[this is the second of two parts. The first part is here.]
A film maker I met recently told me his tales of woe as we sipped beer in a downtown pub, stories of working for ages to bring a series on “world music” to the CBC, only to see it transformed from a series to a one hour special. He gave me a copy of the DVD, and so I got to see for myself the bizarre cuts and fadeouts that the CBC imposed to jam 12—yes, 12—bands into one hour, minus commercials. Do the math. And for this, he said, he barely covered costs, never mind made a profit, on footage that ended up owned by the Corpse.
Now, sitting through the finished product later at home, I had more time to think about it, and to contrast and compare what I’m trying to do (which remains to be seen) with what he had done.
The filmmaker was very proud of the six camera shoot he had orchestrated, including a crane—which made me think of SCTV and Johnny LaRue immediately—and the first visual impression was very good. All the expected things were there, the huge stage, the sheets of lights, pointing up into the heavens of the theatre it was shot in, the musicians positioned on the stage where the (6) cameras could lovingly caress them. Admittedly, the impact was a little weak when it was a solo performer or a duo, but otherwise it wasn’t immediately obvious what the problem was.
Despite the risk of seeming to think my own children are the best looking, I couldn’t help contrast what I saw in the DVD with what was coming together on my screens in Final Cut Pro. And it’s part of the problem.
Musicians may all dream of playing on huge stages before huge audiences, but that’s just money talking. Everyone who loves music has their list of huge groups or legendary performers that they saw at some tiny place. For me, James Brown, U2, Talking Heads, Prince are part of my set. Tell someone you saw any of those people at the Air Canada Centre, and they’ll yawn.
Everyone knows, as in the old joke, how to get to Carnegie Hall: practice. Which doesn’t just mean playing your scales. It means that what gets you to those big stages, like the one in the DVD, is the long, sometimes unending small bars and hot rooms with maybe fifty, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred, maybe only two people in them. Great music doesn’t get born on big stages.
But that’s what the filmmaker had done.Taken a bucket load of acts, tipped them out on the big stage meant for six cameras, not six musicians, and let them play. So the bass player floats far enough away from the lead singer that camera three can do an artistic focus pull from one to the other. Fabulous. C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la musique.
By a disorienting but lucky chance, the first act on the DVD was a merengue band who (what are the chances?) were playing that night at Lula.
They smoked. They burned up the rug. The walls were on fire. Merengue is hard, hot, wild music and these guys could play it. And that isn’t what was on the DVD.
TV is a loudspeaker system for the eyes. It brings the music to more people than any hall can. Why then is the visual convention of the DVD the filmmaker gave me so familiar, recreating the experience of being in a place that’s way too fucking big, way too remote for both player and audience, driving audience and player into the place where the musician can’t see past the lights, and the audience, cut off, is sitting passively; the precise opposite of the musical experience Ned Sublette talks about in Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, and that is at the center of my previous post?
Shouldn’t it be bringing you in close, putting you right beside the guitarist, right up the bell of the trombone during the horn break, fill the screen with the crash of the cymbals?
Here’s what I mean:
That, by the way, is the most perfect presentation of the most perfect musician singing the most perfect song in the universe.
But that isn’t what TV looks like. Instead, too often, it goes BIG. Big stage. Big lights. Big distances between the players.
The music that I see, the music that I’ve sought ought since my teens, is music of quick glances between players, of telepathy, knowing when that snare snap is coming. It isn’t there on big stages. it can’t be. On big stages, the cameras circle, choose their prey. The players, separated from each other are reduced to picturesque dolls, musician marionettes.
The paradox of it is that had that film maker not taken it to a huge stage filled the place with cameras – which then require that the audience shut the fuck up, please – and done three cameras, possibly four, but lose the fucking crane, please – he probably would have created something that looked like music, not television. Because that’s a real opposition: television, the television of Speer-scale stages suitable for the Nuremburg Rallies, is as far from the life of music as you can get. As Lewis Black said, ‘MTV is to music, what KFC is to chicken.’ And without the extra cameras, the extra lights, the extra floor wax for the extra 2000 square feet of stage, he might have put a little more dough in his pocket.
But that’s unfair. This guy loves music, he’s made some beautiful stuff. What he knows is that television takes everything on its own terms. That’s what reality TV means: there’s reality, and there’s reality TV, and the distinction should help you understand that reality is not of interest to TV. And music, as I’ve said elsewhere, is a state of heightened reality, of expanded life.
Or maybe there’s a chance. The Elis Regina video, and a few other masterpieces prove that TV can open doors to what music is really about. Reveal that its about closeness, about heat, about smelling each other’s sweat. Like dancing.
The difference between these views of music is the difference that makes music on TV big, as in big stages, big lights, six cameras, a crane. The committment to big is a committment to a passive audience. At a few points in the DVD, one of the (6) cameras swings to catch the audience, arses firmly attached to seats, watching the spectacle before them.
At a recent Sloan record launch, also at Lula as it happened, I was treated to this spectacle. Here’s a band, not overburdened with talent, but making a good enough stab at getting the excitement level up there, and here, across the invisible laser-wall of the edge of the stage are the young, energetic, fit and lovely youth of today, immobile and staring at the, yes, spectacle before them. Same thing last summer when I was given a ticket to see crosby stills nash and NEIL YOUNG at the ACC. Thirty thousand or more souls, all infused with the idolatrous joy of finally seeing these assholes after thirty years, as they bashed away at the old old old hits, wouldn’t that be enough to get the heart beating, the feet shuffling?
Across the sea of mostly balding heads, even at the most raucous and energetic, the audience stood so still that it could have been our version of that clay army of soldiers that they unearthed in China. Funny thing: spend all that time protesting the war, and then stand on parade without moving for two hours.
The committment to the spectacle model of music appreciation—where audience and performer are profoundly separate, where the mode of appreciation is contemplative, and not participatory, and certainly not built on the idea that the audience’s active participation completes the music—is a very deep cultural value. And its one that TV is a natural for. But even so, the bigfulness of TV takes it to the next level.
The filmmaker called what he was presenting “World Music”. We all know the term. The thing was, all of the musicians live and work in Canada. Lula gets tagged with the ‘World Music’ thing too. Not every musician in the DVD is part of that view of music that assumes that the audience, either through dance or some other activity completes the performance. But at Lula, it is at least a little clearer. Why is the music at Lula and on the DVD not just Canadian music? More to the point, why do we cling to a model of culture that radically separates national/regional culture from international cultures like Latin Music that live here, even as they live elsewhere?
Somewhere in this, I think we get closer to the contradiction of Canadian Culture. The commissars that manage the enterprise begin with the impulse to reflect diversity, but along the way, force the things they mean to show into a box infused with unarticulated cultural values: in this case, the idea that music is constructed around passive, contemplation. The result ends up hiding their nature and character. We think we’re watching African Music, Vietnamese Music, Latin Music, but we’re watching it through the wrong end of the telescope: we see it, but the invitation be part of it, to embrace it as our own, and not treat it as the exotica that is World Music is missing.
From that point of view, the presenting of those musicians as spectacle, adrift on a lonely raft of a stage, cut off from an immobile audience is a radical and wrong way to show people the music. TV is, inevitably, about the separation of performance and audience in time and or space, but I don’t feel separate from Elis whenever I see that totally spine tingling video. The merengue artist on the DVD was not the merengue artist I saw on stage. If he’d been shot in close it could have been a lot closer to the truth.
The dream is to get Latin Music on TV, as Canadian Music, as a music that transforms and involves. If there’s a reason it will happen, it’s because Canada’s destiny—and the destiny of every place—is permanently entwined with the reality of a world that perpetually juxtaposes cultures and people, and not with the parochial restrictiveness of regional artifacts posing as national values.
But those are the prevailing values, not only at the CBC today, but in a host of cultural institutions. The fact that no-one lives in the world that they propose is, and never has been that important to them. At the same time, the reality that TV, even as it transforms itself, is a technology to promote passivity and isolation is a reality at odds with the fundamental reality of Latin Music. The interest is in the tension between the two tendencies.
