Upcoming Things, Metta and The 1975.
I expect this essay will be even swirly-er than usual. (Also: these are essays! I feel good about this nomenclature.)
In light of this anticipated swirly-ness, let me place right out front the Come To This!/These! part:
Friday, February 23, 7pm, Kracum Hall @ Carleton College
fivebyfive (Rochester, NY) in concert, playing (among many other things) a piece I wrote maybe 15 years ago as well as one that is more recent. Chamber quintet! Literally NO percussion unless you count the piano, which is I suppose a thing we could talk about but let’s not.
Details: https://www.carleton.edu/music/events/music-department-events/?eId=uoET
Thing two:
Friday, February 23—Sunday, March 3 (a lucky day! (HBD mom!)), various times @ The NAG Theater
Purple Door Youth Theater’s production of The Hobbit, for which I wrote a little bit of music, which I describe as “Blade Runner in the Shire.” My kiddo has a big part, leading me to make a few epic dad jokes, among them 1. introducing myself to the cast as Andrea Oakenshield, and 2. reciting said kiddo’s lines over severe techno and claiming to be Thorin Oakenfold.
Details: https://northfieldartsguild.org/event/the-hobbit-pdyt/
Moving along…
I wanted to write through some things I’ve been considering, partially in response to these upcoming soundings-out of my own music. Mostly, though, I write in response to a general sense of where things stand, for me, as a sometimes-avid fanboy, a sometimes-consistent maker of music, and an always-committed dreamer of dreams. I think there’s a coherence/cross-relation to uncover here, but getting there will be blurry, as advertised. I’m holding metta (loving-kindness) meditation practice in one hand and a live album by The 1975 in the other. Said no one ever, and yet here we are.
I have been practicing formal meditation for almost half my life at this point. A good sign of doing it wrong is that I have also been feeling, for all of that time, like I am about to really get it in gear, dial it up, dial it in, maybe not yet but so soon. There is a constant and deeply felt sense of distance between the should of it and the actual duration and frequency of seated practice. My most recent “now is the time, finally!” centered on a new app, Sam Harris’ Waking Up, not to be confused with Dan Harris’ Ten Percent Happier, for which I have also purchased a membership. Also, Sam Harris and Dan Harris are not actually related to each other, except in that they are both dudes only a bit older than me who have been wildly successful and now question the terms of that success while continuing to rake it in, possibly just to spite me but probably not.
One of the most recent guided meditations on Waking Up invoked metta, or loving-kindness, practice. The basic idea is that you wish freedom from suffering for others, beginning with someone with whom you have an uncomplicated relationship. This makes me laugh, because the instructor is typically aware of the extent to which all human relationships are complicated and suggests beginning with A PET, almost always, regardless of teacher/app.
Sam Harris did a bold thing in this particular guided meditation, though: he instructed us to begin with ourselves. Since, for some of us, our relationships with ourselves are the most confounded and complicated of all, he recommended a specific workaround: picture yourself as a child. Conjure up a sense of who you were, ages ago. Reconstruct it from memories, photographs, or in my case: videos. Wish that familiar person peace and happiness and ease and freedom and delight.
I did it and I cried. I am a cry-er, so not that remarkable, but still. It was something to contend with. I saw cross-cutting old home movies play on a reel as I wished my former selves to be happy and free. I caricature-died in the snow, hot-dogging for the giant camera, in front of the house we lived in when I was four. I said about my mom’s pancakes, which she made for my brother’s birthday party which had to happen in the morning because everyone had to work at the restaurant later that day, “oh god it’s so gross, gimme a bagel.” My cousin and I did a rap called “Bad Boy Christmas” which we had written together and I wore Skidz and did the running man. I pretended to cut through a wall in my grandparents’ house with a plastic axe and then, on the last strike, deliberately missed the mark and spun into a weird pirouette and fell onto the linoleum.
I am a middle-aged man sitting in his attic on a cushion, watching a child who so obviously wanted to be seen as he was, being seen as he was. By the camera (of course) but also by the situation behind and around it. We would watch these movies as a family and I would feel like I could do no wrong. The snow-death was at once convincing and hilarious. The quip about the pancakes was a truth from the mouth of babes. “Bad Boy Christmas” had a kind of preternatural flow and the Skidz looked really, really cool. There was an almost-backwards hat, now that I think about it. And who could have predicted the spin, figure-skater level, when we thought we were just breaking a hole through the dining room and out onto the porch?
To wish happiness and freedom unto the person this child would become is to find a way to undo the tempering of disappointments, almosts, not-quites, not-evers that unfolded in the wake of a joy and freedom that was already being experienced. This is why I followed Radiohead around in my 20s. I wanted to watch someone being seen in the most generous possible way, and to see it—and somehow this did not sound totally insane at the time—as a weird kind of destiny, to feel like I could actually do something like that. Or would. That I would do something like that. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful here, because my entire meaning-making apparatus has completely transformed in the intervening years, but: hearing some chamber music of mine at work and writing weird synth loops for children pretending to be dwarves is orders of magnitude different than what I had dreamed for myself when I was 23 at Alpine Valley during “Paranoid Android.”
That is why I think I still chase this kind of performance now. U2 at The Sphere was actually the second show I flew to see in Vegas, in as many years. The first was The 1975, the At Their Very Best tour. Matty Healy is the drunk and sexed-up version of that kid coming alive for the camera, the cheering and joy upon playback somehow baked into the feeling of the take.
I listen to the live album from the same tour and there is a two-song sequence that takes my breath away. The opening pads of “fallingforyou” send up a smokestack of recognition in the crowd, the literal sound on the recording played into the Garden, unmistakable. The vocal working slowly from tentative to ecstatic. I don’t wanna be your friend, he sings. I wanna kiss your neck. Except he leaves off “neck” and lets the crowd scream it and bend it, so he can drop back into the lower register, reigning it in under them. Then the opposite thing happens in “I Like America and America Likes Me,” in terms of both intelligibility to the crowd and who gets to really sing out. Their arrangement on this tour is unlike the one I watched on YouTube, the previous-tour stadium version, a more dead-ringer approach. Instead, the drone continues out of “fallingforyou,” and the piano reinterprets and obscures the recorded orchestration of the opening, filling it out and breaking up the chords. The crowd doesn’t know we’re in a new song. But I know the sound and especially the blocking because I was there. He is suddenly up on the roof of the fake house and the smokestack goes up again when the spotlight reveals him. But this is not the recognition of the actual song. That takes until the first line. “Is that designer?” The back end of the lyric is enveloped in cheers and then, this is the magic part, the cheers become the consequent, carried by the crowd: “is that on fire?” They recognize it, yell for it, sing it, all in one move.
It knocks me out every time, not least because, wait for it: he actually flipped the lyrics sequence, anticipating later lines, but the crowd is unfazed. After the chorus he announces the mistake, speaking through the still-autotuned mic, “fuck it I’m gonna do another verse!” More screaming along and his performance goes through the roof, on the edge of tearing through the voice. The “fine” of “it’s fine” goes on and on and on, extravagant melismatic singing through aggressive pitch correction. The sound—the desperate feeling (i.e., screaming into a machine)—of modernity. Or something.
That would be cool on the glockenspiel is a thought that actually forms in my brain at one point and the wide, wide gulf between the 23-year-old stadium dream and the 45-year-old reality opens up. I look into it and it’s mostly a little funny and kind of a little sad. In seeing it and feeling it I can actually do metta practice, uncomplicated, for the version of me, today, writing about all of this. Loving, at best. Kind, at best. Still rapping with questionable flow. Still trying to blow a hole in the wall. Still pretending to die in the snow.