Ghent and the Promise of Culture

By Maxwell Reid

It’s 4:17 PM, I’m sitting in my cramped hostel room in Ghent, Belgium, clinging on to any bit of wifi I can. In two hours the pubs open. In six hours the pubs close. In seven hundred thirty thousand and one hours, the clubs may open. In seven hundred thirty thousand and one hours hours I’ll be in a different town. I can’t wait for COVID restrictions to change, they can’t open up for me; I’m at a crossroads. In seven hours, I’ll be back in this cramped room. All I can hope now is to hear the steel stringed bass twang as I sway home on cobblestone streets. I throw a euro at every busker I see, its clank bringing a percussive element to the Belgian folk blues being played in this lonely city street. They’re the only humans in Europe giving us live music, the only humans in Europe contributing to a physical scene culture.

This isn’t the first time I’ve felt like this, won’t be the last time I feel like this. With it comes tinges of anger, of selfishness, tinges of pain and of guilt. I’ve come to know these emotions very well in the past two years, but this time the emotions feel brand new. Maybe it was foolish of me to think that I could escape this by going to a different continent. I often ask myself what I’m even doing here, am I unwittingly bringing the bug over from infected shores? Who am I to deserve music from these people, I’ve made their problems worse, I’m the reason why most of them are still inside. 

Another show was canceled today. Drain Gang in Cologne, Germany. I’m not a drainer. Bladee underwhelms me, Thaiboy Digital annoys me, Yung Lean bores me, only Ecco2k gives me hope, but I was incredibly excited for that show. I’ve always wanted to be there for the cultural zeitgeist, the mythic befores, the “humble beginnings” that every biographer talks about: dancing to “Psycho Killer” on a congested CBGB’s night, swaying to “About A Girl” in a humid Seattle basement, crowd surfing to “Our Lady of Sorrows” at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, moshing to the electricity of “wokeuplikethis*” only hours after it dropped. These songs we hold as sacred in popular music canon are made even more special by the environments they originated in, the specific zeitgeists they captured of a place on the verge of cultural domination. 

Northern Europe was that place. Now it isn’t. Now, nowhere is. 

Talking Heads, Nirvana, My Chemical Romance, Playboi Carti, all of these acts had scenes to fall back on. A small and confined geographic locale where they could test out their sounds, relate to their audiences, and cultivate something entirely new. Sure, some acts had the aid of the internet to create an audience and get inspirations, but that doesn’t change the fact that at one point in the early tens, Carti and Young Thug were peers within the same music scene of Atlanta, hearing each other’s music and creating a new sound that would dominate everything the mass music audience would consume today. New acts can’t play shows now. Drain Gang can’t showcase evolutions of their sound to their most diehard and personal audience like every other act of the past was able to. Without a scene, how is culture supposed to grow? How is the bug of popular music supposed to spread? History promised us a place in the cultural zeitgeist, as music hungry college students we were promised to be “part of it”, we were promised the “I was there” that our grandparents got for psychedelia and our parents got for Grunge. History didn’t keep its promise. 

Today I walked past Kinky Star, the local music club in Ghent where dozens of local Belgian artists had gotten their start. Its windows were boarded. It took me back to Boston, where I’d walk past House of Blues or the Royale on a cold January night and it too would be completely shut and locked. In America shows have been back for a bit, and as a traveler I’m ignorant as to if they’re still going on now, but it is the constant threat of cancellation that is always terrifying. Many drunken conversations I had with Belgian students went along the lines of me asking if there was a show, them saying that there might be a show, followed by the notification that there was no longer a show. We were forced into crowded pubs, where the usual radio was changed to half hearted house sets, middle aged white men with dreadlocks off molly, cocaine, lsd and speed attempting to grab the kids like me who were simply just in there trying to drink and listen to music and have a good time. The restriction has locked all of us incompatible music lovers within the confines of a shit smelling bar, it was all homogenized to an umixable degree to the point that absolutely nobody was having a good time. All I could hear was the apologies of my new Belgian friends: “Sorry, it’s not always like this. They just have nowhere else to go”.

Lockdowns are frustrating but ultimately necessary in order to combat a lethal virus. This may all sound like complaining, and as a serial complainer, it surely is, but I don’t want my time in Ghent to fill me with this cultural despair. But I think that may be a fool’s errand. ICU beds are completely taken up, the vulnerable are dying. It's ridiculous and almost selfish of me to yearn for a type of “fun” that could infect and kill more. At the worst, like everything else, the culture around music will be entirely digitized (just as this article is) but at the very best, and the outcome I am most certain is true, we are simply living in an era of forced cultural hiatus, a dark spot, a black hole within the forward momentum of the culture. This isn’t the first black hole, the Renaissance being built off the freedom from the end of the Black Plague, the boom of literary genius of Fitzgerald and Hemingway coming out of the horrors of World War One. Once that black hole ends, and it will end, all of us young music lovers will be thrust into terminal velocity, explosions of creativity, the ultimate heyday of making up for lost time. Masterpieces have already come out of pandemic torture, “Fatigue” by L’rain, “LP!” by JPEGMAFIA. “Call Me If You Get Lost” by Tyler, The Creator was ultimately an ode to a perceived end of the bug. 

We can’t see an end in sight, we just need to hope it will end. As I remain in this black hole of culture, I’m going to continue to travel, continue to consume different art, different literature, different films, and different music, even if it is all digitized. Once that black hole ends, I’ll be ready.