constellations #25: critical karaoke
Hi again.
In this edition of constellations, I am sharing a short piece I wrote about a song I love, which I read on Zoom last week for some friends.
Some backstory: I have a tradition every December with my friends from back home where we hold an open mic in a small space in my parents’ yard we call “the studio” (no need for a proper name). We play our own songs and other people’s songs, we do off-the-cuff collaborations, I put out too many snacks, half the crew takes a cigarette break between every single set even though it’s usually, like, 15 degrees outside. It gathers many of the people I love under one roof, and every level of preparation or spontaneity is celebrated. It’s quite lovely. It couldn’t happen this year, for obvious reasons.
So I suggested the next best thing — a night of music-themed readings via video chat, loosely inspired by critical karaoke, a form I stole from the Pop Conference. In short: You read something you’ve written about a song, while the song is playing, for as long as the song is long. (You can watch an example of the pros doing it here, from this year’s virtual Pop Conference.)
For my part for the virtual party, I wrote about missing live music, disagreeing with seasoned critics, driving through a blizzard, and embracing contradictions. I’m a nervous talker and a fast reader, but if you hit “play” on the song just as you start reading and read at the pace of a nervous, fast reader, it should sync up pretty well.
I didn’t know what to expect when I showed up to “The Sun Still Burns Here” at the ICA in Boston last January. Nor did I know it would end up being one of the only live performances I would see in 2020.
“The Sun Still Burns Here” was an evening-length dance and music collaboration between musician Mike Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, and the choreographer Kate Wallich. The show only toured to four cities — Seattle, New York, Minneapolis, and Boston.
Before the series toured, Perfume Genius released two songs from it. The first one is called “Eye In The Wall,” and is nine minutes long. The other is called “Pop Song,” which you are listening to right now. It’s not nine minutes long. (But imagine if I had picked the other one!)
On the drive into Boston that night, Caroline and I learned that it was supposed to snow. But it wasn’t snowing when we parked in one of those expensive parking lots in the Seaport. Probably it was already starting to come down by the time we settled into our seats. But we weren’t thinking about that for the length of the performance. We were thinking about the five magnificent dancers, plus Mike, plus his partner and musical collaborator Alan Wyffels, onstage. And the huge billowing curtains that were sometimes pulled down from their scaffolding during the performance. And the costumes that kind of seemed like costumes but also kind of didn’t. And the music, which was moving and aching and dreamy.
In short, I found it transcendent. I went into the theater expecting not to “get” the performance, to just stare at hot people for sixty-five minutes and then walk away feeling that itchy combination of ignorant and yet somehow also impressed? Instead, as the show went on, I felt so drawn into this world I didn’t quite understand, and amazed by the way everyone’s bodies fit together and came apart, and I left feeling delighted and grateful.
The New York Times, however, did not find the performance transcendent. “The dance’s themes, as stated in the program, of ‘deterioration, catharsis and transcendence,’ are both glossed over and overly drawn out,” said a review published in November 2019, which, thankfully, I did not read before attending the performance. It also describes Mike Hadreas’ output, in what I assume the critic means as an insult, as “music for writhing.”
“At an hour,” the reviewer goes on to say, “‘The Sun Still Burns Here’ doesn’t possess enough craft to hold the stage; the production focuses more on expressing states of emotion that come off as angsty rather than fragile or vulnerable.” And later, the critic calls it “too hokey for transcendence.”
“Too hokey for transcendence!” This leads to an important question: Am I an idiot? Usually I would immediately be swayed by a review like this into thinking I am too dumb or misinformed to understand the art at hand. But occasionally I am able to trust my own feelings, and since this show isn’t touring and no one else is going to see it anyway, I will say here that I disagree with that critic, and that the very idea of hokiness and transcendence as being mutually exclusive feels misguided (and, if we are being honest, you know, at least a little homophobic).
In a little Q&A with Mike and Kate after the show, someone asked Mike about his relationship with his body. His music has often reckonened with the messy instability of the body, his experience with chronic illness and his embodied queerness. When someone asked if learning to dance was healing, he quickly and unequivocally said yes — but it didn’t fix everything. And then he started to cry.
And then I started to cry! He said music was a way for him to control his feelings, analyze them, embody them, and then walk away from them. Dancing — and making music that was meant to connect with the body in complex, challenging ways — hadn’t solved that, but it had complicated it. It felt really special to hear someone talking about how intractable these issues can feel — and to acknowledge that progress can happen, but that a little bit of healing isn’t a cure-all, and that healing can actually sometimes feel like a new set of problems.
Someone else in the Q&A asked him about the title of the piece, “The Sun Still Burns Here.” He said it came from the scope of the show — in his words, which I scribbled down in a notebook in the dark, the show goes from “void like” to “clinical” to “fucked up and torn apart” to “womb-y” and then, even after everything, everyone is still there. Still together.
We left the theater and I bought a shirt [ed. note: I was wearing the shirt during the Zoom call and, at this moment, pointed to it dramatically/enthusiastically] and we went back to the expensive parking lot. My dad’s car was covered in snow, which we tried to wipe away with our fists balled up in the sleeves of our jackets. It was really coming down hard and the plows weren’t out yet and we had to drive all the way back home. Ten minutes in, one of my wiper blades came loose and I had to pull over on Melnea Cass Boulevard and try to snap it back on. It took forever. Ordinarily I would have been so mad but I really truly couldn’t be upset, still buzzing from the high of the performance.
We listened to Perfume Genius’ whole discography on the drive home, staying well below the speed limit, so scared of slipping on ice. Once we made it onto 95 South the roads were clear and we talked about the show, about our own contentious relationships with our bodies and with our desires to make things and with the things in our lives that felt like healing but also felt like a new set of problems.
Oh man, I missed going to shows this year. All I wanted was to be one dumb body packed in a room with a bunch of other dumb bodies, staring at someone in awe, and then have that kind of giddy, warm joy the whole way home, even if it’s the dead of winter and you’re literally driving through a blizzard. I missed that so much. But how grateful I am that, if I only got to go to a handful of shows this year, I got to carry with me an energy that was this hokey and this transcendent.
Hope you embrace the transcendence in all its forms this week. See you in the new year.
xo,
M