June 10th, 2008, 5 Comments »
Last month I wrote about the ubiquity of cameras at concerts. Today, via Metafilter, a journalist asks at least a half-dozen working musicians how they feel about the phenomenon. Their responses are varied. Here’s Sleater-Kinney guitarist (and blogger) Carrie Brownstein:
“As a performer, it’s frustrating to look out and see a sea of cellphones instead of faces. There’s definitely a problem where people are so busy documenting the moment that they forget to just live in the moment.”
The title of this post comes from a Micheal Stipe post (admittedly, it was when REM played SXSW). I don’t have a strong opinion either way on this topic–I just thought this was a handy follow-up from the musician’s perspective.
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April 14th, 2008, 12 Comments »
As I mentioned, last week I saw Cat Power at the Vogue Theatre. As soon as the lights dimmed, a bunch of eager young things stormed the area in front of the stage. When Ms. Power strode out of the wings, the standing audience was probably ten people deep before the first row of seats.
I was up in the balcony, so I had an excellent view of what happened next. As the band kicked into the first song, dozens of people whipped out their cameras and camera phones. The crowd glowed not with the warm aura of lighters held aloft, but with the cold blue glow of device displays.
(I’m reminded of a germane Doonsbury–or possibly Bloom County–cartoon. It’s a scene from a standing crowd at a concert. Nobody has a lighter because everyone has stopped smoking. Someone suggests “hold up my beeper–it glows.)
For the first few songs, there were always at least ten cameras visible from the balcony. The venue had signs telling people to turn off their cameras’ flash, and these were mostly heeded.
I’m not complaining about this. Aside from the worrying possibility of documenting an event instead of experiencing it, I can see little downside.
It is, however, a remarkable sea change. A decade ago you’d have gotten a stern warning or booted out of the venue for waving around a camera. I’ve got a Dave Matthews bootleg recording where Dave, from the stage, asks an audience member to turn off a camera (”I’m sure you’re a nice person and all, but will you turn that mother-fucker off.”).
Now, though, nobody seems to mind. I’m sure that musicians recognize the value in camera ubiquity. All that digital content just helps spread their brand.
I am getting old, though, because all those cameras feel a little rude. The presumption is that Cat Power has given her tacit permission by appearing on stage, but that’s actually a very new idea.
That idea is a second cousin to the argument that the paparazzi often makes. That a person’s fame makes them fair game, whether they want their photo taken or not.
12 Comments »
April 11th, 2008, 9 Comments »
First, apologies for the light posting this week. We’re running at 110% at Capulet, writing a book and starting on the house-building process (more on that later), so it’s been a hectic week.
Last night we watched Cat Power (a stage name, as it turns out) at the Vogue Theatre. I don’t have time to produce a fully-nuanced review, but I wanted to make a few observations:
Damn, I’m old. The average age of attendees seemed to be about 25. That’s eight years younger than me. Hopefully that places me in the old-but-still-cool-not-creepy category.
It was general seating at the Vogue. This struck me as odd, as it’s a theatre, but never mind. I got in line at 6:30pm so that I could get good seats. We went in at 8:00pm, and got awesome seats at the centre of the front row of the balcony (hence, nobody standing in front of me).
Despite the ’special guests’ listed on the ticket, there was no opening act Ms. Power didn’t make it on stage until 9:45pm. I’ve written about this before (though I can’t find where, precisely), but why do we permit rock musicians to be so audaciously late? The theatre, movies, ballet, symphony–everybody else starts more or less when they say they will. Why do musicians get a free pass? And you know that Cat Power and her band aren’t backstage doing coke off of strippers. They’re probably just trying to finish Lego Star Wars on their PlayStation Portable.
Their Chaotic and Unpolished Nature
Ms. Power was obviously having difficulty with her monitors (the speakers facing the band that enabling them to hear themselves) all evening. Near the end of the show she apologized for her apparently sub-par performance. According to Wikipedia, she makes a habit of this:
Traditionally, Marshall’s live shows have been notorious for their chaotic and unpolished nature, with songs beginning and ending abruptly or blending into one another without clear transitions. Marshall has in the past spoken of her severe stage fright. She has been known to stop playing in order to apologize for a self-perceived flaw in her performance.
Ryan Adams did the same thing when I saw him in Dublin–I find these theatrics tremendously unappealing. If you’re a performing artist, it behooves you to be a professional and keep your complaints and fragile ego to yourself. Drawing attention to your flaws makes the audience uncomfortable, and makes me feel like I’m not getting my money’s worth. Besides, people aren’t paying as much attention as they might think. A musicians has to seriously screw up for the audience to notice.
A Quirky White-Girl Dancer
I did enjoy the show, though Chan Marshall is kind of a one-tricky pony. She’s got an extraordinary and unique voice, but I didn’t hear a lot of variation in her vocal style. Plus, she’s not a particularly articulate singer, so hearing the actual lyrics was a non-starter.
I did enjoy her seemingly-compulsive need to revise songs, both her own and covers. Her version of the Stone’s classic “Satisfaction” was both different from the original and the her version on her Covers album. My favourite Cat Power song, “Lived in Bars”, gained two new tempo changes.
She’s got a peculiar physicality on-stage. She’s a quirky white-girl dancer that’s simultaneously awkward and endearing as she seems to invent new moves on the fly. Physically, she’s the unholy love-child of Joe Cocker and Axl Rose. It’s a bit like she’s still in her teenaged bedroom, dancing alone in front of a mirror.
Would I go see her again? Probably not. Her vocals are remarkable, but her immature behaviour and lack of musical variety kind of turned me off.
UPDATE: Here’s a review from the Vancouver Sun. It shouldn’t, this newspaper continues to surprise with the declining calibre of its writing and reportage. Oy.
9 Comments »
