Atlanta & Oslo: Pop Music’s Capitals?
I’m perfectly prepared to admit that London, New York, and Los Angeles don’t always start the trends when it comes to popular music, but I’m not sure I’d go so far as to anoint Atlanta and Oslo the world’s capitals of the stuff. Just because a city has a thriving club scene (Oslo) or is home to several hip-hoppers and producers and artists like the pictured Janelle Monae (Atlanta) doesn’t put you indisputably at the top of trendsetting. Celebrities can make music wherever they are in the world, so the idea that the production of music is any longer centralized in a few cities is nonsense. You can’t even measure cities’ influence by which artists live in them, because the most popular trendsetters spend at least half their lives away-from-home.
