On CMJ, Elbows, and the Crappiness of Live Music

This week has been my first CMJ experience (which amounts to attending a couple of cheap shows the last two evenings), so a big part of it for me is deciphering the particular threads of behavior by which the entire preceding is loosely held together. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far.

The most important thing, the thing that will govern 90% of what you experience at any given show, is the reptilian nature of the crowd. People forget themselves at rock shows year round, but CMJ brings out an intensified lack of self-awareness and rude Darwinian stupidity that is unparalleled in polite society. So yes, please go ahead and shove your way in front of me and bring your girlfriend and six other people with you. I have not been standing here in this same exact spot for over an hour, not shoving anyone and trying to maintain at least a decent view of poor Angel Deradoorian’s set. She’s playing instrumental tracks off her iPod and singing over them, but she’s being shouted down every step of the way by the guy running sound (who, it appears, does not think vocals should be audible) and the roar of disinterested crowd babble echoing off the walls of 285 Kent, a cement box with a toilet in the corner. You just got here, so you definitely deserve to have a better view of the show than me.

I realize that a lot of this is just whining. In these dark, loud, crowded environs, a small switch flips in my brain and the mild social anxiety disorder that surely lurks back there just waiting to be diagnosed comes alive. I get suspicious and territorial, checking my back pocket to make sure my wallet hasn’t been stolen every time someone moves behind me and clenching my fists in irritation when I’m jostled by the elbows and shoulders of dancing show-goers. It seems that I expect rather unreasonably to be able to stand in a room physically undisturbed and listen to a well-mic’d performer skillfully do his/her thing, and the failure of real life to live up to my snooty expectations should probably tell me something practical about my tolerance for heat versus my proximity to the kitchen. But the ‘Fear of Missing Out’ trumps all others and I won’t leave without seeing Twin Sister, who I still believe have made one of the best albums of the year. I put up with the shoving and talking during Deradoorian’s set, I give up and go stand in line for beer during Oneohtrix Point Never, and then I try to politely pick my way back to my old spot (for fear of being a hypocritical shover), feeling prickly and holding my pee but excited to hear such luminous pop gems as “Stop,” “Gene Ciampi,” and “Kimmi in a Rice Field” brought to life.

But they sucked. The acoustics of a concrete box with a toilet in the corner don’t handle fine, spacious, delicate things like Twin Sister songs very well, but on top of that the band was shouty and turned up way too high. It came off like mediocre shoegaze, which I would have been fine with had I come to see a mediocre shoegaze band, but my unrealistic (and ungracious) expectations are persistent little buggers. This sense of mediocrity, of little bands playing in little rooms and not matching the prestige of their recordings, has become familiar during my brief encounter with CMJ. On Tuesday night I walked away sorta-disappointed by Dent May’s sloppy set at the Underwater Peoples showcase, in which the loud glassiness of his guitar subsumed his goofy voice and rendered my beloved “Eastover Wives” jankety. (The less said about the melodic flatness and un-danceability of Class Actress, the better.) I mean, discovering next year’s big bands is supposed to be the point of CMJ, right? With my experiences thus far, I don’t know how anyone could properly gauge the merit of any musician plucked out of this mess. So lesson learned: I’m a recordings guy, not a live guy, and I need to either cut the whole world a break or just stay my ass at home.

EDIT: Man, I sound like a horrible, annoying person here, don’t I? I promise you I don’t spend every show complaining to myself. CMJ is still mostly silly and I stand by my venting about crowds and concrete boxes, but let’s just think happy thoughts for a while, okay?

    • Jens Lekman’s songs speak for him even as he speaks for his songs. It sounds weird, right? I mean, yes, pretty much everyone ambling around Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sunday—Lekman’s second of three sold out nights in Brooklyn—were already fans. We had read the stories on blogs (for we are a blog-reading people) about strange non-run-ins with movie stars and having the same dream every night for two years straight, but we really didn’t have to. Jens Lekman’s songs tend to explain themselves, with setting, narrative, and emotional tone all neatly laid out for us like table settings. Real life, he argues, is lovely and meaningful enough on its own. That’s why, when he leans into the microphone and says “Uh, this song is about how I almost met Kirsten Dunst one time,” and then goes on to recount the entire story (the VIP lines, the potato chip factory, all of it) before playing a single note, we laugh at the tautology. Lekman’s on-stage schtick is a sly wink at our expectations of singer-songwriters, as well as the idea of songs being tightly-wrapped little packages that must be unraveled and solved. Maybe it’s that eschewing of contemporary artifice that gets him labeled a ‘crooner.’ He writes and performs from a point of view that is surprisingly scarce in popular music, one of an observant and sensitive man who, like many of us, can’t help conjoining his feelings to the world around him, but who does not (as songwriters are wont to do) present the world as a mere embodiment of whatever’s going on inside him. Whether or not his honesty is genuine or part of a different kind of artifice, Lekman captures the charming mundanities of his life so acutely that we are compelled to believe him. It’s easy to overlook how he nimbly manipulates his guitar and sampler, never missing a note and singing with ever-increasing confidence, since the personability of the songs outweighs the clear and easy professionalism of his performance. What else can we do but laugh and clap and walk back to the bus stop feeling warmed?
    Pop-upView Separately

    Jens Lekman’s songs speak for him even as he speaks for his songs. It sounds weird, right? I mean, yes, pretty much everyone ambling around Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sunday—Lekman’s second of three sold out nights in Brooklyn—were already fans. We had read the stories on blogs (for we are a blog-reading people) about strange non-run-ins with movie stars and having the same dream every night for two years straight, but we really didn’t have to. Jens Lekman’s songs tend to explain themselves, with setting, narrative, and emotional tone all neatly laid out for us like table settings. Real life, he argues, is lovely and meaningful enough on its own. That’s why, when he leans into the microphone and says “Uh, this song is about how I almost met Kirsten Dunst one time,” and then goes on to recount the entire story (the VIP lines, the potato chip factory, all of it) before playing a single note, we laugh at the tautology.

    Lekman’s on-stage schtick is a sly wink at our expectations of singer-songwriters, as well as the idea of songs being tightly-wrapped little packages that must be unraveled and solved. Maybe it’s that eschewing of contemporary artifice that gets him labeled a ‘crooner.’ He writes and performs from a point of view that is surprisingly scarce in popular music, one of an observant and sensitive man who, like many of us, can’t help conjoining his feelings to the world around him, but who does not (as songwriters are wont to do) present the world as a mere embodiment of whatever’s going on inside him. Whether or not his honesty is genuine or part of a different kind of artifice, Lekman captures the charming mundanities of his life so acutely that we are compelled to believe him. It’s easy to overlook how he nimbly manipulates his guitar and sampler, never missing a note and singing with ever-increasing confidence, since the personability of the songs outweighs the clear and easy professionalism of his performance. What else can we do but laugh and clap and walk back to the bus stop feeling warmed?

    • People like to sing at a tUnE-yArDs show. Standing at Le Poisson Rouge last night, pressed against the edge of the stage (crowded free shows during the summer train you to show up unnecessarily early), I could hear a chorus of NYC show-goers behind me belting Merrill Garbus’ songs back at her. Some of it, one assumes, is just because people really love these songs. She’s sticking almost exclusively to material from this year’s w h o k i l l, an album that’s rightly won her a whole new legion of fans, but I also find myself wondering if this phenomenon goes deeper, down into the very fabric of tUnE-yArDs’ music. Garbus’ fearlessness with her own voice has a way of infecting the crowd, encouraging everyone to open up their own pipes and let it rip. Judging by her intermittent sidelong grins, it appears she’s still getting used to the idea of having her songs adapted on the fly by bar patrons into call-and-response ditties. Where on her records she’s only had her own brawny voice for company, here she finds herself suddenly abetted by a chorus of strangers (I’d be a little freaked out too). She took roll at one point. “How many of you have ever seen us before?” she asked, greeted by a slew of hoots and hollers. “And how many of you are seeing us for the first time?” I raised my can of Rolling Rock in silent assent. This was several songs into the set, after we’d already witnessed Garbus building rhythm tracks on the fly with her drums and hand-held microphones and loop station pedals, so what she said next was only half surprising. “Those of you who’ve never seen us before probably realize now that you can be recorded at any time during a tUnE-yArDs show.” I’d been thinking about this since the first song, about how a tUnE-yArDs show is partly about the joy and magic of making records. The syncopated back-and-forth rhythms of the saxophones in the left and right channels on “My Country?” She’s got two sax players on stage with her, ready to reproduce that same disorienting effect on demand. Instead of hiring a full-time drummer (which she can probably afford to do at this point, no?), she holds the vocal mic inches from the snare and floor tom as she taps out those loop pedal cues in lavender socks. It occurs to me early on that the hoots and hollers and stray claps of the audience must in some near-undetectable way make it into those microphones, that the sound of everyone responding to this music is simultaneously being used to help construct it in real time. This is how her albums work, too, with the ancillary room noise of each fragment left wonderfully intact, but there’s no audience to be heard there. I wonder what a direct recording from the sound board—hearing only what the mics on stage picked up—might sound like. 9.5 Best New Concert
    Pop-upView Separately

    People like to sing at a tUnE-yArDs show. Standing at Le Poisson Rouge last night, pressed against the edge of the stage (crowded free shows during the summer train you to show up unnecessarily early), I could hear a chorus of NYC show-goers behind me belting Merrill Garbus’ songs back at her. Some of it, one assumes, is just because people really love these songs. She’s sticking almost exclusively to material from this year’s w h o k i l l, an album that’s rightly won her a whole new legion of fans, but I also find myself wondering if this phenomenon goes deeper, down into the very fabric of tUnE-yArDs’ music. Garbus’ fearlessness with her own voice has a way of infecting the crowd, encouraging everyone to open up their own pipes and let it rip. Judging by her intermittent sidelong grins, it appears she’s still getting used to the idea of having her songs adapted on the fly by bar patrons into call-and-response ditties. Where on her records she’s only had her own brawny voice for company, here she finds herself suddenly abetted by a chorus of strangers (I’d be a little freaked out too).

    She took roll at one point. “How many of you have ever seen us before?” she asked, greeted by a slew of hoots and hollers. “And how many of you are seeing us for the first time?” I raised my can of Rolling Rock in silent assent. This was several songs into the set, after we’d already witnessed Garbus building rhythm tracks on the fly with her drums and hand-held microphones and loop station pedals, so what she said next was only half surprising. “Those of you who’ve never seen us before probably realize now that you can be recorded at any time during a tUnE-yArDs show.”

    I’d been thinking about this since the first song, about how a tUnE-yArDs show is partly about the joy and magic of making records. The syncopated back-and-forth rhythms of the saxophones in the left and right channels on “My Country?” She’s got two sax players on stage with her, ready to reproduce that same disorienting effect on demand. Instead of hiring a full-time drummer (which she can probably afford to do at this point, no?), she holds the vocal mic inches from the snare and floor tom as she taps out those loop pedal cues in lavender socks. It occurs to me early on that the hoots and hollers and stray claps of the audience must in some near-undetectable way make it into those microphones, that the sound of everyone responding to this music is simultaneously being used to help construct it in real time. This is how her albums work, too, with the ancillary room noise of each fragment left wonderfully intact, but there’s no audience to be heard there. I wonder what a direct recording from the sound board—hearing only what the mics on stage picked up—might sound like.

    9.5 Best New Concert