The Urban Soup (Part XIV)

Show #1: I still haven't gotten the concert crowd down properly: sometimes I can manage. Sometimes I can dig it, and join heatily in the digging. Other times I just stand and watch. That night was part of the latter. The musicians were image-whores: a bunch of badasses with unusually high voices, rocking out in accordance with some General Order from the Office of the Rock God. The kind of interesting part were the two dancers in front of me. They just didn't care, and managed to sway and jump and twirl and whatever else for the better part of the show. It started off with a guy and girl--a couple, I presume--who both looked like Elvis Costello. They managed to suck in a few other people who they may or may not have known. You know the kinds of people they are: within minutes they'll treat you like somone they have a history with. Later on in the show they quieted down, and thay's where the two squares came in: a couple of middle-aged guys in suits amid a crowd where the median age is something like 19. One dude was clutching his pint-glass and dancing for all he was worth, which wasn't much. But it made me think. Will I try to keep "with it" at that age? I hope not. Music then will probably consist of blast beats so loud and so quick that within about ten seconds you pass out into blissful hypnagogic nothingness.

Show #2: We walked in and said "yes!", because the four-synthesizer group on the stage was sending square and triangular waves of hipness through the floor, up my leg bones as vibrations in hydroxyapatite, through my abdominal and thoracic cavities as more liquidy-type vibrations through blood-engorged organs (not that organ) and connective tissue, up through my larynx, hitting the hypothalamus and making me flush. (Wow, was that ever biologically implausible.) The girl keyboardist stashed her handbag under where we were sitting, and we praised her show. She seemed the kind of person who'd totally be down with doing whatever afterwards, except she was way more hip than we were. (So hip she could hardly see over her pelvis.) There were two other bands; the second was just loud. The headliners were good, but didn't make me say "yes!" again. What's more interesting than one-sentence pronouncements is what happens in the interstices of the show. For the first time ever, someone actually tried to tell me her life story. It's odd nodding along to lesbian heartbreak and uptown isolated sadness from someone with blue hair. (My odd fixation with blue hair is material for a long, long essay. One that might get produced ono of these days.) But this wasn't the time, and there was no time or capacity to listen--for the first time ever. Instead, my empathy surrenderred to the bass beats and phlanger noises and cowbell clicks and stage acrobatics.

Consider: "If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience."