Keys to a Future Majority: Culture in Need of a Home, an Idea is Born

I finally met Sean Agnew in person on Halloween night at a show at the Trocadero in Philadelphia, just a few days from the election. As I mentioned in my last Keys to a Future Majority (my Masters thesis) piece, I had been told on numerous occasions that this was the guy to know in Philly if you were interested in both politics and music. I had attempted to meet Sean in person a few times to talk about politics, music, and the Philly scene, but his reputation for being extremely hard to track down was well deserved, and my NYC-Philly commutes made my schedule pretty inflexible. However, I did reach him via e-mail a few times; he was unbelievably helpful, and he allowed Music for America to work at almost all of his many events. He also was really excited by what MfA was doing, and seemed genuinely interested in helping to build upon MfA’s model of culturally based political engagement. Though he said the story I was often told about Ed Rendell, the Governor of Pennsylvania and former mayor of Philadelphia, asking him to run for City Council wasn’t really true, I could tell from our e-mails about politics why it would ring true to people. When I e-mailed him that I wanted to bring him some MfA t-shirts for helping us out so much he seemed really excited, and asked if I could also get some shirts for his staff, who I had also found to be extremely helpful and politically engaged. He told me that he would definitely be at the show on Halloween, and so I gathered up a big bag of shirts and headed out to the show, where I was going to work as an MfA volunteer.

When I was introduced to Sean I was a bit shocked. Whenever someone talked about him they made him seem like some sort of industry big-wig, and I fully expected to find someone who was, at the very least, full of themselves (even though he was nice enough over e-mail). Instead I met a young, punkish, and unbelievably humble kid my age, dressed in jeans and a hoodie. I wanted to thank Sean a thousand times for what he was doing, and yet he thanked me for the shirts and helping to turn kids out at the shows. I only got to talk with Sean for a few moments that night—keeping an entire city’s independent music scene vibrant is hard work for one man—but before he left he mentioned that this show was going to be the last for him at the Troc. The Chicago-based company House of Blues (who have since been bought out by Clear Channel) had just finished negotiating for the booking rights to the previously independently booked venue, which meant that Sean would no longer be able to throw concerts there.

Sean also told me that this wasn’t his only problem finding reliable spaces to throw his shows, in a city and nation where the vast majority of shows are thrown by a single company—Clear Channel (recently spun off into Live Nation)—who also happen to own the majority of radio stations in the nation. Sean had recently had a serious problem with another venue where he occasionally booked concerts—the owner of the space had gone on vacation and the manager he left in charge had double booked the venue, and since the other person who booked it was paying more than Sean, the concert was cancelled just as the line for the show started to form outside. Although these were pretty big problems, Sean didn’t seem overly concerned by them; he was used to throwing shows in unique and unusual spaces, including the basement of Philadelphia’s First Unitarian Church, his most frequently used location, and these developments wouldn’t really effect that many of his shows. However, I realized something troubling for the first time that night that I hadn’t really thought about before: Music for America’s model for political outreach was based upon the idea that the best way to engage people politically was to partner with musicians and cultural connectors, like Sean, and help them politicize their scenes (in other words to convert some of their cultural powers into political powers). But those very people and scenes whom we were trying to partner with were in a precarious position themselves. Without a stable place where he could throw his shows, while going up against some very big, and often nasty, corporations Sean seemed to be in a very risky situation. The music world is even more dependent upon personal connections than politics, a history of working with bands being the most important resource that a show producer has, and so all it would take would be a few bad breaks to come Sean’s way and an entire cultural scene would largely cease to exist.

As I rode home from the show that night I was pretty distraught. By basing their political activities on the cultural activities of musicians across the country, Music for America had a model for political outreach and organizing which I now firmly believed could change the way many people think about and relate to politics. But, lacking the space to thrive and grow, the culture itself seemed extremely vulnerable and potentially subject to collapse, right at the very moment when we were making this important connection.

“Damn man,” I thought to myself. “I can’t believe that Sean doesn’t have a space to throw his shows.” And then, I had an idea.

What if we could build a venue that would house leaders of the independent music and arts scenes of Philadelphia where we could also house progressive political organizations? The cultural and political leaders and scenes of Philadelphia both badly need a home and I had witnessed the extremely high value of the working together, so why not join forces to build a space where both of us could grow and thrive? Why not stand together—the political leaders standing up for and supporting the cultural leaders, the cultural leaders taking politics into their scenes and helping to inform and empower their audience?

These thoughts swirled through my head for the next two days as I helped make one final push to get out the vote before the election. Little did I know at the time, but they would come to dominate my thoughts and activities about a year after the election ended.