IT’S A COUPLE OF DAYS since the massive pre-opening hype and the opening weekend concerts for Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project, and a couple of days before the tape-delayed cablecasts of the concerts show up on MTV and VH1.
So maybe you’ll be able to stand reading a few items about it today:
1. It’s done now. We’re stuck with it. The building was fun to look at while it was going up. Its form and silhouette changed almost daily. But now, it’s in its final shapeless shape. Will it age gracefully into a welcome part of the skyline, or will it become a premature eyesore? (A few observers not bought-and-paid-for by Allen’s PR bucks suggest the latter.)
2. It really is World Class, and that’s one of its biggest problems. Its out-of-scale gaudiness clearly marks it as the product of a town trying too damn hard to prove it had “made it,” too concerned with becoming “New York By-And-By” (The Chinook-jargon translation of “New York-Alki,” Seattle’s original name).
3. We won’t stop hearing about it. Allen sank nearly a quarter-billion into building the thing, but wants the museum to pay back its operating expenses. That means selling annual memberships and bringing casual visitors (local and tourist) over and over. That, in turn, means installing and promoting new attractions (unlike zoo-goers, museum-goers tend not to visit the same old exhibits repeatedly.)
4. Music in Seattle is now a Big Business to stay. EMP’s need to keep itself in the local and national media spotlight means big-name rock and rap stars will be continually trotted out here, at no small expense, to perform or speak at the place or to announce the donation of some collectible trifle. Bigtime concerts and “once in a lifetime” festivals will take place at EMP, or will be sponsored by EMP at other venues, for years to come.
5. Local bands of any degree of street-cred will be regularly “invited” to become shills for EMP (performing at it, appearing at kids’ workshops under its aegis, donating stuff). Will any significant artists (other than Pearl Jam and the Kill Rock Stars label roster) refuse? Will the Seattle Scene be divided into EMP-Friendly and EMP-Unfriendly camps?
6. Rock music is a corporate institution, as if all the previous evidence of this fact (Hard Rock Cafes, House of Blues, Rolling Stone, MTV, the Grammies, Mr. Allen’s former ownership of Ticketmaster, the record industry’s suit to kill Napster, the use of James Brown songs to sell laxatives) hadn’t convinced you.
(A lesson in rock as big business: The reason EMP exists in its present form was because Allen was thwarted in his original scheme to create a “Jimi Hendrix Museum,” honoring the rock god of all Seattle white baby boomers (who himself left Seattle promptly after turning 18, only came back on tour, and told everybody how much he hated it).
Seems Allen had helped the Hendrix family pay for its umpteen-year suit to get back the rights to his music. In return, Allen only wanted the right to create a Hendrix Museum–and, he later decided, the right to control all rights to Hendrix’s music, name, and image for the next 100 years. The family decided to part ways with Allen.)
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: The locally-based Home Grocer is combining with a similar grocery-delivery operation, Webvan. Webvan’s actually a smaller company than Home Grocer, operating in fewer metro areas. But one of those areas is San Francisco, which means Webvan is regularly covered as “the” Net grocery company by those ever so Frisco-centric computer news outlets. Hence, the Webvan name’s far better known than Home Grocer among investors; so that’s the name (and the management team) that will survive the merger.
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