So I covered a concert last night. I love (LOVE) concert lighting, how it illuminates one area and the rest is framed in black shapes, how it can pick out a single face or a line of faces. It's like a painting; what is suggested and what is shown; the lines that may or may not be real but you understand where they are going; the unnaturalness: the machines and the cords and wires and people glamming themselves out even when they're a bluegrass band.
All you need to know about the concert: The Whiskey Rebellion is fantastic. Corey Feldman's Truth Movement...not so much. Feldman, if you don't know, when he was young, played a series of loud, obnoxious children in movies, most famously: "The Goonies" as the character Mouth.
He is a very tiny man and he takes himself absurdly to the edge of total egotism. I have never witnessed such a self-absorbed show.
First, he had his band play not one or two songs from his new album, but all of them. In their entirety. No pauses except for atmospheric buildup while he was offstage changing into, for example, a vinyl polka dot suit. The album was a concept album. The premise: technology has invaded our lives. What are its roots? Where is it going? Was Ezekiel (as in the Old Testament and Hear ye all of Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one) visited by extraterrestrials? And if so, did technology come before the fatal apple of Eden?
This is expressed through the repetition of simple words (like "okay") and repetition implies a bitter and resigned submission. The careless "Okay" is supposed to become anthem and hymn by being growled out enough times by the Lead Singer who grows increasingly betrayed and imprisoned by, I don't know, the Vortex Death Robots or something. Except it's probably something more circular and visionary like The Oneness. Or The Machine. Capitals always sneak in a lot with these kind of projects I've noticed.
This is also, leading from that tippity-top thought I started with: This is also expressed through a blur of noise. I'm all for noise. Noise is interesting and subtle and complex and weaves its merry webs and is almost entirely about no one except the person making the noise. I'm talking about noise that goes nowhere. Noise that, further, goes nowhere and is wrapped up in its noiseness and the sheer cussed cleverness of the maker of the noise. It may not take away from anyone, but it certainly doesn't give back. It's incestuous, vomity and smells like dead cat, like a perverse Pillsbury Dough Boy who sits by itself telling itself how pretty and canny it is, back turned on everything. It is something collapsing inward with a the squishy crunch of an unhealthy spine.
Let me say it this way, I love jazz. I used to love to play jazz (I can't play anymore, but that's because I'm lazy or it's not in my fingers or my list of desires or something). But jazz can be alienating. The best jazz, even the crazy stuff of Thelonious Monk is never alienating. Monk can go all avant garde on his keys, pushing out noise with the best of them, completely hooked into what he's doing. But he lets it all breathe. It's about the music and it's about him. Mostly its about sound and Monk is tidy. Don't be fooled. You could eat dinner off the kitchen floor of his jazz.
Bad jazz sits on the most difficult notes for as long as possible. Its fingers fly. It preambulates up and down unlikely and intriguing sounds. This is not a crime. However, the problem with bad jazz is it's not doing this for any good reason. The music does not ask it or call it or delight in the unexpected. The musician does not desire it. And everyone knows. They're trying to dazzle us or hide something from us. It's not a risk or even a mistake. It's just false.
Monk's music is not always beautiful, but it is usually about truth. Oscar Wilde was coy and said the truth is rarely pure and never simple. So I'm not arguing for a "I-V-I and thou shalt always resolve! COUNTERPOINT COUNTERPOINT aghhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!" No. Unexpected, unexplained, risky, ugly, absurd, lovely. It's all possible (if not probable or always entirely workable). Chaos even finds a decent pattern.
Egotistical people, despite themselves, can make good music. In many ways, I think great artists of any path have to be supreme egotists in that they must believe that what they're doing is what they're supposed to be doing and that is a difficult task. They have to pick apart their insecurities and push through them while still living with them, fall victim to them, but keep on working.
So what bugged me about Truth Movement is that from beginning to end, it was about nothing. It was like reading a poem I'd written when I was 14 and so self-involved, I couldn't see daylight if it danced naked up and down the street. I was so dumb, I thought I was even saying a truth about myself. What I've learned since is that, if we're being honest, we're always peeling back lies.
