After a day of meetings in town yesterday, I hung around. The dinner time zone was spent working in a coffee shop, then I went to a small gig which had caught my eye on some listings. The snippets of music I’d heard online sounded ok, the admission price was reasonable.
But it entirely failed to speak to me live. It felt as if it could have ben transposed to some kind of evangelical religious congregation in the deep south of America.
It shrieked about the goodness of life, love and sex, in terms not bereft of musical ability, but exposed with such threadbare unweathered naivety, it made me want to vomit. The frontgirl was a hippy, plaited hair, Irish, adorably open manner, slightly out there eyes, probably entirely middle class upbringing.
Obviously I speculate wildly on the latter. She evidently felt the earnestness of her music and lyrics. As did her band, tight eyed, looking to the heavens, smiling blissfully, singing over and over:
“When we kissed, the world fell in love!”
It wasn’t necessarily intended romantically, she’d explained before beginning the song. It’s about that explosive feeling you get whenever anybody kisses you, even your little nephew or whatever.
The sentiment made my stomach gurgle, as if it was considering ejecting bile.
Expressing yourself in music through SUCH rose-tinted spectacles appeared to me, to be foolhardy. Religion was never once mentioned, but the way in which it evoked praise and faith to a higher power was impossible to avoid and didn’t sit comfortably. The world isn’t perfect and ideal, life isn’t always a bed of roses.
A sad git like me will always find it difficult to always empathise with the brilliance of love and faith and other people and infinite heavenly sex and permanent hippy, happy bounceyness. I find it all rather facile.
Unreasonable, almost. Open to chiding.
Or maybe I’m excessively cynical.
It wasn’t a musical experience I took nothing away from but one which, given the general audience reaction of reflected splendour and praise, made me feel alienated and disconnected. People do apparently believe other people are awesome and sex is forever religious. And it doesn’t appear to do them any harm either, although they do look starry-eyed, spacey and stoned. And maybe that’s not really all so bad.
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