Now/It's: Live On the Green 2018 - Week Three

In the blink of an eye, we’ve completed three weeks of the latest installment of the Nashville anthology series, Live On the Green. Obviously, I’ve decided to continue the perilous, semi-relevant pop culture parallels for the festival series, and while we’ve looked at rerouting the series through the lens of True Detective, and the overall staying power of the series a la Saturday Night Live, and for this week, let’s take a look at peak Nashville through the lens of peak television and entertainment.

Whether or not you prescribe to the belief that the 2010s were the “Golden Age” of television, or that the late 20-teens are the “Gilded Age” of entertainment, one thing is for certain - Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, (and soon to be) Disney have triggered the seemingly unending “Content Wars.” These behemoths of media are clamoring and clawing for a chance at eyeballs, but at what cost?

Similar to searchbar paralysis and the average music listener’s inability to dive into new music on Spotify, the near two-decades of “peak entertainment” has reached an inevitable impasse.

The impasse of choice. Gluttonous, vast, and vacuous choice. Television and at-home entertainment is an all you can eat buffet of content and programming, so much so, it makes the stomach churn at the thought of missing out on Westworld because you have to catch up on Handmaid’s Tale after ripping through Peaky Blinders at home and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel at the gym.

Entertainment is at an all-time high, as is Nashville.

Not all that dissimilar from the war for eyeballs in the at-home digital sphere, Nashville has its own crisis of entertainment, albeit more so in the realm of concerts, events, spectacle, and the like.

Unless you’ve been living solely through the posts on this site, first, I thank, you are the best type of reader, otherwise, you’ve likely been slapped with the dilemma of multiple shows playing on the same night, thus forcing your hand in fanhood. It’s a terrible predicament, and one that ails many a music fan/concert goer. Which makes an event like Live On the Green all the more impressive.

The third week of Live On the Green went head to head with the Queen Mothe of Music herself, Sasha Fierce, JuJu, Queen B, Bey, otherwise known as the impeccable Beyonce, and her husband, Jay-Z. Granted, that show was taking place at Vanderbilt’s football stadium, so traffic wasn’t necessarily an issue, but, anywhere Beyonce goes, she brings her devoted Bey-Hive, and needless to say, that’ll cause a sizable dent of absent attendees to any other concert going on nearby. But despite such overwhelming odds, Live On the Green seemed to prevail.

They overcame the daunting head-to-head in the Nashville spectacle attendance wars through the grit and persistence of Trampled by Turtles, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Parquet Courts, and Alanna Royale. Sure, their prospective audiences probably don’t see much of a cross-over with that of Beyonce’s, but Queen Bee is a near universal entity, and a household name. But even despite such facts, Live On the Green lived another day. Another day to continue on into one final weekend, of which we shall see if they once again cross the 100,000+ season attendees or not. In the Nashville spectacle attendance wars, nothing is guaranteed.