Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.
I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.
Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.
Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.
It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.
The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.
– Ann Powers
