For some, the wait felt interminable.
Seven o'clock pm, last Monday night. That was what time the Blackalicious show at Club Alegria was slated to start.
Eight o'clock rolled around, and the show had not begun yet. Eight-fifteen came and went. Tick-tock…8:30…8:45…9:00.
Hip-hop shows never start on time. A two-hour wait, at the very least, is to be expected. Knowing this, I made the wise decision to show up no earlier than 9:30.
But most people didn't. When I arrived, refreshed from a productive evening, excited about seeing a true, real-live hip-hop
show in Santa Fe, and entered the front gates, my friends ran up to me. They seemed desperate, hollow-eyed: "We can't leave!" they screeched, clutching at me with their sweaty palms. "We've been here since 7! We can't leave, and there's no alcohol!"
I looked around the patio at Alegria and sure enough, dozens of people milled about like POWs in some long-forgotten war, their eyes dead and their skin sallow. A few smoked cigarettes; I could smell the faint, rope-y odor of pot. That was pretty much all there was to do.
Once, finally, around 9:45, the scratch of a turntable and deep bass bomb advertised Blackalicious' arrival onstage, it was if the Berlin Wall had fallen, releasing decades of oppression and ending a stultifying regime. "They're starting!" went the cry, and everyone raced inside to the stuffy confines of Alegria. The show itself was a fine one. We were lucky to have one of the groovin'-est, and, it should be noted, conscious, semi-underground hip-hop bands in the country gracing our little outpost. Yes, there was dancing. Yes, there was a sort of wholesome feel to the whole endeavor. Yes, the beats and rhymes were sublime.
But the atmosphere of rules surrounding the show spoke to something larger, a trend in Santa Fe that is as disturbing as it is pervasive: The Culture of Can't. The Culture of Can't, wherein city regulations, the City Council and the easily offended all band together, waving a collective finger at us, telling us one thing: "You can't!"
You can't leave Club Alegria once you're inside. You can't drink a beer there while waiting 2 1/2 hours for a show to start. You can't smoke a cigarette on an open patio. You can't talk about things that are difficult, or gross, or embarrassing. You can't, you can't, you can't.
I would like to go on record and say, just because one feels that beer would make a hot, boring long-term wait for a band more tolerable does not mean one is a proponent of alcoholism or underage drinking. Similarly, if one proposes a compromise between smoke-saturated bars and complete banning of cigarettes does not mean one is pro-cancer. And, most important, just because one feels that free and open dialogue about difficult topics is the healthiest option for a community does not mean one is a proponent of pornography.
The triple-headed monster of these difficult subjects has raised definite hackles in our fair burg, and, to be honest, that scares the bejeezus out of me. The Culture of Can't is repressive, totalitarian and draconian (its restrictive nature made physically manifest in the "you can't leave once you get in" rule at the Blackalicious show), and nothing will kill a true artistic culture more quickly. I hate to break it to everyone, but not everything in the world is cute as a puppy and covered in patchouli; there is ugliness, there is war, there are STDs, there are suicides, there is dirt and grime. Restricting the boundaries of discussion about such things doesn't make them go away; it simply shoves us all into a corner of cowering, collective denial.
Thing is, this denial strips a community of its ability to communicate; it takes away the conversation and the flow of human interaction. It leaves behind a pristine (on the surface only), sanitized culture. Does art and music thrive in a false world such as this? Do artists and musicians thrive in a place where naysayers constantly wag a finger in their faces, saying, "You can't!"? It constantly strikes me as mind-numbing that Santa Fe speaks so much about supporting art and artists, yet promotes a culture that is so anti-expression, so stupidly restrictive.
I thought about this at the SFR Block Party, wherein the folks wanting a beer were roped off in the pariah corner, separated from everyone else by yellow police tape. A friend of mine ran over, breathless with excitement: "Come look at the alpacas! They're so great. And let's go look at the tattoos!" I said OK, then realized I was stuck in the pariah zone. "That's OK!" she said. "Bring your beer." I just looked at her, simply sighing, "I can't." Then I figured, hey, I can follow the rules, so I slugged down my beer, wound my way through the crowd to the exit (tried to jump over the police tape, but the rent-a-cop said, "You can't"), wriggled through hundreds of people and found her amongst the crowd. By the time I got there, her enthusiasm had died. She'd moved on. I'd had so many damn rules to follow, by the time I reached her, the moment had passed.
