Personally, I never forgave it for killing "Flight to Mars. Just like that vanity glass "museum" killed off the putt-putt course.

Love the place and watched De La Soul kill it there saturday night. Not much to bring me to Seattle Center but EMP

There definitely are worse things Allen could do with his fortune than fund the EMP...and he does many of them simultaneously.

I dunno. I like the guitar exhibit but I've only been once, and that was in the 1st month it was open. The funk ride was ridiculous, but they had the good sense to take that out.

The Pop Conference sounds great but I'm always too busy. I worked that entire weekend. L@m3.

Sky Church is an amazing concert venue but they rarely use it for anything.

Paul Allen's play-thing is there, but there's no playground at the Seattle Center (no Fun Forest anymore either... hooray for pirate glass) and it was built not long after Allen paid to have a special election he could swing to get hundreds of millions in public money for the Clink (and tickets to that are even more insane than the EMP's admission).

I like the EMP. The Game of Thrones premier party there for season 3 was amazing.

Paul Allen turned Seattle into the bedroom of a tween old boy living alive 1973, complete with black light posters of his favorite bands, plastic spacemen, model rockets, football and baseball trophies. The Cheryl Tiegs posters were always there on 1st avenue. All that's missing is a Godzilla with a glow in the dark head.

I like it. But I know I'm in the minority.

It is a weird and unconventional building, to be sure. Some people like weird and unconventional, but a lot of people just can't handle it.

The EMP has morphed over the years into a pretty decent pop-culture museum. I'm not sure how anyone can be put off by the Paul Allen connection unless they're also prepared to take umbrage at all other the cultural organizations around town that rely on wealthy benefactors. Just wish that Frank Gehry had designed for us a Bilbao Guggenheim, not a clown turd.

I'd like it more if they would book more shows there...when they first opened I saw Television (with Richard Lloyd), Mission of Burma, X, Joe Strummer, the dub show EMP was stellar with Scientist, Lee Perry and Adrian Sherwood...and there was even more! Hell, I met Al Green there. I really want more shows there damn it!

Third'd on Sky Church, which is an amazing venue.

But the rest of the place? 90% of it is insufferable, disorganized, mess. That and the so called Sci-Fi museum are publicly funded storage units for a rich guys exceptionally dull personal collection.

At best they are tourist traps. And boring ones.

I went there last winter fully expecting to be underwhelmed. It ended up being a lot of fun and I actually ran out of time to explore the whole museum before closing. I really love the music video rooms, the costumes (the star wars exhibit was there, which was really cool) and the indie game exhibit. Actually I loved just about everything. It's a really great museum for anyone that loves pop culture stuff. It's basically a museum that wants you to interact with it and have some fun with it. I hate Gehry's architecture, but I can't deny the EMP is awesome. I avoided it for 15 years because of the steep price and because I didn't think I'd like it. What a huge mistake - Seattle should be proud of this.

Why? Because it's ugly as sin. People don't like to spend their dollars in ugly places unless they are from out-of-town and have travel fever.

I am not a native Seattleite, but I went a year or two ago. The price of admission kept me from checking it out sooner than I did. It was cool, but for the price of admission, I didn't feel like it was a lot of bang for your buck. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

EMP starts to make a lot more sense if you go with children. My kids love it, and I've enjoyed lecturing to them endlessly about the genius of Kurt Cobain and how cool Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video was when it came out.

EMP looks like every other fucking Frank Geary building. It's as if he only knows how to make one design and for some reason people want to have the same damned building built everywhere cuz Frank's designs are so "unusual" I guess.

The times I've visited, I have always had the impression that they try really hard at making a good museum experience. The exhibits are crisp and change relatively often, and the Sky Church is a great venue. Unfortunately, I think it suffers from "cool kid" syndrome, where if the hipster royalty feel it's an uncool thing, the other trendsetting kids reflectively think the same thing...and then that settles into an often unearned reputation. If only all of our billionaires tried as hard to be such wonderfully nerdy benefactors.

I make a point of going every year around my birthday - mostly for the Sci-Fi Museum, even though it doesn't change all that much. I love running around in "The Horror of it All", again, even if I've seen everything four or five times already. I guess I'm just a geek that way. They have a Chuck Jones exhibit up now that is frankly fantastic. So much incredible art and great videos featuring John Lasseter from Pixar extolling the charms of Looney Tunes. It's just fun, people. Stop taking everything so god-danged seriously.

I can't give anything more than my own perspective here, but several other commenters have touched on the factors that shaped my opinion. Seattle was being transformed by Paul Allen's entitled billionaire projects at a pretty frightening pace 15 years ago. The Seattle Commons project poisoned a lot of us against him as we realized that even an under-utilized warehouse district deserved to grow up under the influence of its long-term residents and not as part of a public referendum to turn it over to Paul Allen's petulant Urban Disneyland dreams.

But once it was built, it was there and we could all see it from the surrounding hills and I-5. I jumped on the 8 with my kids for the Muppets exhibit only to be assaulted by the admission fee at the door. While he didn't get his Urban Disneyland, he did get a chunk of the Seattle Center where he gets to charge Disneyland prices. And once you're inside it's exactly what it's described as: a museum. No rides, no anthropomorphic characters to entertainingly scare the life out of your toddler, not even a sky tram to get you from "well, what do we do now?" to "hey, kids! Let me get a picture of you enjoying that thing over there!"

It is a good addition to Seattle, overall, I think. But Paul Allen threw quite a bit of feces at the wall during that period and EMP was the thing that stuck. But it's hard for us old people to embrace EMP when we fought so hard to keep the rest of Paul Allen's bjillionaire playground dreams at bay.

Sorry, but I was skimming through and my eyes caught on these words: smash a glass guitar that Dale Chihuly designed at the museum's opening. (Kid Rock also played at the kickoff celebration and.. I just don't know what to say. I didn't know that I could hold that whole thing in lower regard than I already did...

Don't have anything to say about the owner and his stuff, but as a piece of architecture it's fun to look at from a distance, but hostile to pedestrians and the surrounding neighborhood once you get close to the exterior, and then you go inside and the interior is just a dark horrible tomb.

So it's god awful ugly.

So it is an icon of the rich having their way with public property, an obelisk of Paul Allen's ego incarnate.

But why do people hate it?

Man, the writing on Slog has gone downhill. This is simply open and self-admittedly ignorant clickbait.

I feel like I like the building more than I care about anything inside it, really. It's pretty and photogenic and once a year or so I wander around it enjoying the colors. It's fun for photo shoots.

But the inside is, as @23 said, tomblike and doesn't change enough to warrant multiple visits and is focused on the least interesting aspects of either music or science fiction. It's neat to see the tchotchkes and the ephemera but that doesn't hold a candle to watching the films, reading the books or, best of all, seeing the bands themselves. The three times I've actually experienced music there were for seeing They Might Be Giants perform there, seeing one of the last Iron Composers (with Jello Biafra!) and one time when I played a corporate gig with a samba drumming troupe. The rest of the time, it's just looking at stuff.

FUNK BLAST!

I only went once. But I liked it. I was alone in Seattle waiting for my friend to get off work and considering I didn't know my way around to anything cooler, it was a more entertaining way to kill a rainy day than going up in the Space Needle and wishing I could see the mountains. I live in Washington now and would take tourists there. It's a little spendy for what it is, but whatever. Sure, the building is hideous, but if you're inside it, you can't see the outside anymore.

@12, anyone who uses the word "vibrant" in a post doesn't deserve to be posting. Please just do your job at Vulcan and leave journalism alone.

Yeah, what 17 said. It is a great place to take your kids (of any age). I took my kids there when they were teenagers and they had a blast. It really is a good museum, it is just expensive. That is the only thing that keeps the numbers down. The only reason people blow money on the Space Needle (which is also really expensive) is because tourists want to visit the most iconic spot in Seattle. Thankfully the Pike Place Market is free.

I hate the EMP for the potential rigor it has to bring to the subject of pop culture but doesn't. Its exhibits are consistently one-note. While that note may be a positive one often enough, it consistently fails to include a much-needed, critical, relevant perspective that goes beyond the surface of what could be very interesting, challenging subjects. As an organization that went out of their way to add "museum" to their name, we are justified in holding them to the standard of one.

Haven't we had this conversation? A decade ago? Welcome to Seattle, but dig deeper/harder.

@31:

How many times must one be banned before seeking an alternative venue?

@34:

That's unfortunate. If you are here to express your truth, I would expect an effort to find a venue that allows for that. If you're not, what are you here for?

UGG UGG UGG, boring and overpriced - like Chihuly, and the new food vendors at the place formerly known as the Center House.

I haven't actually been to any exhibit hosted by the EMP, but have been to a private party at this venue (a disco party for my friend's work) and the interior really is gorgeous! The staff is fun, friendly, and professional. The main room up the stairs and to the right was a perfect place for a band to play and the right size for the crowd to dance and feel their energy. The private loft upstairs with couches and a balcony facing the main room was super posh. They always seem to have cool exhibits, especially of the scifi and fantasy genre. As a Seattlite, I really should make it there one day for a normal exhibit. I have nothing against the place, just need to find the time to make the trip!

"It is a late-in-life hair band of a piece of architecture, and its programs are monuments based on concepts of anti-monumentality."

Really? It's that what they said? Not even an black-turtleneck architect could spew that out without some major editing.

@21 ". The Seattle Commons project poisoned a lot of us against him as we realized that even an under-utilized warehouse district deserved to grow up under the influence of its long-term and not as part of a public referendum to turn it over to Paul Allen's petulant Urban Disneyland dreams."

And how did that turn out for the residents? It's ground zero for the corporate makeover into Amazons HQ and just about nothing and nobody present 20 years ago is there. We could have had a great park, 15,000 units of workforce housing, a road redesign, and a corporate HQ land. Instead we just got the corporate HQ with all the traffic that being overbuilt brings. Because impudent nimby snobs looked a gift horse in the mouth because Paul Allen paid for it.

Well, I live here, and I like it.

The building I hate is the new downtown library.

The Seattle Center was a much different place 15 years ago. It was a kids place. Not any more. And it started with the building of EMP. And it us ugly building. The only good thing in this whole EMP debacle was Allen smashing Chihuly art work (as he is just as pompous as Allen).

While there may be good content in the musuem, I have an extensive musuem work history and had some communication with a couple staff members a couple years after it opened. All staff and volunteers had to sign a contract saying they would not speak poorly or criticize EMP or Allen (I guess common Allen thing) and volunteers got zero perks to being a volunteer (you always have some kind of perk for your volunteers). I don't know if things have changed, but from those few interactions it was clear that the staff were not allowed to run the museum in a successful manner. All us other musuem folk felt pretty bad for them.

So it is not that Seattle people hate EMP. It is the idea that Allen can use his 'power' and or money to do whatever he wants. He has a company named Vulcan for goodness sakes. Can't get more self-righteous than that.

Three indisputable truths about the EMP:
1) The building, when considered as a building, is a giant hideous turd, but when considered as a piece of art, is pretty cool despite being obnoxiously large.
2) The music museum stuff is pretty cool and interesting and although I haven't been in 10 years, it's probably about time for me to go again to see what's new.
3) Science Fiction Museum LOL no thank you.

I like the SciFi museum part and always take visiting friends there if they're into that sort of thing. The rest of it is OK too.

There's a really nice playground at Seattle Center. It just opened. Fantastic climbing structure.

I've never paid to go all the way in but ten years ago or so I went to the bar which had a great bartender and- don't know how to call it. A screen showing old (sixties-seventies?) music with live footage but not music videos in the modern sense. I found that fascinating and had a great time waiting out a rain storm.

I've been to the EMP twice - once for Mini-Maker Faire, once for the SciFi museum section.

Cool stuff. Interesting organizing principles for the exhibits. Surprisingly broad for the amount of space, but not deep.

Which is pretty much my overall impression of SAM, as well, so perhaps I'm just a bit too harsh. I think a couple of the interactive displays @ EMP (at least the SF/F portion) would work better on the web, or would at least be stepping-off points for critical content and cross-work/genre comparisons.

The building is an architectural failure, which is mostly Paul Allen's fault - he vetoed some of the original design ideas such as a fragmented spire that should have helped give it the appearance of a smashed guitar. Perhaps it would have still failed, but it was denied a proper chance to work.

That said, I never got to go because the price was just too goddamn high. I think they wanted $20 15 years ago. What are they asking now? Don't want to know.

@48- Today I strolled across the Seattle Center grounds from the Queen Anne Dick's Drive-In past the International Fountain, through the Armory Food Court to the EMP and the whole place was teeming with families with children, and there wasn't even any special event going on. The Children's Museum and Pacific Science Center both seemed to be doing a brisk business. On what evidence do you support your claim that Seattle Center is no longer a place for kids?

I hadn't been to the EMP in years so I checked it out today and I was far more impressed than I thought I'd be. Go before the Star Wars costumes are gone October 4th. The Chuck Jones animation exhibit is not to be missed either, and I liked the guitar room, the horror film exhibit, the Infinite Worlds of Science Fiction, and the Jimi Hendrix display.
Even if I'd have paid full price I'd have no complaints. Totally worth my time.

I am an RN. I went with my client and his family. he was a young boy. I really liked it. My little charge, Erik went to the sound lab and made a recording for his mom. and surprised her with it. He has since passed away and the recording is very special to her. Where else would he have been able to do that and for free.

It takes more than "lofty aspirations" to create a vibrant, ongoing, useful addition to the cultural life of a city. I mean, we've been waiting, what, TEN YEARS for the place to give something back to the community, and what have we got instead? A wacky, freaky looking pavilion that looks like something out of a kid's toybox (20 years ago, Gehry's name became synonymous with (HA!) "good taste", and what we have now it just a trophy that the people who run the city can brag about to their friends. All that money could have been used to teach and tutor needy, talented children, rather than being wasted on a dopey tourist attraction. What the hell do Star Wars costumes have to do with music? Tell me.

Build a Science Fiction museum for Science Fiction fans, and turn the EMP into what it was meant to be: a place for citizens and visitors to learn about the beauty of American and world MUSIC!!!!!! Some of these comments give joyful statements about comfy couches and the playground. WHAT????? Fifteen years of hip-hop being called "music" (yeah, right) has left us with a generation of teens and kids who think Drake is a musician. That video game soundtracks are music. That shrieking divas are musicians. Change the name of this place, because its current name is a lie.

Are rock and roll and music synonymous? (hey, I love rock, everything from Metallica and Nirvana and Ministry to Black Sabbath and David Bowie and The Ramones, but there's more to music than only rock and roll) It's a big world out there, and as of right now, the EMP's world is pretty small.

I think it's just confusing. I never really understood what it was. It doesn't seem to be promoted well. And although I'm used to it, I still think it's ugly.

I am surprised no one mentioned this,but...Nintendo hosts the Indie gaming expo here every year as well!

Nothing would make me happier than to get rid of the EMP, the Seahawks, the Sounders, AND trade KEXP back in for KCMU.

I love the EMP. I try to go every year (but only make it every other) and have a great time when I do.

It might have something to do with loving Hendrix more than any other guitarist and Horror and Sci Fi more than any other genre. It also includes stuff I don't care about just to round out the 'experience'.

The EMP is literally the perfect museum for me.

I'm also not a native, and I live outside of Seattle, so maybe I don't count.

(@61 Isn't the Indie gaming expo a new thing? I remember going to the opening recently, and can't remember there being one previous. This may be due to my bad memory and lackluster attention to detail, though.)

It's self-indulgent, imposing, ugly as hell, impossible to ignore, and overpriced. Standing on concrete floors for concerts is not my idea of fun. It detracts from the charm of the Seattle Center, and I wish it would be torn down.

If you can have a Springsteen exhibit and a fan like me is bored, you really haven't tried -- but charged me $20 for the pleasure. Only once. I hate it more each year.

Thank you thank you thank you for this piece. "...a defensive entitlement that presents itself as healthy skepticism" is so fucking accurate. Glad you weren't here in '95 when the same myopic holier -than-thous voted down the Seattle Commons, thus ensuring the rise of South Lake Amazon.

The problem with the EMP, aside from its hideous trying-too-hard architecture, is that it is ultimately a temple to Dad Rock. (Yes, I have been a few times). Experience music? Sure, if it's one of the, uh, two kinds of music on offer there, out of the thousands of possibilities. It's fundamentally a stupid place, for stupid people, who, when you say "music" think "Eric Clapton's guitar". Yawn.

Even their northwest focus is lame. It's all rock'n'roll, with a little r&b here and there as an afterthought. They're missing 90% of the story. Sure, they've got a hunk of Hendrix's used toilet paper, but that's not telling the story. And I don't think anyone at the museum, not Paul Allen, and not the museum staff, know what the story is. They probably know a lot about Cobain and Springsteen and Freddy Mercury and Led Zeppelin and so on, but that's not really that interesting.

The other real problem is that, as a museum, they're trying to tell the story through artifacts. But artifacts have little to do with it. It's funny, because in the same time frame, we are living in a golden age of music documentary, to say nothing of the astonishing variety of miscellaneous weirdness you can find on Youtube. I did actually see one great doc in EMP, down in the basement where the walls are square (Allan Zweig's "Vinyl", now available in its entirety not at EMP but on...Youtube).

Compared to what's happening in books and on film, a room full of random guitars is pretty fucking weak. They don't even really tell you anything about guitars! The selection on offer is incredibly dull, and put to dull uses. And guitars are such a boring part of the story in the first place! The scholarship is fucking TERRIBLE. Even as artifacts go, there are so many better ones; why is one of the few remaining Abbey Road mixing boards languishing away in the basement of a shithead like Lenny Kravitz instead of here? The answer: everything about rock music is controlled by stupid people and always has been.

As a museum of musical artifacts, even, it's cool but not that cool. I mean, there's more cool stuff packed into Buck Owens's Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, which has the added bonus of being able to watch hundreds of obese hillbillies scarf down triple-size breakfasts while you tour the exhibits. And that building cost, like, $75 to build.

The building is, of course, completely ridiculous. Most of the space inside it is useless, weird gaps and corners and odd undulating ceilings in which no museuming can be found. There's a reason why good museums (like SAM, downtown) are boxes of rectangles. As a building, it is a laughingstock.

It's funny, because I can't stand Science Fiction, but I actually think that sci fi is a much more likely candidate for this kind of museum, because sci fi is all about artifacts. Rare books, rare costumes.

The building : worst acoustics IN THE WORLD.

The location : the city DONATED a-couple-hundred-million-dollars worth of precious park land to the second richest guy in the city. In a city where we are severely deficient in open space, why take some away when they could have built the exact same building somewhere else?

The purpose : if Paul Allen wanted his own private building to store his fantastic collection of music memorabiia, he could have just put it in his garage. Music is to listen to and enjoy, not to look a some half-a-century-old guitars that some musicians used to own. I can get into Hard Rock Cafe for a lot less than $35.00 or $40.00.

@64-"It detracts from the charm of the Seattle Center..."

Seattle Center has charm? If you mean it's got a weird the-pasts-vision-of-the-future vibe then I think the EMP building fits right in. It looks like a technicolor Blob attacking a Buck Rogers city, which is why I like it.