i got sucked into an ethnomusic night and i didn't even know it. a friend of a friend was playing at joe's pub, which isn't something that happens to me often since, well, joe's pub is classy and expensive and usually full of yuppies or people dancing to hip hop and while i wish i had more friends who were always dancing to hip hop, right now i don't. feel free to ask me if you're out there. anyway, i went to joe's pub and you know, they want you to buy drinks and pretend you're in the weimar republic and clap clap clap with their nice, intelligent stage lighting, etc etc, and then this band gets on stage.
First thing I noticed was that one dude had a really big, well, a really big guitar, which wasn't a guitar at all, but a guitarron, that he played like a bass. It had a cool case and I'd like to see someone carrying one on the subway. Anyway, the band was Luminescent Orchestrii, which is a band name in Romanian I think. They played umm...what they called gypsy music. They had a Ukrainian women's choir that sang between their sets, they umm, said on stage that they collected folk songs but couldn't remember them and so they made up other stuff instead. There was glitter, there were stripped (read -strip-ED, like the name, not -ed, strip-pED), there was fiddlin.
This lady Rima, who played fiddle in the band and also sang, seemed to know what the fuck was going on. Yes, people, that's what I'm saying. Authentic. I never have these horrible horrible worries about 'the authentic' because i never go to anything that tries to be umm. real. and by that i mean 'tries.' also, i'm not used to seeing bands where the band members are in 'costume' like, not karen o wearing christian joy, but like, girls wearing, you know, 'concert clothes' which is where i insert a story about how when my parents got divorced when i was young, my mom couldn't afford to buy me 'concert clothes' for every orchestra concert, and other kids would make fun of me for wearing the same thing as last time. okay, that didn't really happen, exactly, or maybe it did, but concert clothes always strike me as 'nervous clothes' or 'i'm not 100% committed to this' clothes. concert clothes. costumes. gimmicks. penny whistles. Oh my. Ethnomusic. Anyway, it was mostly okay music, spirited and fun and the band was full of chix with chops, but seriously not my thing - (I kept thinking of the last Roma concert I went to, in Prague, where it was sweaty and hot and full of smoke and the band played forever and their suits were stained and old, and it was generations of men, only men, up on stage...sick, that i should crave that and not this, cool, composed, willfully transgressive act in the name of art -- or is it?)
now i'm listening to this heat to cleanse myself.
...I must say. Roma, ALLWAYS dress up when they play and i've played with them quite a bit now. I'm sure those men in Prague where dressed up. Very likely, though I could be wrong, what they where playing was not "traditional" or "authentic" music but what they call "resturant" music. There is nothing authentic in music, it's allways changing and one culture effects another. That said.... most people in most cultures have "concert clothes". The only people who dont are white kids. Cultures that are are wealthy often don't see it as a statement if you "dress up", so they do the opposite. Which is fine.
cheers,
Sxip
reminds me of spanish lang. textboks where there's be a boy saying 'estoy nervioso' and there's be three little lines like rays coming from his head - signifying 'the shakes.' which reminds me of a remy zero song called 'tememos - here comes the shakes' which was one of my favorite songs ever back in 1997. which reminds me of radiohead, who apparently listened to the RZ record when mixing ok computer. okay, i'll stop.
Dude, I almost went to that show...but that would have been too much daphne for one week, eh? Can there be such a thing. I like the idea of nervous clothes. Let's design a line.