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MTV visits Minneapolis, ‘A place so cold the music has to be hot’

by Andrea Swensson

July 25, 2013

MTV recently launched a new series called "This Is the Place," which zooms in on particular music scenes and explores what each city has to offer. For their third episode, they ventured into the heart of Minneapolis, where they discovered that everyone is in everyone else's bands.

Watching this video, a few things jumped out at me immediately. Though this obviously only showcases a small fraction of our scene (there are no folk, rock, jazz, or blues artists featured—in fact, there's only one guitar shown, which is quite a feat for such a guitar-heavy town), the video does a tremendous job of illustrating something about the Twin Cities that can be very hard to describe to outsiders. This is such a collaborative scene that even the word collaborative doesn't quite do it justice; more often than not, bands and groups bleed into one another, overlap, and then reconfigure themselves into totally new projects, and it's something that becomes clear as you watch P.O.S. pop up here, there, and over there again as the video cameras make their way around town.

Our own David Campbell is featured in the video giving an overview of that very idea: "I don't want to say cliques, because it's an open door, but there's these little groups of people that are all over each other."

And Mike Mictlan of Doomtree gives another astute summary of the scene: "It's cold, it snows, and we make records, then it warms up and we play those records... a lot."

Watch the video here.

Clean Water Land & Legacy Amendment
This activity is made possible in part by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment’s Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund.