In contrast to our typical weekends, Chris and I spent Friday and Saturday nights in concert venues. The first with Damien Rice and Fiona Apple took place at the Northrup Auditorium (on the University campus). The Northrup is an older theater and the median age of the audience was 22. At the second one, we were on the main floor of the Excel Energy Center along with a crowd of well-heeled 50 somethings to see Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young(what those twenty somethings are destined for 30 years down the road).
Although the performances of Fiona Apple and Damien Rice differed from CSN&Y in that they eschewed the political, all of the performers played with the relationship of harmony and noise. Of the three, CSN&Y were the most successful. Nash and Crosby would pull the audience into their lovely harmonies while Stills and Young would excite with more passionate lyrics and noisier chords. (Trent Reznor would have bowed down to serve Young after hearing him go wild with his guitar at the end of Rocking in the Free World.)
One of the pleasures in watching CSN&Y was knowing that the quartet had 40 years of experience collaborating, feuding and performing. All the members must be in the sixties but they had the audience on their feet rocking out to politically charged songs for 3 1/2 hours (which is no small feat given that any crowd willing to shell out $177 for a ticket is accustomed to comfort). Even more to their credit, I have no doubt a large majority of the crowd voted for the Bush, yet ten thousand people were cheering the band on when they sang, "Let's Impeach the President.)
It must be very difficult for the band to come up with a set list when they have such a wealth of material to draw from. Whoever and however they did it, the concert worked. The newer songs from Young's albums blasting Bush's regime benefited from their juxtaposition from classics such as "Ohio." By the same token, the older songs took on fresh meaning when listened to in the context of the Bush bashing. (We decided that Bush must prefer country to rock by the way.)
Another set-list strategy which worked was interweaving the more personal songs like Graham Nash's "Our House", Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," and David Crosby's "Guinevere" with more political anthems. As fun as it was to rock out to protest songs, it was magical when the voices of the four singers (the idealist, the sentimalist, the activist and the outlaw) came together in perfect harmony as they had had done for so many years.
Apple and Rices' songs were much more personal as each of the seemingly introverted singers drew on their angst to generate emotion. I enjoyed Rice more than Fiona Apple becuase he played with dynamics. Known for the sad and quiet songs on O, he was clearly just as much at home with chaotic riffs. In addition to favorites such as The Blower's Daughter, he played louder songs which illuminated the noise that frames the silence in his songs. (He allowed "Volcano" to erupt at the end which was quite exciting.)
Of the three, I enjoyed Apple the least but nevertheless found her performance fascinating. She strikes me as one of those introverted musicians whose love of music drives her to express herself rather than enterain. I could not take my eyes off of her when she moved in a way that evoked Martha Graham as much as an epileptic. She has the same compelling quality of the neurotic but beautiful French characters. You keep watching them and her because you're expecting them to crack at any moment. As much as you don't want to see it happen, you do.
It's refreshing to see someone in their twenties break away from the pop mold and her talent is undeniable, but I would have preferred a little more canniness and awareness of her audience. Whereas CSNY&Y and Damien Rice understood the power of melody and harmony, Apple got lost in music which allowed her bluesy, raspy, powerful voice to shine but left me cold and bored. Whereas Rice and CSN&Y knew how to balance on that edge between order and chaos, Apple just kept tripping over into discordance.
posted by cim @ 2:01 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Music gains its power, I think, by successfully negotiating its flaws. Young works through (not against) a flawed voice, Crosby (sometimes) manages to discipline his excess and the abyss of his disappointment, Rice balances an almost sentimental delicacy with obliterating rage, etc. In these moments, the music mends the broken symmetries that haunt us.
I responded to the CSNY concert by being drawn in – I’ve lived for thirty years with some of the songs I heard live for the first time on Saturday night (leaves me wanting to think that through in the context of Benjamin’s essay on the “Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”). As Cim writes, the new music recontextualized the old and vice versa.
I responded to Rice by being drawn in as well, but in a different way. I was listening for the balance between the movement of his anger and the discipline and restraint of his hands – both of which are registered by his seamless transition between a breathy falsetto and full voice (another negotiation of “the flaw”). When he opened with the first chords of “Canonball” (an E minor melody played in the bass, capoed at the 6th fret) I knew I’d heard precursors to these fingerings and melodic displacements before – maybe in the guitars of Cat Stevens and David Crosby. I couldn’t place it, exactly, but my hands could feel familiarity in the movement of his guitar. I was eager to try to recreate his live sound on my own guitar at home – and that situated me to listen prospectively (whereas I was listening retrospectively at CSNY). I later wondered why I hadn’t heard the possibility of playing Rice’s music in the studio version of “O.” Maybe I listened badly, or maybe he covered over too much -- despite that CD’s considerable impression of emotional honesty.
I responded to Fiona Apple by watching and feeling the distance between her and me increase. Within a few minutes of her set, I was writing in my notebook as I watched.
Apple was clearly the crowd favorite on Friday night, but she didn’t so much negotiate the flaws that define her as dramatize them. Apple has a huge, cabaret rock voice. But her body language communicates and occasionally breaks free of the anguish and uncertainty of an abused pre-adolescent. In my notebook I wrote: “The flaw is the only fascination here – Apple is so powerful vocally yet so damaged, so psychologically tenuous – that’s the drama: a psychological freak show. Her response to the music in the breaks hovers between modern dance and fetal catatonia.”
My last entry of the show was to note how wrong, how suspect the experience felt. Apple and the crowd were both feeding off each other, and both were getting what they wanted from the exchange. But my sense was that Apple wasn’t getting what she needed. When Cim told me later that Apple had dated David Blaine, that felt like a key. Apple searches for magic, but what she keeps finding are self-inflating illusions. And when we watched her riveting movement on stage last Friday, what we witnessed was the real performance of someone being ‘drowned alive.’
Hey, be nice to Fiona! I really wanted to go, but my flight back from the OC did not land until after nine. I wish that I could debate you on this, but we'll have to wait for the next apple and rice entree.
Post a Comment
<< Home