Who Knew?

This past Thursday, October 10th, 2013, I had the most stunning concert experience I have had to this point in my life, which includes 30 years of attending big–name concerts. It was “stunning” not only because it’s the most impressive all–around show I’ve seen, but also because of the way I ended up there—how despite my knuckleheadedness, I ended up in the right place at the right time.

So “how I ended up there” is the kind of long story suitable for a brand–new blog: In February of this year, after gradually noticing that the pop music ubiquitously played in public spaces was most interesting to my ears when it came from Adele, I decided to put into the car the copy of 21 our friend Jonathan gave us about half a year earlier, largely because he thought my partner Amy might like it. I was immediately impressed as soon as I started to listen to it in a focused way, and over the next several weeks I listened to Adele nonstop and also bought 19 and Royal Albert Hall to broaden my Adele experience. Throughout the summer I kept coming back to Adele, time and again, not tiring of her, a sure sign that she was a “permanent” addition to my relatively narrow list of “artists I listen to in a dedicated way.” I write relatively narrow here despite being a constant, obsessive music listener (in the car, in the house, on headphones, hours every day) because I tend to go “deep” more than “wide”: Like I did with Adele, I tend to check out all the works by a single artist rather than just choosing a few hits or big albums, and I listen to CDs all the way through rather than iPod mixes or Pandora channels.

But my realizing that I was “serious” about my relationship with Adele led me to a bit of a personal crisis because my musical pathways have historically been relatively narrow in another sense as well, in that almost all the artists I have explored in a deep sense, by listening to all the albums and trying to understand the artistic goals of the music in its own context, have been men (not to mention Euro–American; every major reference point I have to music has been Euro–American to this point in my life). The “personal crisis” part is that I teach classes in gender studies, and indeed my entire vocational life as a pedagogy professor involves analyzing communication texts in terms of their explicit and implicit cultural politics. So how could I, as Amy often asked, be comfortable with calling for complicated, pro–feminist readings of texts, in print and in class, while at the same time  spending all my leisure time consuming the works of (almost exclusively) men—from baseball to writing to film to music? This was a hard question to keep admitting that I had no answer to, and so in the case of Adele I decided to try something new.

The “something new” that I tried was making an effort to give her the same trust I give other musicians I admire, which means tracing the influences she cites to see if I could hear connections or develop an appreciation for them. The trouble, though, was that the exceptionalism that has always shaped my attitudes about art was coming up again, because even though I was reading about Adele’s citation of influences in an effort to prove that I could take her art as seriously as I take others’ art, I learned the kind of thing that a secret, small part of me always expected, with a patronizing sigh, to learn about Adele: She claimed her primary formative influence was not another gorgeous–voiced belter like Etta James, or a long–melody–writing, emotionally powerful balladeer like Carole King, but instead—reflecting her youth and her immersion in early-2000s era youth culture, I figured—P!nk.

P!nk. Ugh, I thought. Seriously, P!nk??? This is what happens when I try to treat a 23–year–old corporate singing sensation as a real artist with real threads of influence? I made meaning of this initially in two ways: First, I used it to persuade myself that by listening to Adele I had begun to more fully assimilate early–2000s era pop sensibility, that Adele herself was even cooler than I thought because she wasn’t just listening to her dad’s old–time jazz and soul like Norah Jones or Natalie Cole but was, instead, the genuine article, a working–class kid who grew up on the same kind of Top 40 bubblegum that all her little friends did but who, somehow in her magical throat, assimilated that bubblegum into the spryness of “Rumor Has It” and so on. Second, I reminded myself that as Top 40 bubblegum goes, P!nk was better than most; “Get the Party Started” was fun enough, “Just Like a Pill” was interesting, “Trouble” was exciting and rockish, and though I couldn’t name any other songs beyond those three, I liked her voice well enough whenever I heard it drifting within the froth of the mainstream media barrage, plus it seemed that reliable people with taste would validate her more fully than they would most popsters.

So now, for some readers, we move to the point in the story that’s new for you, as what I have just written is an extended version of what I posted on Facebook right after I bought P!nk’s greatest hits album—a post that led to my friend Brandi reminding me that her dad tours with P!nk and that, if I liked, she could take me to the concert the next time P!nk was in town. “Sure!” I replied, always happy to try a new concert experience, especially with an act as famous and ballyhooed as P!nk. I thought it might be fun, and after all, the greatest hits album was lively and quite a bit better, on several listens, that I had expected.

No amount of listening to the greatest hits CD could have prepared me adequately for this concert, though that CD sounds much better to me after hearing many of the songs played live. I acknowledge that, with Brandi in my corner, the seats were as good as can be: on the floor, about 20 yards from the front of the stage—far enough back to see every move on every inch of the very wide, very deep set, but close enough to see every muscle in the performer’s face without the help of a camera whenever she was downstage center. But while I had the best seat in the house, I am confident that every person in that arena was swept up in the energy. P!nk’s art is like hockey: you have to be there live to grasp what matters about it. So many threads intersected to knock my socks off–good grief, every piece of clothing I wore was knocked off, not just the socks. Here’s my effort to trace those:

First of all, she is a ROCK star; she’s not kidding when she brags about that in “So What.” My friend Karen told me the day before the concert that she thinks P!nk is the coolest person in the entire world, and not only do I agree, but I see how much her image continues to capture what “rock star” has historically meant. I know nothing in the world, as a music critic, as well as I know Bob Dylan and The Beatles, and I know Elvis Presley pretty well, too—in other words, I have a well developed sense of what a “rock star” initially was and what it meant. When hard–hitting, electrically amplified rock n’ roll music, music designed, in Robert Harris’s terms to be “memorable” and to “create an immediate impression,” was  broadcast on radio for a youth market, the “rock star” was a part of the culture embodying a rebellious spirit of willfully making the future one’s own (James Dean, Marlon Brando) combined with sexual freedom and media–friendly charisma (Elvis, The Beatles). Dylan took “rock star” to a more complex level by writing with poetic power right when youth culture became politically and socially radicalized, so that now rebellious, gyrating charisma could stand for something. I don’t mean to make too much of this, as I remain anti–corporate enough to be very skeptical of what it means to be a Cover Girl spokesmodel. But though she’s not Kate Millett or even Gloria Steinem, P!nk does mean something as a celebrity representing “edgy” beauty, and while I’m not enough of an expert on beauty culture to say exactly what she means, I can say this with the confidence of direct experience: She has all the charisma and cool of any of the men on the “rock star” list above, and the willfulness, the deliberate perversity and the social conscience are most assuredly all there, lighting up the tawdry basketball arena with the overwhelming power of the superstar, manifest and unmistakable. As a Living Colour fan, I say “Cult of Personality Indeed”; P!nk is someone who could get thousands to lemming themselves off a cliff, I have no doubt, and I’m very glad that all she wants from us is to get rich and, while getting rich, to tell young girls to be smart, beat ass and stop worrying what other people think. I had, until relatively recently, basically stopped going to rock concerts, concentrating only on jazz clubs, largely because I thought that large–scale rock concerts had become dull, predictable affairs in which the whole point of the rock concert as such, which was the visceral, communal energy of resistance, had become corporate and remote: mega–screens in football stadiums with folding seats instead of mosh pits, with the only source of power the deafening, distorted blare of amps. P!nk gave us the visceral, communal energy of resistance—arena, mega–screens, folding chairs, amps and all didn’t stand in her way, because she’s just that much of a rock star.

This relates strongly to the part of the concert experience for which I have the highest level of undying respect: She can reach such a very wide range of people, really reach us. A stranger agreed with my comment, just before the show, that this was by far the most diverse audience in terms of age and gender that I had ever seen. I wish that it hadn’t been quite so white, but in truth it was much more racially diverse than any of the rock concerts I have been to, and almost as racially diverse as the jazz concerts. But in terms of age and gender, I was astonished as I watched men quite a few years older than me show that they were completely absorbed, body and soul, in the exact same musical experience as the middle–school–aged girls in the row behind them. This was not a case of parents merely “sharing” in their teen daughters’ passions; I mean men older than me who knew every note, who pivoted with anticipation on every beat, no less enraptured than the teen girls just in front of me who would leap into the air, fists pumping and calves flailing, each time P!nk sang, “So you’d BETTER run and hide!” I simply would not have believed that this kind of broad–based musical community was possible in the personal–preference–media–channel–fractured, iPod–and–Pandora–saturated landscape of 2013 popular culture, and it was breathtaking to behold.

Perhaps this was possible because of what I consider to be, by far, P!nk’s greatest legacy, and on this I have confirmation now that I have started to read critics on her work: She effects a genuine synthesis of a huge range of genres, integrating them into a unique voice. This is so impressive to me mostly because I have, for so long, seen pop stars who are described this way, but who in my experience are really just putting a sheen of rockish sound or rhythm–and–blues scooping or country warbling or guest–rap interluding on top of what is, inevitably, just the same old tired Top 40 dance music. My favorite example of this is Avril Lavigne describing how much she loved to listen to David Bowie while pronouncing his last name “Beewwiee,” but any listen to Top 40 radio has, to my ears, always confirmed this skepticism. Yet having seen P!nk live, I am confident of at least the following: She most assuredly grew up listening not only to Guns n’ Roses but to much of the same hard rock I did; she could have sold millions of records as a country star if she’d wanted; and her in–concert shout–out to Billy Joel was dead serious and comes from a place of deep knowledge. The kind of smugness I brought to my first listen to her Greatest Hits CD about a month ago, as I opened my mind all the way up to the possibility that the songs might rise as high as “Really good for Top 40 pap,” that kind of smugness is just shamed to oblivion by the force of her musical synthesis. Not only could she argue with Kyle and me deep into the night about the merits of Led Zeppelin, if she chose, but she could do it without simultaneously speaking dismissively to Amy about Billy Joel or cordoning off her rap albums into one section of her collection, two things I never knew how to do. Relatively narrow is a phrase I apply to myself because of what I learned three nights ago from P!nk.

Despite all of this, I am not yet persuaded that she is as musically gifted as those artists I love the most (you know, the men). But one thing I know for certain is that not even in 1963 could Bob Dylan have performed acrobatic maneuvers at the head of a troupe worthy of Cirque De Soleil (I’ve seen “O” twice, so I do have some standard of comparison). I don’t mean that they did complicated tricks so she could do the easy ones and look good; I mean she did the hardest tricks of anyone in the arena. I know for certain that Miles Davis, even when he didn’t turn his back on his audience, couldn’t get thousands of people to sing and dance at the appropriate moments without ever, not even one time, exhorting us directly to “sing with me” or “show me how much fun you’re having” or any of that nonsense—not even one time. She spoke to us, to the other singers and dancers and techies (even the ones offstage) in ways showing that she was fully present in the moment, not leaning on rehearsed stage patter—and this is what I study, so I’m not willing to just valorize any random charismatic freak–of–nature–talent for convincing us that she was fully present. I mean she was fully present, in an arena with several thousand people. She introduced every dancer and musician by name, playfully joking with them and conveying her personality—not her persona, her personality, I swear (or at the very least, to avoid the “making/faking” dichotomy, the most convincing performance of a three–dimensional, volitional onstage persona I have ever seen). Every note and every beat of the music was played live, except the duet voice of Nate Ruess in “Just Give Me a Reason.” When I first read that Adele described falling in love with P!nk as a young girl because P!nk was “this girl singing her ass off onstage,” I was puzzled because, even without lip–synced foolishness, I didn’t understand how the style of songs like P!nk’s could lend themselves to that; but now I see that the tone and energy that so many artists (even sometimes P!nk herself) get from punched–up, auto–corrected, production–smoothed vocals on their studio recordings, and which are so often nearly impossible to recreate effectively live (even by the men I have been watching in concert, frankly), are put across with extraordinary verve and power—”singing her ass off” on every number, making the songs better live than they were on the record, vocals and all. The use of the mega–screens, including the one shaped like a heart that had Ruess’s giant face singing his duet part, was exquisitely choreographed so that the entire show was coherent and grew naturally out of the energy of the songs. I’ve spent years scratching my head, as I watched tv, wondering why people would go for these bizarre, Madonna–with–the–headset–style shows with jillions of tumbling dancers and splashy effects and running all over the stage looking like a bewildered baby deer while supposedly playing music to fans. Well, P!nk looks like a synchronized–swimming–level athlete, not like a bewildered deer, and now, after seeing this show, I finally understand what all the pop concertgoers are looking for, hoping for, when they go to these shows in this style. I doubt very seriously that they get this very often, if at all; but P!nk, who I will state again as I did on Facebook is the most impressive all–around entertainer I have ever seen, taught me three nights ago how to understand the language of this style of show. It’s like the Jackson Pollack exhibit I saw with Larry in November 1998: I was befuddled by Pollack, like many people are, until I moved through his work chronologically and let him, the artist himself, teach me his own language. P!nk taught me the language of pop, and now I will try to be less relatively narrow in the future and will be open to the concert styling efforts of the Justin Timberlakes of the world—though I think the language of pop is very unlikely to be as poetic as it was last Thursday, at least not for a long time.

So I say again, thanks Adele for turning me on to P!nk, and thanks P!nk for helping me at least begin to take off some of the arrogant aesthetic blinders I’ve been wearing and begin to try (and try and try) to live my values more consistently, as a listener and art critic and not just a professorial mouthpiece. I claim to believe in multiple intelligences and plural ways of knowing, but I still sit here and find myself shocked that a working–class girl from England who was barely born as the 80s were waning, and a working–class girl from Philly who is ten years my junior (but another Virgo, born five days after my 10th birthday!), hear so much more than this working–class academically gifted snob was ever was able to hear in popular music. I am going to try (and try and try) to move from shock to awe, because awe is what I’m left with after Thursday night.