Another article on the supreme hipness of Portland, Oregon. It's funny to me that the floodgates have opened on the subject of who in the music world has moved to town. I'm guilty of being a band member (bass player for Gang of Four) who moved here in 2000 so I'll be careful to avoid the 'pot calling the kettle black' syndrome. While it's a healthy phenomon I do worry that we'll get all Seattle-ized and the music scene will be way too trendy before collapsing around our collective, oh so cool, heads.
If you want to follow the music scene in Portland from the POV of a performing musician take a look at my blog Pampelmoose.com where I post daily about the goings-on in PDX.

Dave Allen

I'm surprised the article didn't mention you. Keep Rocking.

Thankfully I was happy not to be mentioned...!!

Do the Dandy Warhols not qualify because they are actually from Portland? Scandalous oversight, IMHO.

Dunno, but my wife and I have been thinking about moving there (for non-hipsterish reasons; just seems like a nice place with cheap homes and natural beauty) and it's nice to know it's got a good reputation.

As a native Portlander with a huge appriciation for indie-rock, I would have found your article hyperbolic...

Had I not lived in Sacramento the last six months.

Dandy's couont here for sure but the article covered the latest incoming transplants. And PDX is great, yes, but forget the cheap houses - not anymore..

Yeah, OK -- transplants. Fair point.

Houses are still cheaper than Orange County, CA though, which is where we live now and barely have two nickels to rub together. And in other ways too, Oregon seems like the perfect antidote to having spent two years in OC. My background is as a journalist in the Middle East, which I loooooooved, and I now work in marketing in a big company in OC. With every passing week, I get more desparate for a place where the houses were built piecemeal not in massive tracts, where the jobs pay the bills but don't define who you are, where there's stuff to do but the sprawl is not endless ... and, well, the usual crap you'd expect to hear from people who aren't really cut out for the corporate life but somehow ended up in that life anyway. Portland sounds good.

We like Southern Oregon too though -- Ashland seems nice.

Yup, all salient points when it comes to Portland. Ashland, although beautiful, is probably as expensive as OC in parts....

Though the 80s and a fair part of the 90s, Portland was considered a jazz magnet. Tom Grant, Jeff Lorber, Quarterflash, Dan Balmer and others. More was going on here than even L.A. Don't forget about Nu Shooz and Crazy 8s. Portland was and is not the lame, sleepy town the author makes it out to be. Before writing an article next time, do research about the Portland music scene.

The article actually did mention the Dandy Warhols. It referred to them as "local punching bags". This is because it is considered cool in Portland to profess not to like the band. Secretly, everyone enjoys their music-- but everyone who has met them can't stand their entitled personalities, and at this point that's a lot of people.

Night Owl, that's a good point..I hear that even Miles Davis played PDX back in the day.

Just a thought Night Owl who are those remarks directed at, me or the article writer?....I'm confused!

Pampelmoose-- I'll be checking out your blog a lot in the near future. I'm young enough to have missed out on the great heyday of punk, but I got turned onto GO4 a couple years ago, and I spent a good hour earlier today listening hard to Entertainment!. There's a lot going on there aside from the fact that it just sounds brutally awesome. The wikipedia page on your band is reasonably good-- it likens you to The Velvet Underground in the sense that your influence on later bands far outstrips your initial album sales. And then, as I was reading that line in the article, the album's bonus tracks started playing and there was the Sweet Jane cover. Serendipitous.

Anyway I'm pretty sure that Night Owl's snark was directed toward the writer of the article.

Dear Newly-Relocated Hipsters Who Dig Portland And Never Shut Up About It:

Someone has to say it: You've -already- frikkin' ruined what was great about our city. It's less authentic, less community-minded, more expensive, more fake-ass and fully crammed with hipsters (who are in reality trend-suckling yuppies with Bettie Page tattoos and faux-old-man beards). And your consumerist leanings have brought the worst sort of developers and opportunists along. Seattle is about a year away. And then one of the few great cities in America will be a memory because YOU just had to feel like a cool kid because you read an article in some mainstream news outlet about how Portland is Green and Indy. You're turning PDX into a freakin' frat house.

And we don't most of you like you because of it. Yeah, I know, every last one of you thinks you're the exception to the rule. Sorry.