IF THERE’S ONE CONSTANT about my lifetime in the Northwest and particularly my adulthood in Seattle, it’s that somebody’s always complaining about anything and everything around them.

If folks aren’t complaining about the weather, they’re complaining about the economy. If it’s not the economy, it’s the politicians.

And if it’s not the politicians, it’s the whole town’s supposed total and incurable suckiness in regard to everything except natural scenery.

You know the drill. If folk in Seattle aren’t listening to (or wearing, or eating, or reading, or watching, or drawing or painting) whatever the folk in NY/LA/SF are, it just shows how we’re hopelessly behind the times. If we are doing what the bigger-city folk are doing, it just shows how we’re rote trend-followers who can’t think up anything “unique.”

Then there’s the rant I recently receivd in a bar from some musician who apparently still thinks he has to rebel against the dreaded Seattle Grunge Stereotype, 10 years later.

He apparently thought that (1) everybody in the music world would immediately love him if he simply got the hell out of hicksville Seattle (tell that to L7, the Beat Farmers, Concrete Blonde, the Minutemen, and all the other Calif. bands who never got their deserved due), and that (2) to be “Notgrunge” was to be a persecuted musical minority in this town (even though every single act in Seattle since ’92 has insisted it was “Notgrunge”).

But if you think I’m just here today to complain about all the complaining, you’re wrong. (I may be susceptible to many ideological recursive traps, but that’s not one of them.)

Whining about the supposed lack of a local identity actually is a longstanding, integral part OF our local identity. (It’s just one of the many traits we have in common with the Canadians.)

WTO could be seen as complaining taken to epic scale.

Kurt Cobain and co. could be seen as complaining taken to the level of art, or at least great entertainment.

But complaining can be good for you, and for the world around you. You wanna live someplace like Singapore where saying anything negative aboutalmost anyone or anything is not only legally but socially taboo? Didn’t think so.

So go ahead and bitch and moan. Get it out of your system. Feel the potentially healthy ego trip. Be proud of your willingness to speak up and call truth to power or whatever.

Just try, at least, to get to the next step–proposing a solution to your complaint (other than “screw it all to hell”)–and maybe even attempting to act upon this potential solution.

NEXT: WTO videos, the hot and the not-so-hot.

ELSEWHERE:

• Our pal Tom Frank explores the pro-money, anti-politics, anti-complaining schtick at its Ground Zero, Singapore….