Like a lot of young rappers, Eric "Slim E" Carter sells copies of his demo CD out of his car, backpack, or whatever he's got with him. He carries at least half a dozen copies at all times around the streets of his hometown Baltimore, ready to hand one over to anyone interested or – more importantly –whose approval will put him one step closer to his dream of making music full-time. He works the room at clubs like One, Tee-Bee's Place, 8x10, Choices, or "any place they'll hear what I got," eschewing nearly every high-tech avenue of self-promotion in favor of low-tech footwork, mixtape trading, and scraping for whatever stage time he or his friends can secure.

"You got to work in this Baltimore rap game," he explains. "Them real niggas lookin' for real hip-hop, they ain't playing around on MySpace or whatever. Real hip-hop comes from the streets, and that's where motherfuckers gonna be lookin' for it."

Carter says he's handed out or sold over 500 copies of his demo, produced at his cousin's home studio in West Baltimore, but hasn't seen much in the way of attention beyond the local level. He speaks specifically of the Baltimore rap scene, but Carter's story could just as easily be that of any of the countless jazz, classical, or hardcore punk musicians who've come and gone through Charm City before him.

Billie Holiday, for one, was arguably the greatest jazz vocalist of all time and certainly the pride of Baltimore's music history. A statue of Lady Day stands on Pennsylvania Avenue just south of Lafayette, the former site of the legendary Royal Theater. Ironically, historians note that Holiday's success didn't come until after leaving Baltimore for New York City, and legend has it the crowds at the Royal booed Holiday off the stage both well before and long after she'd established herself as the reigning queen of jazz.

Hugely influential composer Phillip Glass gained his legendary homemade music education in Baltimore, but never made a name for himself until moving on to Chicago and Paris. DMX, easily the biggest rapper to ever come out of Baltimore, actually learned everything he learned about rap music only after moving to Yonkers, NY.

From Eubie Blake to Rod Lee, the laundry list of musical heavyweights to come out the city suggest that Baltimore's problem isn't one of no inspiration, but one of not enough incubation. Between the rich history and rough present, the city offers an aspiring musician plenty to write about but very little in the way of opportunity to turn that art into a decent living. The proximity to Philadelphia (101 miles), Washington, D.C. (40 miles) and New York City (187 miles) and the various scenes each has nurtured and eventually dominated didn't help Baltimore's musical vitality much, either.

In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, vocal groups from Baltimore such as The Orioles and The Cardinals laid the blueprint for what would become doo wop and modern rhythm and blues, and the city was in a position to become both the birthplace and capitol of African-American pop. Much to the dismay of the city's collective want for fame, an up-and-coming group called The O'Jays and a young singer named Patti LaBelle would not only advance the style of R&B coming out of Baltimore, but would also go on to earn their home Philadelphia the unofficial title of "soul capital of the world" with the help of the nascent Motown Records, which had just set up shop in Detroit in 1959.

More famously, Baltimore had an extremely active hardcore scene in the early 1980s, anchored by genre titans Fear of God and Law & Order. Just up I-95, however, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, S.O.A. and what eventually became the Dischord House stable of bands were making a louder noise at a national level, and most punk bands looking to make the next leap had a better chance of success latching onto D.C.'s larger punk community. In a vacuum, the Baltimore scene was both vital and viable, but compared to what was happening just next door it was hard for any band to justify staying put.

Assumptions about small city culture aside, the general inability for Baltimore to establish itself as anything besides a home for also-ran runs deeper than a simple case of other cities doing it better. The exodus of middle-class residents in the 1960s and 1970s, due to both economic necessity and racially-motivated pandemic white flight, saw a marked decline in population and economic conditions; at the individual level, less work meant less disposable income, which meant fiercer competition for the entertainment dollar. The city's population dropped off considerably from 949,708 in 1950 to 636,251 in 2000, but was also spurred by more immediate-impact events like the full-scale twelve-day riot in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, from which several once-vibrant neighborhoods still have not even attempted to recover.

The result was a city essentially divided in two, with Baltimore broken into the predominantly black East and West Baltimore areas and the predominantly white downtown area. Ongoing racial hostility still keeps the city turned against itself – Census Bureau data ranks Baltimore the eighth-most segregated city in America, while its bloated crime figures make it the most violent city with a population over 250,000 – with the mostly white owners of the city's premier clubs perceived as keeping out black musicians (or, more specifically, the black clientele that comes along with them).

Whether or not this perception is accurate anymore is both highly debatable and highly suspect, but at a time when the national music press is once again shining a light on Baltimore music it seems odd that decades-old and entirely obsolete notions of informal segregation would keep promoters and talent apart. Most of the discussion has centered on the vaguely-defined Baltimore club scene, but "eclectronic" composer Dan Deacon and the rest of the Wham City collective of performing and interpretive artists are drawing new attention to the burgeoning art-rock community.

While it's easy to get excited when the likes of CMJ, Rolling Stone and Pitchfork latch on to what Deacon and Co. are producing, it's just as easy to forget that only two years ago both Spin and MTV announced the arrival of the aforementioned Baltimore club music. Yet even with that level of mainstream media exposure, not a single performer was able to break through to a national audience beyond a handful of DJs doing remixes for other, non-Baltimorean artists. The particular brand of avant-garde and noise-rock being explored by the likes of Lizz King, Blue Leader, Video Hippos and the like may not be what American music so desperately needs, but any city that can form a cultural bridge from jazz royalty to Ed Schrader's outstanding fictional arguments with David Bowie must be doing something right.

In many ways, Baltimore has found problems not only through the disappearance of the manufacturing and heavy industry that gave the city much of its cultural backbone and character, but also by inventing problems on top of that through decades of fighting itself in self-imposed class and race wars that can't be won. While Deacon, Carter, DJ Technics, Rod Lee, Debonair Samir et al push the street-level culture of Baltimore forward the best they can, the invisible specter of their city's history and the inevitable limits of Rust Belt living loom quietly, each whispering their subtle reminders that while plenty of people make it in Baltimore, the only way out of Baltimore is a one-way ticket up the interstate.

You may republish this article if you link back to this original. Image from danocamera on flickr.