were going to have those guitars. We were going to make that space. Um, and it's an open question. I think, first of all, whether teens want the grunge scene recapitulated at least 15 years ago, they definitely didn't. That wasn't what they were into.
[00:17:39] And two, if you hand a kid a guitar and go, okay, you know, Susie, like make some punk. Right. You, you know, you're, what are you doing? It's not what anybody, it's not how music, it's not, it's not how music gestates. It's, it isn't going to create anything. It just, because it just makes it feel like dad. It's just what, you know, dad wants you to be into the jawbreaker.
[00:18:06] And it's not, it's just not how culture is built. And what made Seattle and Portland incubators was we're, the people here were bored. There was nothing else to do. And space was cheap. You could, you could work three hours a week for 20 hours a week and still find a place to live.
[00:18:31] Not a nice place to live, not a place, just actually a shite place to live. But there was also space for you. You remember it, there'd be a storefront and somebody would go in and paint all the walls black. And then they'd be like, it's a theater. And for however long it was a theater, they'd do alternate, alternative plays. There'd be somebody with a dance. There'd be bands on, on Saturday night.
[00:18:59] And that would last for six months or whatever until the place burned down. But we had an incredible theater scene in Seattle in the nineties. Incredible. Globally recognized theater scene. That also went kind of where the music scene went, which is everybody moved to New York or LA. People wanted to professionalize it. People wanted to go somewhere with it.
[00:19:24] And the, and when you talk about kind of reintroducing it, the number one question is, and put it where, um, there's no empty or now. Now with the commercial real estate crisis, there's tons of empty space in downtown Seattle. It's just, it's not activated yet because people are still thinking that they're going to get $6,000 a month for a space. That's no one's ever going to use again, or not, not for, you know, not for two decades.
[00:19:53] It's just, it hasn't, we were occupying light manufacturing space that wasn't used anymore because nobody was making fishing hooks or whatever it was that those places used to make. Now we have all this office space that nobody wants to use. I just don't know how it's going to turn into a club. Exactly.
[00:20:15] You know, I, I think John, you're putting your finger on what seems to me to be the paradox or maybe the limits or the complexity of what the difference between cool and uncool and what kind of hipsterism actually is. Because, so when I think back to Portland in the eighties, totally, yeah.
[00:20:38] The sad little strip clubs, the, you know, pasty face white boys with mullets and faux leather jackets over there, iron maiden t-shirts. Right. It was a sort of, you know, everybody was some species of poor. It was, it was, you know, it was sort of Oregon rednecky white trashy kind of, kind of town. Right. It was the butt end of the known universe of a provincial backwater, all of that stuff. Right. I also have tremendous nostalgia for that.
[00:21:07] And in some ways I, I could make the argument that Portland was cooler than the, you know, the bougie emo twee Portland that Portlandia created. And in some sense, it seems to me that for hipsterism to work, it actually needs something authentic to latch onto. Right. It needs grist for the irony mill.
[00:21:27] It needs real emotion, some real misery from which to concoct its sort of detached second order statements or, or, or, you know, comment on the beautiful hypocrisies of life or whatever. And if it doesn't have that, it sort of becomes precious and a little bit fey and self-referential and a kind of comedy of manners. Right.
[00:21:50] It comes Portlandia, you know, which is a funny show, but also, you know, sort of very self-contained in this, in this kind of way. And so, and so I think that's what happened to Portland in some sense. That's what's in a different way. What's happened to Seattle and places like that, that we hipsterism became the, you know, the hegemonic culture of the city in Portland. And it sort of began to consume its own output for fuel in some way.
[00:22:19] And then it kind of turns into a hall of mirrors and it's not the same anymore. And then there's no bands and there's no creativity and there's no, you know, like, like it. So anyway, I, I, I don't know. I'll just throw that out there as a comment. If you have thoughts. It's really hard to, and it was hard throughout the 2010s and into the, and through the 2020s now to, to, as a generation X person, push back against the idea.
[00:22:48] Uh, that thing should be any particular way, because when we were coming up, there wasn't any should, there wasn't any sense that we were ever going to succeed or, or make it anywhere that anybody was going to ever be. Uh, uh, even like, uh, accounted for right. Nobody cared with, if you fell off a bridge, like nobody would notice kind of.
[00:23:15] And I made $9,000 a year at the most until 2008 and lived in Seattle. And nobody can appreciate when I say that to a, to a room full of younger people, like it's easy to romanticize what it was like, but honestly, that universe doesn't exist anymore. Can you imagine living in Seattle? I worked at Steve's Broadway news.
[00:23:46] I worked there four days a week. I lived in a loft between Pike and pine on 11th. And I had a separate practice space for my band across from Cal Anderson park. And I, I made $9,000 a year. Now, what I didn't have was a car, a computer, a television. I didn't have anything. I had a guitar, an amplifier, a bed, a girlfriend.
[00:24:15] And a job where if I didn't show up, it was like, oh, well, the magazines will sell themselves. You know, there was no, I had no expectations and the, and nobody had any expectations of me. And how do you duplicate that? You can't go back to it without there being, you know, the bottom has to drop out somehow.
[00:24:41] And we're living in a world now where people look at their lives. They look at their lives in Seattle where they have a computer, they have a phone, they have a television, they have access to all the information of the world. And they, all they can see is the injustice of the fact that they don't have their own apartment that has a bathtub and they don't have a car. Or if they do, it's not the right one.
[00:25:07] And they have to work a job and all these things that, um, that those things feel very different to young people. Like they're being exploited or they're not being given opportunity. And to go back to a time, I think the thing that a lot of us are most nostalgic about is a time when nobody was watching us or gave a shit about us. And we had no expectation that anybody would.
[00:25:34] I mean, I had so many friends that hadn't talked to their parents in a decade. It wasn't considered weird. It was like, what does your dad do? I don't know. You know, like you wouldn't have even asked the question. So there was a cultural change that had nothing to do with whether or not you could afford a home. Like I knew a girl that lived in a house on 22nd off of Madison. It was a five bedroom house.
[00:26:03] And the woman that owned it offered to sell it to her for $40,000. And there were nine of us living there basically. And we really sat, we had a house conference and was like, how are we going to find the down payment, which would be $8,000 to buy this house? And it just seemed like a pipe dream, $8,000. Where would you find it? You know?
[00:26:33] And so we let the house go. There was nothing anybody could do about it. And we thought there'd be $40,000 houses in Seattle for the rest of time. And it would just be a matter of one of these days. You know, somebody would get, we'd all have $1,000 put in. So I don't know, I don't know how you can sit in a room full of people and talk about affordability in Seattle, talk about opportunities for, for artists to live here.
[00:27:03] And have any component of it that involves justice, fairness, opportunity, because those are the, those are the words that come up in all conversations about those things. And what you really want is a world in which people are, are just trying to make some shit to, you know, to get through the next day.
[00:27:27] My band, like I say, the first time I put out a record and it was number one in the strangers list of local records at easy street and at, at, uh, uh, uh, cellophane square or whatever. Like we had the number one record in Seattle. I had no higher ambition. I had no dream bigger than that. Not that anyone in Portland would ever hear my band.
[00:27:54] Hadn't even occurred to me that I could be any bigger than to have the number one record at cellophane square for a week. And I don't know how you reintroduce that except that, that everybody loses hope, which I think is the, is, and I see it in Gen Z. I see the kids, you know, they're just so tired of being lectured by millennials.
[00:28:20] They're just so tired of being told how things are and what they can and cannot say and how to think and how to be. And I see, I see a lot that reminds me of, of us when we were young, but they're just like, God, can you shut up and leave us alone? Like, please just shut up. And I, and I look at that and I'm like, fuck yes. Like that feels hopeful to me.
[00:28:46] That feels like culture can come out of that, you know, that and the office space, the empty office space. Somehow there's some potential. Yeah. I think we're coming around to the conclusion that Seattle needs a good old fashioned massive recession. Well, I read something today like, oh, Starbucks is moving to Nashville and it's a referendum on Seattle and liberal cities. And I'm like, ah, Starbucks is moving to Nashville because labor is cheap.
[00:29:14] It's the only reason labor is cheap and space is cheap. And they have no, they have no, they're not taxing people. It's, you know, if anybody that's lived in Nashville for a year knows that you'd rather live in Seattle. Isn't that a good music scene? It's the only state I haven't been to of all 50 states is Tennessee. For some reason I have not been to Nashville. No, what, what the Nashville music scene is, is there are, I mean, you walk into any hardware store in Nashville
[00:29:41] and everybody that works in there is a better guitar player than anyone in Washington state by a factor of five. Yeah. Wow. But they play according to a mode. They all know 10,000 songs. If one of them starts to do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, that everybody else in the hardware store grabs a guitar and they all can play.
[00:30:10] But nothing new is coming out of there. Right. Nobody's pushing any kind of envelope. It's formulaic. And it's, and by design, I don't say that as a criticism. That's country music. That is, that is a bluegrass music. It's all hillbilly music is just, it's the same. And that's what they want. Seattle does not have great players. We do not have, we do not, or rather we don't privilege virtuosity.
[00:30:39] We don't say, man, that guy's a great guitar player. What, what builds Seattle music is songwriting and innovation. We want to hear something different every time we want. We want to break the box. And as soon as we're not trying to break the box here, as soon as people are like, I'm playing this because this is the sound. At least in the Northwest, this is true in Portland too, or always was in Vancouver.
[00:31:07] As soon as it's, it's a sound, you want to break it. And people, and a lot of bands in Seattle are trying to reinvent the wheel. And this is true in Seattle hip hop, right? For 30 years, people have been saying Seattle's the next, going to be the next hip hop scene. But Seattle hip hop's always trying to break the mold. And so what you get is a lot of intellectual hip hop, which never breaks out.
[00:31:34] Because people aren't, people in the rest of the country aren't like, yeah, give us your fucking deep thoughts. You know, they're like, the last time Seattle hip hop was like on the verge of breaking, what came out was crunk. That was, you know, that was what ended up taking the charts by storm. So, and that's true in, in all the music we make here.
[00:31:58] And I think all the culture, it's just a little bit more transgressive, I guess, against form. And that's true in Austin too. It's all in a box in Los Angeles. It's a box. They're trying to manufacture music. And up here, we're not. We're, we're playful in a way that's also sad.
[00:32:25] And that's not, you're not going to sell records in Nashville with playful and sad and bad. I want to take it back to this, this question you started with of affluence and what cities used to be like and Gen X nostalgia. I guess to push back just to say, because you also started with New York City and how cool it was to be playing there and having people know your songs.
[00:32:52] And one of the best cities I lived or lived in in terms of cool was definitely Tokyo, a very affluent city. I lived there after college. This was also in the 1980s, so a really long time ago. But a big part of that, and you know, I'm obviously like the millionth person to have said it, is just the density. The clubs, the bars, the restaurants, the apartments, all just like stacked on top of one another.
[00:33:16] The fact that you can have some friends say, if you check out this place and they take you into a building that looks like an apartment building, go down this dark hallway and up some stairs and another dark hallway and in an elevator and out the elevator and down the hallway. And they open up a door and there's this like super cool bar. There's only six seats in it. You're like, how the fuck does this even exist? Like, how is it possible? And it's the way in which all of that kind of gets revealed in Tokyo.
[00:33:46] That's just so there's just nothing like it in the entire world, really. Yeah. And, you know, but the key there is, yeah, there's affluence, but there is density, which, by the way, is what we need to help solve our housing crisis and climate change and other things. So what about that? I mean, is there hope for us? I don't know how we can kind of recreate Edo-era cities in North America, especially in the West, or even, you know, we're not even, we don't have a tradition of great European cities here that we're trying to fix.
[00:34:17] So given our patterns of development and what cities like Seattle are, I'm not sure what we can really do. I don't think we can create that kind of density. But what about density, I guess is the question. Well, the thing that you have in Japan and in Tokyo is you have conformity as part of a mass, like, understanding of how the country works, how the culture works.
[00:34:38] And so there's something always to fight if you, and then that's why there's a 1 billion alternative cultures in Tokyo, because there's a vast majority of people that are living a very conformist life with conformist expectations. And what we have in Seattle in the West is we've made non-conformity the mass culture.
[00:35:04] Everybody here is doing it, you know, is alternative. And so there's nothing culturally to push against because you can't be fringe in Seattle. How are you going to be fringe? The guy that owns the club has got a septum piercing and has got his tongue split in half so he can be a forked tongue. You know, like you can't be the next mayor is going to have surgically implanted horns.
[00:35:34] Right. So how do you, how do you make a culture as a young person, um, without something to push against? And you're describing density in, in Tokyo as a, uh, as a cultural driver. I think density is just the, it's the future of Seattle. It's the future of cities in the United States. And we don't have it right now because land is still plentiful.
[00:36:00] Like I left downtown Seattle and moved to South of Burien, which is still just 15 minutes from downtown. And I've got the house and a yard and all this stuff, which isn't affordable today, but it was affordable five years ago when I bought it. I, you know, it's, you couldn't get a two bedroom apartment downtown for what I'm paying for this house. But that was five years ago. It's not like I'm some boomer that bought this house in 1970.
[00:36:27] Um, and you can go to federal way. You can go to, you can go somewhere that's just outside and there's still room. And so why would we have a downtown? The, the, the idea of a, of a very dense downtown core was predicated on there being tons and tons of office jobs downtown.
[00:36:49] And then we'd just put tons and tons of apartments down there and it would be like a little spaceship, but now all the office jobs are gone. And so we're talking about density downtown. Well, everybody's working from home. Like what you're talking about at that point is you're just building like a playground for rich millennials and nobody wants that.
[00:37:12] Um, so density is going to come, I think here in Seattle because the Pacific ocean is no longer a barrier to immigration. Like it was for the entire history of humankind. Like we've always emigrated to the West and now the Pacific is gone, right?
[00:37:32] You can buy a $700 plane ticket from Hong Kong to Vancouver and you don't have to be rich anymore to make that, that, that is going both ways now. And Seattle is becoming a, uh, like it's a focal point of, of, of East word migration. And so, yeah, China's got a mil, a billion and a half people.
[00:37:59] And here in Seattle, there's 500,000 people living in a, in like this jewel of an environment. There are going to be more people here. And 50 years from now, there are going to be a lot more people here at which point density is going to be like, we're in a way we're fighting the last war. We don't have to worry about density that's coming. Um, what we have to do is prepare the ground and Seattle's terrible about that.
[00:38:26] If we had prepared the ground for the amount of growth we've had 20 years ago, if the city council wasn't trying to cap buildings at five stories in order to punish developers five years or 25 years ago, we'd have housing now. Um, but the city council had this idea that, Oh, development is bad. We're, you know, I don't want development because it's going to chase out the, all the artists that are living down in South Lake union.
[00:38:55] Well, that we fucked that up beyond belief and we're doing it now again and again, because we're always fighting the last war. We're never looking forward. Yeah. I would, um, you know, this whole conversation is making me think of how the conception of what a city is for and what they do has evolved.
[00:39:17] So enormously just in, uh, you know, since we were young in our, in our lifetimes and there's the whole Richard Florida, you know, kind of creative class thesis, right.
[00:39:27] That, um, uh, that, you know, the, in order for cities to be successful, it's really about attracting, you know, professionals and innovators and, you know, and, and what attracts them, what is the magnet for them is culture and music and nightlife and all of that stuff. And that, that conception of the city, which I, you know, I, you know, I subscribe to like Seattle.
[00:39:56] I had a choice of going to write for a paper in Orlando or going, coming to Seattle to write for the stranger. And I, you know, it wasn't even a choice because my wife was like, I'm not moving to Orlando. There's no fucking way. You know, like, like, like, and not that maybe Orlando is a nice place. I don't know. I've never, but she's like, we're going to Seattle, even though the Orlando job may be a better job. Right.
[00:40:18] Like, but, um, um, and so I, I, I, I get the, the, that, that is sort of the purpose of what a blue city is these days. Like to, to, to be that magnet and to draw this sort of certain kind of educated, you know, um, more, you know, people on a more upward economic trajectory and they're going to, you know, create jobs and build businesses and do tech and whatever. Right. But that's really a change from like, right after college, 1989, I moved to New York city.
[00:40:47] We're just talking about New York and I lived in alphabet city on the lower East side. And, um, there were 2300 murders, I think in New York city in 1990, the year I lived there. And, um, including one of my upstairs neighbors who got shot in a drive by and crawled up the stairs, died outside of my door. Right. Like, um, uh, that was pretty much the vibe of the city back then, but you know why?
[00:41:13] Cause there were still poor people there and, and, you know, in Manhattan, right. Manhattan is now kind of a Disneyland for the affluent. But back then there were big parts of Manhattan that still had poor people. And there was a kind of vestige of the old New York. It was even changing. Even then that New York was a place where starting in the 19th century, people kind of destitute people came to like build lives for themselves.
[00:41:39] They were engines of economic uplift, all the huge waves of immigration we had in the early 20th century. All those immigrants coming to New York city and working in factories and sweatshops and stuff. And that's what cities were about, right? That's what built Cleveland. That's what built New York was like poor people coming there and finding, getting on the ladder of, of upturn. And that's, what's kind of gone away about blue cities. It seems to me now, right? We're a different thing now. Yeah.
[00:42:06] And it's really hard to make the case to young people that, oh, well, the way to have a vibrant art scene and to have a great like culture is to have 2,300 murders happen in your city. Yeah. There was a, right. I mean, it was gritty and violent in Portland and Seattle back then. And, you know, you watch, what is it? Streetwise, that movie about Seattle in the eighties and the street kids. And like, I couldn't make that. I'm old. I couldn't make that case to myself anymore. Right.
[00:42:34] And I think it's because part of what goes along with affluence is that making these implicit promises, which are, you know, and it's a promise that we want to make to our kids. You're not going to have to struggle like we did. Um, in my own case, you know, my parents were saying my, my mom came from a, a farm in Ohio where the, the toilet was in the yard. Right. Where, um, where in the winter, you know, they heated the house with a fireplace.
[00:43:04] And my dad grew up here in Seattle, but came from a culture where, uh, his dad made him take cold baths in order to toughen him up. And so their promise to me was, uh, and so those are achievable promises.
[00:43:28] And, and it didn't turn me necessarily into, uh, somebody who sat around thinking where's mine. I, I, there's still a voice inside me that said, I said it to a friend yesterday. He was like, how's it going? And I said, well, you know, better than working in the uranium mines, uh, which it is, it remains. But we made a lot of promises that it was going to be a lot better.
[00:43:58] And it turns out we just didn't know what the new bad was going to be. And a lot of that, the new bad doesn't look that bad to us. I read an article this morning where somebody was like, all this political violence, these are the worst times. And somebody pushed back and said, between 1880 and 1903, three presidents were assassinated.
[00:44:25] You know, in 1968, every prominent politician in the country was shot. Um, and so these are not unprecedented times. These are not the worst times for political violence. This is not the poorest everybody's been. And this is not the darkest time in American history. It's arguably statistically things have never been better. There's never been less sexual assault. There's never been less violence. There's never been less war in the world. There's never been more affluence.
[00:44:55] There's never been better nutrition, but we have all these new problems, which are, which are disconnect and malaise and, um, and bitching, you know, that what we don't know what the counter to that is. And I think the counter, as my daughter would say is, will you shut up and let me, you know, let me read.
[00:45:23] I don't think my daughter expects, I don't know what she expects. None of the, none of them want a driver's license. Like what, what kind of work? There's nothing I can say about their world. Cause all I wanted was a driver's license. There wasn't a higher ambition. I am. My 20 year old son doesn't have a driver's license. Yeah. Doesn't even want one. It doesn't, doesn't feel like he needs one. I keep pushing him to get one. And yeah. So we talk about the future.
[00:45:48] We talk about the world we're living in presently and it's unrecognizable just in terms of what a young person thinks they have available to them and what they, what they dream about. And I don't know what that is. I think a lot of it, I mean, one of the reasons I wear a tie is that when I was a kid, the world of adults was exotic and off limits.
[00:46:19] And so I was curious about it. Now, whether I wanted to work at the Dexter Horton building and wear shoes that had leather soles and went slap, slap, slap. When I walked up the marble stairs, I don't know, but it was exotic and it was other. And now I think kids, you know, most of their parents sit and play video games in the living room and wear sweatpants.
[00:46:45] And, you know, like my peers, our generation thinks that freedom means to dress like a little kid and spend your time like a little kid when you're not at work, which is mostly sitting at your computer, uh, playing games when, when you're not in a meeting. And so a kid, my daughter's age looks at adults and goes, it just seems like being a kid except worse.
[00:47:15] Whereas in my world, adults smoked cigarettes. They were like having sex with their neighbor's wife. They were drunk. They were mean. They, they, uh, they could do things that we weren't allowed to know. And kids were dumb asses that, you know, that like did things on their bike and, you know, like you weren't allowed in to so many buildings.
[00:47:45] And it just seemed like being a kid was lame. Uh, we didn't realize that being an adult was like gnarly, but it seemed better. And I just, I look at other grownups that go to work in a Seahawks Jersey and it's like, God, you know, you're not making adulthood look that great. We really did make ourselves grow up faster. I mean, I left home at 17 to go to college.
[00:48:11] I was like, as you said, I was like, yeah, I went 3000 miles away to, I wanted to cut those ties and, uh, figure out, but there's a different, it was a different time, different era. And, and, and kids don't grow up as fast anymore. Yeah. It was a different time. It was, it was arguably a hundred times more dangerous. And we were a hundred times letting, you know, people were like, yeah, he's 17, you know, hope he makes it back. Right.
[00:48:37] I know a girl who got, got murdered by a serial killer while she was hitchhiking on dead tour, you know, like, like stuff like that happened. But, but again, you can't say, you can't put that up there as like, I wish we could go back to a time. No, right. I mean, in some sense, you know, our problems today and the stuff we've been talking about are the problems, John, as you're saying of success, right? We had success in sort of getting past some of the grittiness and stuff that was dangerous.
[00:49:06] And some, in some sense that like that old Portland of the eighties was unenlightened and there was a lot of racism. You know, I experienced some really virulent racist stuff during that, you know, that was all part of it too. Right. Well, that's the other thing. There's less racism by every metric now than there was 40 years ago, but we are way more aware of it. And so it seems like America's a racist country.
[00:49:30] You have no idea, you know, what it was like in 1980, what the homophobia and the racism, it just was, there weren't iPhone videos of people microaggressing one another in targets. And so now that looks like the, you know, it's a, it's a crime scene because somebody was like you people. And it's like, look, people disappeared 30 years ago.
[00:49:57] And, and Sandeep, I'm sure you had, you had lots of experiences that were more than just somebody giving you the hairy eyeball in a grocery store. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I did. But that's, uh, but that's the level of our discourse now because we, because our standard I think is pure justice, absolute equality, things that aren't necessarily attainable by human beings.
[00:50:23] And if your standard is that there is never any struggle, then I don't know what to do except tell you that the bottom's about to fall out and you're going to, you're going to. You're going to encounter struggle that you're not prepared for. It's today, right? Am I right?
[00:50:47] Well, and, and no, and the thing is adults today, like my friends, I mean, Gen X has adopted that way of thinking too. And partly it's because Gen X has never had a spine. And so millennials rushed into the space that boomers used to occupy culturally.
[00:51:06] And they said, here are the rules and here's the language and here's, and Gen X was like, okay, you know, just don't, you know, don't yell at me and I'll just say whatever you want me to say. If you get, if you get five Gen Xers in a room, they're like, oh my God, is this a safe space to be racist? Oh, thank God. You know, thank God I can make jokes at the expense of other people now. Cause I'm with my people, but you know, then they go out and they're just like, oh shit, people are listening.
[00:51:36] You know, I can't say anything except what is prescribed. And I say that, you know, and that people are like, oh, that's disgusting. But it's like, I'm telling you, if you had a, if you had a microphone in any gathering of three Gen Xers, they're just, they can't wait to go. Oh God, can I just for, can I just relax and not parrot a kind of sensitivity that I don't feel. Yeah.
[00:52:03] And, and when we'll never feel as authentic or legitimate, but I'm, but Gen X never stood up. We didn't stand up for ourselves when we were 20. We just went, man, whatever. It's losers. Fuck me. And now we're in our fifties. We should be, we should be the, the voice of adulthood now. And we just can't, we can't, we can't be like, pushed around by boomers, pushed around by boomers, then pushed around by millennials.
[00:52:32] And we're just hoping for like Gen Z to save us, you know, because we're not going to do it. Well, Gen Z is like, hey, grandpa, can I have your old t-shirts? Because they're cool. You know, like that talking heads to her t-shirt is worth 90, $95. And we're like, oh my God, they love us now. I want, I want Gen Z to overthrow the tyranny of the millennials. And they will, except Gen Z is a much smaller generation.
[00:52:57] So I think for the rest of our lives, there are going to be insufferable millennials telling us that we're doing it wrong. And Gen Z is going to be the same. They're going to be like, yeah, okay, man, I guess. Like. Yeah, whatever. Sure. Whatever. Never mind. Aren't you guys boomers is what they'll say. Hey, John Roderick, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, it's my pleasure. I like talking about this stuff.
[00:53:22] And I think that I feel maybe in the last couple of years, we're in a place where we can be a little bit like this. A little jocular about topics that maybe we're off limits to be funny about or to be irreverent about. I think that I'm a booster of Seattle. I think it's a great city and I think it's a, it's a gem.
[00:53:51] I just, I'm not, I don't think any of us are really qualified to know what the hell kids that are 20 years old right now are even going to do. Or even, even to know what they think when they look at Seattle. I don't know what they think. I don't think we'll ever, we'll ever know until they start telling us about it. God, I can't, I'm not looking forward to that. Yeah. That's it for another edition of Blue City Blues. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. Our editor is Quinn Waller.
[00:54:20] And thanks everybody so much for listening.