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Sunday, November 04, 2007
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In Which UD, Because Her Sister's Pestering Her About It... ...blogs the Morrissey concert she went to the other night. UD's once-student and now-friend, Christina, came along for moral support. She also came along to sit with UD, because UD's sister, a cultist, stood in the first row of Constitution Hall so she could be as close as possible to Morrissey, and there's no way UD was going to do that. The three ladies met, on a mild and beautiful autumn night in the city, at a Cosi restaurant across from the Old Executive Office building. UD ordered a salad she thought'd be great, only it had blue cheese on it which she had to scrape off. On the way in to the hall, they met up with another cultist, a friend of UD's sister, and the two of them went off to see the opening act. UD and Christina, realizing they had no interest in the opening act ("It's three big girls. They kind of look like a Latina gang."), and that Morrissey wouldn't appear for another hour or so, decided to get a drink at the Cafe du Parc, just down from the White House. It was a bright, elegant place -- brand new, a fine French knock off -- and UD had her winter drink (her summer drink, longtime readers know, is a pina colada), a vodka and orange juice. She did what she does with all alcoholic drinks -- she drank half of it -- and Christina looked as annoyed as Mr. UD looks when UD does this. They tried to walk along the back of the White House to return to Constitution Hall, but a security guy stopped them and told them to walk a different way. When they got to the hall, Morrissey was wailing, and the crowd (which filled up most, but not all, of the place) was, as a colleague of UD's at the University of Toulouse used to put it, eento eet. Really eento eet. UD and Christina took their seats in a lower-level balcony and UD considered first the pretty tacky light show, its pulsing strobes exactly like the strobes at the 'sixties concerts UD attended when she were a wee lassie. Three huge images of Richard Burton (not the adventurer; the movie star) were projected on the wall behind the band... UD pondered the meaning of this homage. Almost no one in the audience besides UD recognized the guy -- Christina didn't -- so it was a kind of private gesture, I guess, on Morrissey's part... And what was it about? Maybe, like UD, Morrissey has a thing for handsome brilliant passionate self-destructive artists. I dunno. I mean, the room was full of symbolically resonant objects -- a gorgeous enormous gong... various message-ridden t-shirts Morrissey would wear for a few minutes and then strip off of his body and hurl into the hungry crowd... UD knows that Morrissey's lyrics are clever, poetic, dour, gifted. Yet overamplification made detecting even one word impossible. That left his voice and the quality of the music itself. His voice was fine, serviceable, a smooth easy tone, but nothing that'd knock your socks off. And the music? I'll let Roger Scruton say it: [There's an] abdication of music to sound: to the dominating beat of the percussion, and to such antiharmonic devices as the 'power chord,' produced by electronic distortion. Melodies become brief exhalations, which cannot develop since they are swamped by rhythm, and have no voice-leading role. ... In the soup of amplified overtones, inner voices are drowned out: all the guitarist can do is create an illusion of harmony by playing parallel fifths. |