On a recent trip home to Portland, Ore., I met (on two occasions, actually) a particular girl who was a heroine among her friends because she drank her Rainier Beer out of a sixteen-ounce tallboy can with a plastic straw. Widemouth pop-top notwithstanding, this girl sucked and sipped her cheap, Pacific Northwest beer as perhaps no one else in any given bar would do. I had wanted to ask her about the odd technique (and why it had raised her to such rarefied status at the handful of dive bars she frequented), but, before I got the chance, she overheard the datum that my career had taken me to New York City, that my zip code now began with that city's '1' instead of Portland's '9.' She dismissed me--profanely--as a snob who needed to go back whence I came (which I eventually did--aboard a 737 on Continental's redeye to Newark, chariot of the aristocracy--when my vacation ended and I had to return to work), and the straw-imbibing beer spectacle remained--and remains--a mystery to me.
Portland, as a recent paean in Slate declares, is the new American mecca of indie music. Fair enough--and a contention this Oregonian ex-pat has no interest in disproving. Still, Taylor Clark's tour through the city's musical boldface names (some bolder than others) ignores the greater milieu that allows this so-called heart of "Pabst-and-angst fueled racket" to thrive, a milieu that, in my observation, is strangling and polluting a great city with a virulent import far more pernicious and stifling than any perceived snobbery I may or may not bring west with me on my yearly trips home to visit Mom. Those creating and enjoying the music after all, are the same folks telling me to take my Oregonian-cum-New Yorker ass out of town.
For the Portland "primordial ooze" from which this music evolves is, after all, as snotty and pretentious as the East Village hipster scene, but with a bigger chip on its shoulder, which makes it all the more obnoxious. As cosmopolitan as Portland is (as Clark's musical/geographical tour does indeed make evident), many of its citizens still act the part of the Texas cowboy in the old Pace Picante Sauce* television commercial who's appalled to discover that his bunkmate's salsa comes, not from the Southwest, but instead from--heavens--"New York City." Portland's version of the hipster, I've discovered, is mean, ostracizing, and elitist, as offensive to easterners as the famous New Yorker "View of the World" is to westerners. Snobbery, it seems, cuts east and west, up and down. Still, it doesn't have to.
East Villagers trolling Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan may look down disdainfully on the uptown and crosstown interlopers that descend upon the park's famed dog run and wonderful weekend farmers' market, but there's a symbiosis there (however begrudging), a camaraderie between the facially-tattooed and the non-facially tattooed, created by the myriad idiosyncrasies endemic to Manhattan living. There's a sense (real or imagined) of community and a tacit pride that, I've found, come with living in America's largest city. Be ye writer or hipster, M&A man or lawyer, New York is perhaps the one place in the United States in which you don't have to rationalize to anyone else why you're there; the city has a natural magnetism unrivaled anywhere else in the U.S. The northwest isolationist attitude is, of course, unnecessary and futile, but it pervades deeply into the Rose City's ethos nonetheless.
Portland, blessed with a population of half a million, cannot hope to compete with New York's eight million as far as sheer intellectual energy is concerned; there just aren't enough brain cells. And the money and muscle embodied by Wall Street, well, isn't migrating west anytime soon. The two cities, in short, are incomparable. Thus, it takes an active decision by a Portlander to determine that these mere differences are actually major deficiencies, that these demographic and economic inequalities are things to be feared, ridiculed, and, as I recently found out, venomously loathed.
There is, of course, a certain modicum of pride in Portland's scrappiness; the underdog always feels like a beneficent role to play, and the art that emerges from a perceived sense of inferiority can enlighten and embolden folks from any economic stratum and any zip code. When the underdog becomes jaded and cruel, though, creativity is stifled. Portland's celebration of its seedier side is unique and, it its own way, charming; when it becomes malicious cannon fodder to throw at the less seedy, though, it becomes disheartening. Couldn't great music and great people continue to flourish in Portland with or without the city's "rivalry" with the snotty northeast? And couldn't even more be squeezed out if the energy spent bitterly spitting self-constructed inferiority into the faces of "elites" were directed into non-confrontational, creative channels?
I don't want Portland to turn into New York; it's wonderful as Oregon's largest city. It would do well, then, to avoid devolving to a frontier camp that disavows people--or salsas--by merely looking at their zip code--or labels.
* Correction: An earlier version of this article erroneously identified La Victoria as the condiment advertised in the salsa commercial. The television spot is, in fact, for Pace.