Join me, won’t you, in singing this place. It doesn’t exist—not yet. Yes, the concrete of St. Louis is here, and it’s on the road maps, but in other ways there is barely a trace of this city.
Close your eyes and you can picture New York, even if you’ve never seen it. You can do the same with New Orleans or San Francisco. You know their street names through novels, rock lyrics, movies. Now ask yourself: how many outside our city can close their eyes and picture St. Louis?
That is what we can sing (or write, or paint, or sculpt) into existence—an art of the city, an art native to the city, an art expressing the soul of this place. We’ll get it wrong if we try to make our songs/stories/movies look like the art born elsewhere. We should be ourselves while there is still a chance, before homogeneity engulfs us all.
What is unique to a city reveals its soul. Be inspired by our native textures—the muddy river, the terracotta of our buildings. Investigate our native face—the amalgam of North and South, our French roots, our Bosnian and Vietnamese influx. Be honest in your creations about what in our civil society works and what doesn’t. Dare to love it enough to criticize it; dare to keep running back to it even if it dismisses you.
Most importantly, don’t wait for an infrastructure to form that will “support the artistic community.” The infrastructure arrives after the artists claim the territory. Think of Dublin, where plaques are hung at every location mentioned by James Joyce in Ulysses. The plaques are hung afterward; the book was written first. And now, tourists flock to Dublin, lured by the desire to see the city firsthand after a novel formed an image of it in their minds. Your grand ambition, and mine, could make such a thing happen here.
One easy way to begin: be specific when you write poems or songs or do whatever you do to create. Which is more evocative in a lyric: “the main drag” or “Grand Boulevard?” You may have a cult audience now or someday, so give them something to puzzle over. Give your true believers reason to make annotated versions of your work.
Never be content with a fan base here. Make something that upsets or confuses them, if you must. Be the prophet without honor in your home if it will give you a voice outside. But even in your travels away, find a way back. Get your record deal, publishing contract, or whatever out of town if you must, but keep a home in St. Louis. Our soil is clay; everything growing has to fight for its life here, but the fight makes it tougher, stronger. Staying here (or coming back) will strengthen you in ways a transplanting never will.
Originally published in Playback.