The Wife has a wrapup of the Dallas Observer Music Awards from Tuesday night, along with some bitching about the Dallas music scene that hits the nail right on the head:

Dallas always has been, and always will be a “see and be seen” city. If you go to a club that has a stage with a tremendous talent commanding the attention of the room…then who will look at you? Live music is not condusive to the Dallas way of thinking…or rather lack thereof. Hell the Awards show the other night was such a perfect example. The only folks among the hundreds and hundreds of attendees paying any attention to the show were the other musicians.
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I just don’t see young professionals from Uptown or the Park Cities or Addison coming down to fight the fight in Deep Ellum to see a show. It ain’t gonna happen…and that, my friend, is that.

I’ve been saying that for fifteen years. This is a shallow city that would rather spend their cabbage at semi-private foofoo clubs with marble bathrooms and velvet drapes. The grit of live music is just too common, especially for the $35k per annum Millionaires wandering the streets.

Dallas has a plethora of great musicians and a decent music scene, but the telling number comes from Sarah Hepola’s little wrap-up column: 5,200. That’s the number of people who bothered to click in and vote. Five thousand, two hundred. From a city that has over one million people inside the city limits. From a metropolitan area that has over 8,000,000. For a paper that has a rack of 100 freebies every 30 yards. I don’t want to run the %s, because they’re just embarassing. Gen-X and Gen-Y are falling down on the job, if you ask me, but that’s the way the earth rolls, and the way the invisible hand works. I hope their contemporaries, who are starting the bands, recording the CDs, playing to the empty rooms have all the success they so richly deserve, but I hope it happens for them somewhere besides the city that thinks Spaniard bridges over the stinkiest stretch of river in Texas to no purpose other than assuaging a bunch of Highland Parkers’ vague sense of image.

In other words, go forth and be fruitful, dudes, but do it somewhere you’re appreciated.