My Lady Story
What I really want to do, now that all that important spiritual stuff is out of the way, is talk about music. Like a big oily geek.
Two weekends past, I went to the coolest place in PDX, the Doug Fir Lounge, and lived. I contributed to the fire hazard (though not the philosopher's beard or magic scarf quotient) by packing myself in with a dangerous number of hipsters to see Antony & the Johnsons.
I came across Antony's new album "I am a Bird Now" at a listening station in Jackpot, and 20 seconds into the first track I was weeping like an Operation Iraqi Freedom widow (note referring to my last post: crass political jokes have their proper context. Like this one).
You can read the website's press and find all the requisite gushing over his gorgeous multi-octave voice, and comparisons of same with Nina Simone and Otis Redding. One review (which I can't find so I can't cite, so what do you think this is, Rolling Stone?) claims, quite rightly, that "I Am a Bird Now" is "the greatest song cycle about a pre-op transsexual ever recorded." Guests on the album are Lou Reed, Devendra Banhart, Rufus Wainwright and Boy George, and his self-titled debut was released by David Tibet of Current 93; all this should serve as a map of his sound for other geeks.
I almost left in the midst of the opening set by Cocorosie; not because of them, or the disturbing psychedelic child abuse vibe of their accompanying video show (featuring looped and kaleidoscopically distorted footage from the Care Bears cartoon), but because there were just too damn many people in my personal space. This is why I'm indifferent to live music, folks.
I was impressed enough with Cocorosie to put their CD on hold at the library (my version of illegally downloading is checking them out then and burning them. Use your local public library! Exploit it while it's still there!). The lead singer (one of the two Cassidy sisters, Bianca or Sierra) has the amazing ability to make her voice sound as if it's emanating from an old, scratchy 78 record. It hovers and attacks, with a serrated, too-trebly edge that can seduce or madden depending on your proclivities. A couple songs in, I was mesmerized; by the end I was numb. That's all she does, unfortunately. It's a schtick, and I hope they figure out how to transcend it, 'cuz they sound like no one else.
Anyway, I stayed, and Sven finally found me after having been turned away, post-sellout, before they decided to pack just a few more Portlanders in, and Antony arrived, tall and lumbering and looking like he'd just been mugged; or perhaps done some mugging. Not dressed as a woman, but rather androgynous, throwing off all assumptions. Quickly he crossed the stage, sat his awkward, blocky form in front of the piano and began unceremoniously to sing:
"My lady's story is one of annihilation/ My lady's story is one of breast amputation..."
If you share my English degree fussiness over lyrics, these may look, in type, to be at the very least a bad idea. But the way Antony owns and lives and suffers them, all in the time it takes for them to pass through his lips (which is great to watch, by the way: his demonstrative singing style brought to mind the oft-ridiculed contortions of Joe Cocker) renders any objections moot.
The lady in question could be Antony-as-narrator, Antony-as-character, or a lady Antony knows, or a boy who wants so badly to BE a lady he's willing to embrace all the suffering and degradation our society visits upon women, and even their own special cancers.
Most likely the truth is at the intersection of them all. It's a terribly profound and complicated intervention into the already tangled logistics of gender and sexual identity, and it's just one example of a slew of equally brilliant and heart-shredding narratives/manifestations/theses in Antony's arsenal.
Not all is misdirection, though; sometimes it's achingly simple and direct:
"One day I'll grow up/ And be a beautiful woman/ One day I'll grow up/ And be a beautiful girl/
But for now I am a child/ For now I am a boy."
Antony, of course, played piano, which is the beating heart of every song. He was accompanied by an acoustic guitarist, and a cellist with a HUGE tattoo of a pentagram on her arm (which was, umm, bitchin'). This simple weave of keys and strings--no drums--was much fuller and lusher than it had any right to be.
And all that's beside the voice, which is so simultaneously familiar and alien, and so effective in blurring notions of race or gender as the source of the sound, that it makes me sick with confusion and longing.
Which may not sound appealing, but I'm as indifferent to vocal prowess as I am to lyrical content, and this is one of the few voices I've heard that gets inside me every time; not merely virtuosic or technically honed, it is also raw and primal, both bruised and bruising. "Don't punish me/ For wanting your love inside of me."
I can only speak for myself, but being present for that performance made me seriously question what I was doing there, what I was getting out of witnessing such a deliberately outre display of disbelonging. There is a sense of cultural tourism for someone like me who has never been forced, by birth, circumstance or prediliction, to live on the outside of our imperialist and puritan hospitality. I wondered why he was giving me so much, and how I could possibly return it. And would I, could I, if given the chance?
Of course, this is theater and he is a performer. But Antony's persona is not a front, a gaudy mask suggesting decadence and indie weirdness. It's an amplifier, iterating his inner self out to us in a fierce cone. Even in a year in which representations of sexual otherness both affected (Franz Ferdinand, whose "Take Me Out" and "Michael" are rewrites of earlier ambiguity operas, particularly Bowie's "John, I'm Only Dancing") and over-the-top celebratory (Scissor Sisters, Big & Rich), are the Next Big Thing, Antony's authenticity and openness have a tinge of self-immolation, a ritual self-birth and suicide rolled into one. As he sings in "Hitler in My Heart," "from corpses, flowers grow."
Even Iggy, who rolled in glass, or Sid, who gouged his chest with a razor, did so out of monumental boredom, the glassy-eyed ennui of suburbs and council estates. Antony sings of love as brutality and brutality as love because he feels so much, and because so much of what he feels is abject in our society. The need for love must accomodate any vehicle in order to survive; thus songs about love as mutilation, love as self-erasure, love as a beating. He sings, "I wear on my body the memory of your devotion."
This kind of yearning, this desperate need for belonging and companionship, is really not much of a magnification of the stuff of any pop song you could name. It's rather a transubstantiation: "I'd die for you," as a metaphor, is as trite and banal as they come. But what if the death was literal, a sonnet in the flesh, with blood and scars as syntax? "I'll even cut off my finger/ It'll grow back like a starfish."
If he wasn't onstage, he would be literally invisible, an outcast; someone we would cross the street to avoid. What is it about the stage that renders abjection into desire? What we find unthinkable, alien or repugnant in our daily lives we emulate and gaze upon when it's stylized, when it's framed by performance and its distance, its strictures. The carnivalesque makes horror beautiful, but it also innoculates against its threat.
Everyone worth their iTunes download royalty (assuming there is such a thing) knows all this. Ask Trent Reznor. Or Marilyn Manson, or anyone else who trades on our fantasies of transgression. But Antony is perhaps the only such performer I can think of who can throw up an artifice and then burn straight through it.
So, beautiful show. Everyone, I'm sure, had their moments of transcendence in a set that was a string of them, like a procession of sunspots. Mine was the break in "Man is the Baby" when the piano and cello entered a long, slow, suspended dance, a sad embrace that sounded like leaves falling, leaving branches bare.
Two weekends past, I went to the coolest place in PDX, the Doug Fir Lounge, and lived. I contributed to the fire hazard (though not the philosopher's beard or magic scarf quotient) by packing myself in with a dangerous number of hipsters to see Antony & the Johnsons.
I came across Antony's new album "I am a Bird Now" at a listening station in Jackpot, and 20 seconds into the first track I was weeping like an Operation Iraqi Freedom widow (note referring to my last post: crass political jokes have their proper context. Like this one).
You can read the website's press and find all the requisite gushing over his gorgeous multi-octave voice, and comparisons of same with Nina Simone and Otis Redding. One review (which I can't find so I can't cite, so what do you think this is, Rolling Stone?) claims, quite rightly, that "I Am a Bird Now" is "the greatest song cycle about a pre-op transsexual ever recorded." Guests on the album are Lou Reed, Devendra Banhart, Rufus Wainwright and Boy George, and his self-titled debut was released by David Tibet of Current 93; all this should serve as a map of his sound for other geeks.
I almost left in the midst of the opening set by Cocorosie; not because of them, or the disturbing psychedelic child abuse vibe of their accompanying video show (featuring looped and kaleidoscopically distorted footage from the Care Bears cartoon), but because there were just too damn many people in my personal space. This is why I'm indifferent to live music, folks.
I was impressed enough with Cocorosie to put their CD on hold at the library (my version of illegally downloading is checking them out then and burning them. Use your local public library! Exploit it while it's still there!). The lead singer (one of the two Cassidy sisters, Bianca or Sierra) has the amazing ability to make her voice sound as if it's emanating from an old, scratchy 78 record. It hovers and attacks, with a serrated, too-trebly edge that can seduce or madden depending on your proclivities. A couple songs in, I was mesmerized; by the end I was numb. That's all she does, unfortunately. It's a schtick, and I hope they figure out how to transcend it, 'cuz they sound like no one else.
Anyway, I stayed, and Sven finally found me after having been turned away, post-sellout, before they decided to pack just a few more Portlanders in, and Antony arrived, tall and lumbering and looking like he'd just been mugged; or perhaps done some mugging. Not dressed as a woman, but rather androgynous, throwing off all assumptions. Quickly he crossed the stage, sat his awkward, blocky form in front of the piano and began unceremoniously to sing:
"My lady's story is one of annihilation/ My lady's story is one of breast amputation..."
If you share my English degree fussiness over lyrics, these may look, in type, to be at the very least a bad idea. But the way Antony owns and lives and suffers them, all in the time it takes for them to pass through his lips (which is great to watch, by the way: his demonstrative singing style brought to mind the oft-ridiculed contortions of Joe Cocker) renders any objections moot.
The lady in question could be Antony-as-narrator, Antony-as-character, or a lady Antony knows, or a boy who wants so badly to BE a lady he's willing to embrace all the suffering and degradation our society visits upon women, and even their own special cancers.
Most likely the truth is at the intersection of them all. It's a terribly profound and complicated intervention into the already tangled logistics of gender and sexual identity, and it's just one example of a slew of equally brilliant and heart-shredding narratives/manifestations/theses in Antony's arsenal.
Not all is misdirection, though; sometimes it's achingly simple and direct:
"One day I'll grow up/ And be a beautiful woman/ One day I'll grow up/ And be a beautiful girl/
But for now I am a child/ For now I am a boy."
Antony, of course, played piano, which is the beating heart of every song. He was accompanied by an acoustic guitarist, and a cellist with a HUGE tattoo of a pentagram on her arm (which was, umm, bitchin'). This simple weave of keys and strings--no drums--was much fuller and lusher than it had any right to be.
And all that's beside the voice, which is so simultaneously familiar and alien, and so effective in blurring notions of race or gender as the source of the sound, that it makes me sick with confusion and longing.
Which may not sound appealing, but I'm as indifferent to vocal prowess as I am to lyrical content, and this is one of the few voices I've heard that gets inside me every time; not merely virtuosic or technically honed, it is also raw and primal, both bruised and bruising. "Don't punish me/ For wanting your love inside of me."
I can only speak for myself, but being present for that performance made me seriously question what I was doing there, what I was getting out of witnessing such a deliberately outre display of disbelonging. There is a sense of cultural tourism for someone like me who has never been forced, by birth, circumstance or prediliction, to live on the outside of our imperialist and puritan hospitality. I wondered why he was giving me so much, and how I could possibly return it. And would I, could I, if given the chance?
Of course, this is theater and he is a performer. But Antony's persona is not a front, a gaudy mask suggesting decadence and indie weirdness. It's an amplifier, iterating his inner self out to us in a fierce cone. Even in a year in which representations of sexual otherness both affected (Franz Ferdinand, whose "Take Me Out" and "Michael" are rewrites of earlier ambiguity operas, particularly Bowie's "John, I'm Only Dancing") and over-the-top celebratory (Scissor Sisters, Big & Rich), are the Next Big Thing, Antony's authenticity and openness have a tinge of self-immolation, a ritual self-birth and suicide rolled into one. As he sings in "Hitler in My Heart," "from corpses, flowers grow."
Even Iggy, who rolled in glass, or Sid, who gouged his chest with a razor, did so out of monumental boredom, the glassy-eyed ennui of suburbs and council estates. Antony sings of love as brutality and brutality as love because he feels so much, and because so much of what he feels is abject in our society. The need for love must accomodate any vehicle in order to survive; thus songs about love as mutilation, love as self-erasure, love as a beating. He sings, "I wear on my body the memory of your devotion."
This kind of yearning, this desperate need for belonging and companionship, is really not much of a magnification of the stuff of any pop song you could name. It's rather a transubstantiation: "I'd die for you," as a metaphor, is as trite and banal as they come. But what if the death was literal, a sonnet in the flesh, with blood and scars as syntax? "I'll even cut off my finger/ It'll grow back like a starfish."
If he wasn't onstage, he would be literally invisible, an outcast; someone we would cross the street to avoid. What is it about the stage that renders abjection into desire? What we find unthinkable, alien or repugnant in our daily lives we emulate and gaze upon when it's stylized, when it's framed by performance and its distance, its strictures. The carnivalesque makes horror beautiful, but it also innoculates against its threat.
Everyone worth their iTunes download royalty (assuming there is such a thing) knows all this. Ask Trent Reznor. Or Marilyn Manson, or anyone else who trades on our fantasies of transgression. But Antony is perhaps the only such performer I can think of who can throw up an artifice and then burn straight through it.
So, beautiful show. Everyone, I'm sure, had their moments of transcendence in a set that was a string of them, like a procession of sunspots. Mine was the break in "Man is the Baby" when the piano and cello entered a long, slow, suspended dance, a sad embrace that sounded like leaves falling, leaving branches bare.