The Advice King Anthology

The Advice King Anthology

Chris Crofton, Nick Gazin

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780826504647
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

Since the fall of 2014, The Advice King has been one of the most widely read sections of alt-weekly the Nashville Scene. The Advice King Anthology contains the best of those columns, with new In-the-Meantime notes, a new introduction, and a foreword by writer Tracy Moore. If you are looking for traditional advice, this might not be the book for you. But if you care to find the incendiary, subversive, and hilarious alongside actual thoughts about addiction, depression, gentrification, politics, poetry, music, economic policy, living in New Nashville, and (inevitably) romance, the Advice King has much to offer.

CHAPTER 1

NASHVILLE

Priced Out of East Nashville

PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2, 2014. One of the first few Advice King columns, and one of the all-time most popular.

Dear Advice King,

I’ve lived in East Nashville for about a decade now. I’ve always really liked it over here. I’m an artist (meaning, I work on films and music and writing as much as I can, but I also wait tables), and it’s always been pretty easy to find a place with cheap rent. But my landlord is selling my current place, and I have to be out by the end of the year. Everywhere I’ve looked is way out of my price range. What should I do? Should I move up to Madison, or over to the West Side, or out of Nashville altogether?

Broke as a Joke on the East Side

Dear Broke,

When I moved to Nashville from New York City in 2001, all the fancy people I knew up there said, “Why would you go THERE? What is it? Like, a general store and cows?? HAHAHAHAHA.” Little did they know it was a nice place to live. That kind of insecure asshole won’t go anywhere that looks different than what they’ve seen in a style magazine. Nashville was safe from those people, because: A) it’s in the South, which people in New York and L.A. think is “sketch” and “random”; B) it didn’t have “any good restaurants.” Insecure people need the city they live in to have “good restaurants,” because what if someone fancy came to visit and they couldn’t prove that where they live is fancy too! Now that condos have been built and there’s a Whole Foods and Husk,* the condo-zombies think Nashville is a magical oasis in the South, the rest of which they still think is “sketch” and “random.” “I swear, Larry, you wouldn’t even know you were in the South. These developers have done a great job. AND there’s no income tax!”

The problem is that the insecure people have all the money in this country. Since the ethics have been completely removed from business culture, only super-insecure people are willing to do the immoral shit it takes to make a lot of money. Nice people won’t work for Exxon or Dow or Goldman Sachs or a health care system that makes the executives rich at the expense of the sick, so nice people don’t have any money. You basically have to be a sociopath to do any of the evil high-paying jobs left, and if you aren’t a sociopath, you are a barista. Baristas can’t pay the same prices for housing as sociopaths, so the best thing the baristas can do is try to keep the sociopaths at bay. But Nashville BEGGED THEM TO COME. Nashville had low self-esteem and wasn’t going to rest until it had an ultra-lounge with a bowling alley, too. Well you got it. And so much more! You were invaded by the sociopaths. And as usual, they only care about one thing: appearances. Tear everything down and make it shiny and new, just like in the magazine, just like Brooklyn, just like everywhere.

I remember when some people in Nashville started selling shirts saying “Nashville is the New L.A.” in 2006 or something. Waving a red flag in front of a granite-countertop bull, they were.

Nashville will never be Nashville again. Not the Nashville I was lucky enough to live in. The one where most people wore a T-shirt and jeans and were pretty goddamn friendly. The one where people didn’t run around in silly hats calling themselves “foodies.” The one where people could afford to live, except for the people who couldn’t. Poor people are always having to uproot as the rich people move in and raise rents. The difference is that now middle-class white people are being priced out. There is no color in America anymore that won’t be affected by the giant chasm between the rich and poor. While everybody was porch-drinkin’, the 1 percent has been successfully looting this country, and now no town is safe from the sociopath makeover. The best you can do is to hope that these assholes never get interested in YOUR town. But Nashville wanted to be part of the “in” crowd, and never considered what would happen to the rent. Fancy restaurants and boutique hotels are like raw meat to a rich bear. Rich bears can pay un-fucking-limited rent. And once the rich bears found out that the State of Tennessee had no income tax, Nashville was toast. Avocado toast.

American whites will now join the ranks of so many throughout history who have been forced to run from assholes. It’s reverse Manifest Destiny, with the world’s tiniest violin providing the soundtrack. First go to Madison, my friend, then to Smyrna, then to Columbia, then to the country Colombia, then to that island made of garbage in the Pacific. In the sky above your lean-to on Garbage Island you will see Virgin Galactic flying dickheads from Dubai to East Nashville to get hot chicken, and you will think to yourself, “I should have voted.”

Why Don’t People Like Condo Developers?

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 3, 2015. People didn’t like them then, and they like them even less now.

Dear Advice King,

I am a condo developer who has many properties in Nashville, some of which I’ve purchased recently. I buy up old, unused properties, I demolish them, and I turn them into useful spaces for a city with a growing population. So why does everyone hate me and hate what I do? Nashvillians want to be a big, important city. An “It City.” It Cities have condos. Why the backlash? I’m only meeting a need.

—William in Nashville

AGAIN WITH THE #@%$IN’ CONDOS?!?! Useful spaces for whom, you deluded freak? The middle-class fools who take out loans to buy these overpriced pieces of shit so they can appear successful? You and your cohorts—a slimy cabal of marketers, publicists, lifestyle-branders and bankers—will have already pocketed your fees by the time the foreclosures start. Then you hype another city and do it all again. Why waste your time flipping houses when you can FLIP A CITY? GO BIG OR GO HOME. JUST DO IT. YOU’RE SOAKING IN IT.

This is going to be a pain in the ass to explain, but there was once an economy that made sense. It was a local economy. It was where some guy traded a fish he caught for a night at the inn. It’s a regular-size inn and a healthy fish in this scenario, by the way, not a 600-story inn with 10,000-thread-count sheets, artisanal chocolate on the pillow and people “popping bottles” at the rooftop nightclub. The fish was not irradiated, nor was it full of Monsanto Roundup. This was a simple, fair, “healthy fish for a normal room” transaction. Such exchanges of goods and services occurred in towns all over America for hundreds of years. They were fair transactions, so no one got too rich and no one got too poor. The fabled free market at work. Of course there are always a few rotten apples who figure out a way to make more than their fair share. They make outsized profits by “distorting” the market. Plantation owners realized they could make a lot more money if they didn’t pay their workers. Slavery was their super-profitable market “distortion.”

These days the distortions are more subtle, so that the perpetrators can sleep better at night. Profiteering politicians—in league with the rotten apples—made it legal for American companies to outsource (use foreign labor to make their products). That is a major fucking distortion. In fact, it ruins the whole thing. How are Americans supposed to buy this stuff if they don’t have jobs? They buy it with loans—high-interest loans. Double mortgages, triple mortgages, reverse mortgages. How’s that working out? Fifty-one percent of American public school children are living in poverty. That’s how it’s working out.

A really funny thing about greedy capitalists is that they get so mad when you try to set up regulations to make sure there are some jobs, or that loans aren’t predatory, that they say crazy things like, “The market will regulate itself,” and that the regulations are the “distortions.” Nothing makes me madder than dishonest shit like that. They know damn well the market won’t regulate itself, because it’s they and their fathers before them who rigged it. They just want to make sure it doesn’t get unrigged.

Simply put, to make massive profits you have to cheat. You developers keep labor costs low by hiring undocumented or non-union workers and by using building materials manufactured in countries with no labor or environmental laws. This kind of disgraceful behavior is not exclusive to developers—it is worldwide business-as-usual. Endless economic growth (endless ethical economic growth, anyway) is an impossibility. I remember in the early ’90s when companies started calling employees “temps” so that they wouldn’t have to give them benefits. They had them work slightly less than 40 hours a week so they wouldn’t technically be full-time. The money they saved on benefits became “profit,” to be divided between executives and stockholders. That is what a healthy person would describe as an immoral arrangement. An outsize-profit-crazed modern asshole sees it as an innovation!

One more important point: America was “developed” on stolen land. The Native Americans were the first American neighborhood association. The “developers” considered their opinion, then murdered them all and did what they wanted. I bet a lot of developers wish they could still murder neighborhood associations. You wanna hear a joke that isn’t funny, mister? Why aren’t there more black developers? Because they weren’t allowed to own land when the country was being divvied up.

Since the paid-off politicians end up approving 99 percent of these projects regardless of what the people want, one small concession should be made: The public gets to name the fucking thing. Good luck selling units in “Conformity Creek” or “Dickhead Central.”

Building luxury housing is the opposite of public service. This impoverished world needs affordable housing, not luxury housing. And it’s not enough that you are making a lot of money—you want to be liked, too? Start spending some of your ill-gotten gains on a good therapist, William.

The Great East Nashville Train-Horn Controversy

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 23, 2016. FYI, the horns were NOT silenced.

Dear Advice King,

I live in East Nashville, and lately all these people are showing up on my doorstep asking me to sign a petition about train horns. Some petitions are AGAINST train horns, and some are FOR train horns. Which one should I sign? I wanna be on the right side of the tracks, and history.

—Thomas

OK. This is a real fucking thing, people. The guy who wrote this question is trying to be funny by calling himself “Thomas,” but this is a real fucking thing that is REALLY happening in Nashville. Some white person who doesn’t like noise bought a house near the train tracks, and now they want the trains to stop blowing their horns. And here’s the kicker: This person—from Los Angeles, naturally—bought this house by the train tracks A YEAR AGO.

There are a lot of affordable houses in Nashville that aren’t near train tracks, by the way. Thousands of ’em. They just aren’t in East Nashville. But all the trendy fools who are moving to Nashville from New York and Los Angeles have to live in EAST NASHVILLE, because that’s the neighborhood all the magazines talk about. They HAVE TO. What would their lousy friends think if they didn’t?

Because of the huge demand, East Nashville houses have gotten pretty fucking expensive. EXCEPT FOR THE ONES BY THE TRAIN TRACKS. So this Los Angeles person has a ghoulish thought: “What if I buy a cheap house by the railroad tracks and then use my white privilege to TURN OFF THE TRAIN HORNS?!?” Most people would have a thought like that and say to themselves, “What a terrible thought. I should see a psychiatrist and try to find out why I get these diabolical thoughts. I bet I get them because my parents told me ‘NO’ all the time.” Some people get told “NO” all the time when they are kids, and then when they grow up, they decide they will NEVER TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER AGAIN. Even if the question is a crazy one, like “Can I turn off the train horns?”

It could also have been the exact opposite situation. This person’s pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• The Coronation of the Advice King
• Chapter One. Nashville
• Chapter Two. Music
• Chapter Three. Serious Shit
• Chapter Four. A Little about Me
• Chapter Five. Politics
• Chapter Six. Life & Love
• Chapter Seven. TV & Movies
• Chapter Eight. Holidaze
• Chapter Nine. Odds & End(s)
• Acknowledgments