#la has its own problems and I wouldn't want to be in a creative career there either but that's another post

[dionysus-complex]

Some musings on the place where I’m from while I wait to see if anybody shows up to my office hours~

Salt Lake is so weird b/c like, contrary to the popular (at least from what I’ve encountered living in liberal West Coast cities/college towns) perception of the whole state of Utah as a conservative religious wasteland, it trends centrist-liberal, less than half the population is actively Mormon, and there’s a major research university here, a visible if (in my experience) kinda cliquish queer community, tons of breweries/coffee shops/vegan cafes/etc, and in normal times there’s decent nightlife and touring bands stop here regularly, and yet somehow it seems like even compared to similar mid-size centrist-to-progressive metro areas in swing-to-red states (Tucson AZ, Columbus OH, Omaha NE, etc), there’s no real self-sustaining creative community or large-scale music scene here because a lot of queer folks and people in the alternative scene tend to try to get out of Utah as soon as possible, and meanwhile the Mormon creative center of gravity is an hour south of here in Provo/Utah County and is centered around BYU and simply not open to anybody outside of that community.

And you can kinda see this in the fact that all our “major local bands” (The Used, Neon Trees, Imagine Dragons) are all not from SLC but the actual conservative religious wasteland of Utah County, and they’ve mostly relocated to Las Vegas and/or LA immediately after making it big b/c there’s just no real reason to hang around in SLC if you’re in a creative career.

All this is not to belittle the great work put out by a couple of local bands and artists here I do love!! But the fact that this place is perceived by most non-Mormons and queer folks (myself included!) more as a place to be from than an actual place to settle and make a life really keeps it from having the kind of creative vibrancy that’s certainly possible in other similar metro areas, and that makes me a little sad b/c it’ll always be home and there’s a lot of good qualities about this place that get drowned out by the vaguely stifling dominant culture of Utah.