Making Noise
WPLN - Nashville Public Radio2023 was the 20th anniversary for Lovenoise, the Black-owned, Nashville-based concert promoter that has radically altered the city’s live landscape. Lovenoise has expanded opportunities for Black music makers doing contemporary, original music in Nashville, especially hip-hop and R&B, and served multiple generations of the city’s previously underserved audiences.
This four-part narrative series tells the story of Lovenoise: its past, present and plans for the future.
2023 was the 20th anniversary for Lovenoise, the Black-owned, Nashville-based concert promoter that has radically altered the city’s live landscape. Lovenoise has expanded opportunities for Black music makers doing contemporary, original music in Nashville, especially hip-hop and R&B, and served multiple generations of the city’s previously underserved audiences.
This four-part narrative series tells the story of Lovenoise: its past, present and plans for the future.
History Lessons
Last week, we introduced you to Lovenoise. Now we’re zooming in on exactly how they pushed through barriers that had long existed in Nashville. We’re also going to travel further back in time, to the heyday of Nashville’s Black music scene, and the role the city played in unraveling it. Then we’ll meet the first generation of R&B players, hip-hop MCs and neo-soul singer-songwriters who found what they’d been looking for at those Lovenoise Sunday nights.
In the early 2000s, Holt and his fellow Lovenoise founders may have been new to putting on events – aside from the party promotion that some of them had dabbled in – but they were savvy enough to learn from what was already working in Nashville. That meant borrowing from the strategies of a couple of country-oriented showcases that were considered institutions in the city.