Just today, we got the news that New Orleans was passed over for the Super Bowl in 2018.

That’s too bad, and not that smart on the part of the NFL. Of course, I’m not privy to the inner workings of the football mafia’s marketing strategy but I’m assuming that they are interested in spreading the wealth around to a number of cities where their franchises are located. Gotta keep everyone happy in the league.

How can you compare a party in New Orleans to one in Minneapolis? No comparison. But hey, it’s politics.

It’s been over 30 years, and despite my squawking in OffBeat’s pages and in my blog, as well as personal lobbying, we still don’t have a music museum in New Orleans. The Old U.S. Mint will open an exhibit in late July to coincide with the upcoming Satchmo Summerfest, but overall, the Mint is still sitting there, big and blocky, and wasting away. It could be a great music museum, but it’s not in a very iconic location. That would be the site of the World Trade Center building, which sits vacant and moldering at the foot of Canal Street—arguably the most prime real estate in New Orleans in terms of location and visibility.

Several developers answered city RFPs; one was selected and then rejected. So the city is reissuing RFPs for the site. Tear down the building? Redevelop the WTC Building? Tourism leaders want to tear down the building and put something “iconic” there, like maybe a tower or a Ferris wheel. Yawn. How about putting in a music-and-performance museum to celebrate our music? There are surely enough resources in New Orleans that have bits and pieces of our musical culture that could contribute artifacts and expertise to this museum: the Historic New Orleans Collection; the Louisiana State Museums; the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Archive, Tulane’s William Random Hogan Jazz Archives and Amistad Research Center; the Backstreet Cultural Museum; House of Dance and Feathers, and much more.

If you’re reading this and you want to have a huge impact on what happens to our musical culture here; if your vision can include educating people from around the world on our music; if you want to influence the future of New Orleans culture; increase its tourism value dramatically and improve its reputation as a world-class music city, build us a museum. Make a gift; we’ll name the damn thing after you. If the city and local developers don’t see a potential in this, well, I say we need to reach out to investors in New Orleans from outside Louisiana.

And I would hope that local politics and some of the infighting that New Orleans is known for would never have a negative impact on a project like this. It’s too important that it get done. This is such an opportunity!