Nashville Rough: Grecian or Girly?
by
Baker Montgomery & Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Nashville is a real hole of a town, a boring shit hole whose idea of civic greatness has its apotheosis in a full-scale replica of the Parthenon. The centerpiece of Centennial Park, Nashville’s Parthenon might as well exist only to serve as an ideal score for trumpeters of postmodernism’s dislocated fragmentation and to bring into being (with a bald directness that has no time for subtlety,) the city’s tagline: Athens of the South. It’s as if the only possible meaning of the nickname can be realized here. There is no word for “metaphor” in these parts. This is not a replica historically interested in the original; it’s a replica of the structure as it never was. And by watering down such a powerful sign of the past, it creates an incredulous false face of authenticity: pastel. Nashville never really wanted that pagan temple those smarmy Greeks built so long ago anyway because that would have meant mean a brightly colored affair way too tacky to convey the gravitas, the dignified grandeur which was its goal. No, these Southerners would improve on the original by making theirs anew out of treated concrete simulating unpainted stone. Their Parthenon - finished to look like the one in Athens never did - would be even better. Welcome to Nashville.
A mere fifty years after the structure was completed, a major restoration was begun. It seems concrete doesn’t hold up as well as stone, but who knew? The choice treatment of the concrete façade as a sort of muted pastel shade of white, both disguises and replaces one unglamorous material for another romantic, yet absent one. The Southerners in Nashville seemed hell-bent on confirming what Jean Baudrillard wrote in The System of Objects:
“Nowhere... it seems, is the “honest” color that painting once liberated as a living force now to be found. Instead we encounter only the pastels, which aspire to be living colors but are in fact merely signs for them, complete with a dash of moralism.”
In light of Baudrillard’s assessment, I began to think about Nashville (and my native South as a whole) with its profusion of pastel colored Cadillacs, Sunday dresses and muffins. Reviewing data from my very inaccurate sampling taken from a depressingly small sample group, I can say Southern women are at least twice as likely to wear baby blue, yellow or pink panties as are their California counterparts. It seems safer to them, less overtly sexual than the black more commonly worn by their West Coast sisters. Southern women, with their shame about their bodies and their shame about their sexual desires, tend to hide behind pastel frillies. They are still sexy, but they obscure their sexual desires with the color of Easter eggs. Pastel is color passed through white, doused with white, diluted with white. It speaks the same language as white bread sandwiches with mayo and the crusts cut off. It speaks goy. Pastel is the palette of prudence, pasture, and pastor.
By wearing colors that are "sweet" and "cute", the aims of their pastel lingerie become multifaceted. In this sense, the pastel panties are merely bleached signs for more aggressively colored garments. As Baudrillard puts it, black is a “living color”. Black, in the context of lingerie, is undeniably sexy and undeniably clear in its aim. There is little obfuscation when a woman wears black. It is aggressive and erotic, unashamedly so. And then there’s always the tempting alternative of no panties at all, which sidesteps the whole politics of mediation by color in exchange for a politics of hiding in plain view, a performed confidence that preempts equivocation.
In Nashville, the pastel stands in for the real, not only in the faux-Parthenon and panties, but also in the country music the city is known for. For decades, the studios on Music City Row have eschewed any notion of honesty with a false notion of authenticity. In much the same way, Southern women, on principle, eschew the honesty in their desires. As a stand-in for the real, the country music made in the Music City Row studios relies heavily on the mere signs surrounding the art form – steel guitars, nasal tinged voices, etc. – instead of grappling with an actual art form. As these specific production values and conventions have become entrenched in Nashville’s soil, something even more sinister has occurred, the pastel sign referring to the art form has morphed, de facto, into what is recognized as the thing itself, Baudrillard's feared simulacra.
My gut tells me the whole of Nashville could be described, not as a real “living force” but a place of the pastel, a place of mere signs. But clearly I need to do some more research.
