…but there are definitely a whoooole lotta things they know how to do RIGHT. You gotta give ‘em that. When it comes to pastries, angst, gouda, not talking during movies, widespread acceptance of cigarette smoking, and 16 year-old gay poets who end up portrayed on the big screen by Leonardo Dicaprio, they blow us right out of the water.
At least we still have the market cornered on reality television and subhuman/Texan heads of state. And freedom fries.
Huzzah.
For a while now, I’ve been making weekly pitstops at BLOGOTHEQUE,* a French site that never fails to blow my mind. For most of you, this is going to be old, old news — I’m pretty sure they’ve been around since 2005, which makes it ancient by today’s standards — but just in case there are a couple stragglers out there even less music-savvy than myself — Blogotheque has this thing called “takeaway shows,” and… well, it’s just fucking amazing. The mastermind behind it all, ‘Vincent Moon,’ basically gets musicians who are performing in Paris to come out into the streets and do impromptu shows, then they film it with a shaky handheld camera. When it goes well, which is most of the time, the results are magnificent — I’ve never seen anything so raw and good and… perfect. The bands they get are usually pretty great, too. There’s a comprehensive write-up and a fairly interesting clip (from MTV, no less, and focused largely around Zach whatshisface of Beirut, but with a neat little interview of Moon towards the end) on popandpolitics. Definitely worth a look.
These are some of my favorites:
Grizzly Bear performing “The Knife” a capella as they walk down a street.
It’s nuts. And I definitely prefer it, for all its roughness, to the real version.
The demoralizingly brilliant Arcade Fire, playing ‘Neon Bible’ in a freight elevator.
God. They are just so fucking amazing. There are no words. (Turns out this was filmed
less than a month after I saw them in London with Carrie and wrote this raaambling post.)
Sufjan Stevens. Enough Said.
Jose Gonzalez. I’d heard his name but didn’t really know him before the first time I saw
this clip a couple months ago. Before the song was even over I was downloading his album.
Architecture in Helsinki with Heart it Races — one of the longer clips where you
see a lot of setup; they actually put up a notice on their myspace like, an hour beforehand,
and got some local fans to show up to form the impromptu ‘chorus’ — the payoff is worth it.
La Fete, by Beirut, from the performances for The Flying Club Cup.
(Farris — every time I see this Zach kid I think of Ilya — in a good way.
Don’t you think they have an eerily similar vibe going on!?)
What I love so much about all these little performances is that you get an unpolished glimpse into what it must be like for these people, people whose lives actually are about making music, who do it the way I might eat a sandwich or strike up a conversation. Or breathe. I think it’s this same quality that made Once so appealing. (Speaking of which, if you haven’t seen that yet, go. Go now. My sources tell me that it’s now out on DVD.)
If you liked these, go spend a glorious couple of hours here, and here. The second link is to a page on Vincent Moon’s own site — for the new Beirut album, The Flying Club Cup, Zach whatever got together with Moon to do a Takeaway Show for every single song — each photo takes you to a corresponding song on the album — they’re slightly more polished but still manage to capture the essence of what it’s about. I’m actually not that huge a fan of Beirut, but these performances, they’re good. Really good.
Back when I was a teenager, before I saw the light, I used to listen to a lot of Korean pop. (It’s true.) I remember, once, as I gloried in the oeuvre of musical giants like Shinhwa and G.O.D.(OHHhhhyeah. That stands for GROOVE OVER-DOSE, bitches!), my mom rather violently declared: “This shit isn’t MUSIC. These are idiots chosen for their ability to dance and show skin. Close your eyes, and it’s nothing!” And as much as I hate to concede any point to that particular madwoman (whom I love dearly), she was right. (In my defense, I would like to add here that those were dark, dark times, and even as it was happening, I knew it was wrong.)
Anyway, yeah. That wasn’t music. In fact, there’s a lot of stuff out there that wouldn’t qualify as music by my mom’s set of standards. But this? Whether you happen to like the individual artists or not, this is.
*To give credit where credit’s due: David did show me Blogotheque like, a year ago, back in London, and then again when he was here for the summer. Actually, during those two months I got to experience firsthand his impressive ability to track down all kinds of cool music and video content online. Naturally, at the time, because he is David and I am me, I didn’t really pay much attention to how, exactly, he did this. Since his departure, however, I’ve been reduced to searching out cool web content on my own (damn you, you inconsiderate Irish lout and your unreasonable need to “go back home”), and I did REdiscover the glories of Blogotheque all on my own, after much circuitous linking and exploring. So there.
[Image: Beirut’s Zach Condon (I finally looked up his damn last name) during a performance — google image search for ‘La Blogotheque’.]