Hunting Divine

The conclusion offers remarks on what happened to the Athens scene, Hale, and its bands in the 1990s. The success of some bands, including R.E.M., meant locals thought they had stopped being alternative acts. Athens also began to gentrify, and UGA became a much more selective school. The broader culture of Athens changed during these years due, in part, to the role played by bohemians. Athens became more liberal, more open to the LGBTQIA+ community, less white supremacist, and more generous in providing social services. Overall, Athens, and other scattered sites of indie America, played a mostly unacknowledged role in creating a new kind of place-based, cosmopolitan, and forward-looking American culture as well as a renewed interest in the local. Like America, Hale concludes, the Athens scene was a collective creation.