by David J. Lobina
Like almost everyone I know, I enjoy listening to music and going to live concerts. What’s more, once upon a time I used to place much importance on someone’s ability to perform at a concert. This was especially the case because I was listening to a lot of rap music in the mid-to-late 1990s and within that world anything that was live was deemed to trump anything that was recorded. Rap was all about free-styling in situ and trying things out in the big outdoors in order to get your props, as they say; it was clearly not about trying things out again and again in a studio until it all clicked. As a matter of fact, some famous rappers did not sound like in their recordings at live gigs, and that counted against them.[i] Performance on a stage was all that mattered; the rest was manipulative and hardly genuine.
But no more: I now think that live music is awkward to witness and recordings give a better idea of one’s true potential as an artist – a better account of one as an artist, that is.
There’s an interesting contrast to be had here between attending live music and attending live sports (recall the lonely footballer!). When you are watching a live sporting event, especially a professional sporting event, you want to see what players are capable of under pressure and against one another in that very moment.[ii] There is something rather engaging in witnessing pros performing at their very best and in competition, with something at stake, an aspect that is lacking in sporting exhibitions and the well-rehearsed bouts of professional wrestling, the latter all theatre with its mock combat, and both just uninteresting.[iii]
So-called rap battles can be competitive too, though most free-style raps are not really created ex tempore – some are performed for the first time in a battle, sometimes with a specific rival as target in mind – and thus the importance of the live element is somewhat reduced here.[iv] The live component is perhaps more important in other musical styles; jazz, we are often told (here and here, for instance), is not about perfection but improvisation, and this is all the more dramatic if it happens in front of an audience – it seems that jazz is all about being oneself during the creation of music, whatever comes out (naturally enough, the result is usually only of interest when it involves talented and experienced musicians).
I grant all that, but this is not what I have in mind when I say that attending live music is awkward. What I really have in mind is the usual case of going to a concert to see an artist or band perform their songs live – to perform live songs, that is, that were created and rehearsed some time ago in a studio or house, and often have been recorded, professionally or otherwise, before being performed in front of an audience. In such cases, one is not witnessing the creation of art, as it were, as in the case of jazz improvisations or live sporting events, but the recreation of one’s past art.
The crucial bit of my complaint here is that such performances (for it is a performance!) come with all the feelings and emotions professional musicians usually showcase during a live concert; not the feelings and reactions, mind you, of someone who has just created something new, but entirely recreated feelings and emotions, all of these seemingly called upon at short notice. It is precisely all this that I find awkward to witness.
Part of it has to do with the artifice involved in music performances. Watch a recording of a live concert and you’ll see the camera up close into the singer’s face, showing all the little details that trouble me: eyes closed, for the most part, a fair amount of head bobbing, depending on style of music, and a general contorting of the body – all apparent feeling, and right on cue (no pun). But what are musicians actually feeling as they do all this? Is it the recreating of the art of creating? Is it the recreating of the feelings felt when creating art for the first time? Is it the feeling of sharing one’s art with an audience, even after having done so hundreds of times before? What is it?
Part of me believes it is all indeed artifice: it is nothing more than a performance, a well-paid one to boot, and as such it just won’t do to not act a little bit, playing it up for the audience. In this sense, what the musicians and the audience are doing, barring unwilful delusion, is participate in a show for the sake of having a show (for the sake of having fun). And given that I myself cannot participate in the same way – my attitude is a bit like Woody Allen complaining about canned laughs in Manhattan (it is just wrong!) – the whole thing is just awkward and uncomfortable to see – the musicians are pretending to feel something, and in a way it is worse theatre than professional wrestling, and just as superficial.
Another part of me believes it is not all artifice and some musicians do feel something, perhaps even enter some sort of trance during a performance (let’s put drug taking to one side, though this is not irrelevant here). But then this is still awkward to see, this time because showing these kinds of feelings and emotions in public is perhaps unbecoming – feelings are for the most part private affairs, and it is just awkward to see someone in what is effectively a rather vulnerable position in public (and, basically, a stranger at that).
And yet another part of me, to expand on the latter point, believes that even if a musician is really feeling something as they play their music for the umpteenth time, such feelings cannot be shared by the audience, for the audience cannot really fathom what the musicians are actually feeling. We can rationalise these feelings as much as we want, in the old-fashioned folk psychology kind of way – to wit, we can explain the behaviour of a person in terms of beliefs and desires and be rather successful at it – but this is quite far removed from what the musicians may be feeling – this is not a rational inquiry, after all. And so, in this case the awkwardness arises for another reason: we witness someone enter a kind of trance or similar that is not accessible to us in any way. We are not in the same place, even though we are in the same place. And that’s just awkward.
The contrast with other art forms is interesting, for music seems to be the most common form to give itself to live events. Sure, there are some live painting events and the like, but these are much rarer and often part of some experimental-slash-interactive exercise. In the usual case, you don’t really see sculptors or writers go on about their work in their private studios, something that would be rather boring to observe in any case and the reactions and feelings of the artists unlikely to be very telling – I am writing this very piece on a sofa with the snooker world championship in the background, sans the rocket (who he? Read Sally Rooney about him), and this is obviously very uninteresting (and of course I am not an artist!). Also, there is no question about sculptors and writers recreating their work for an audience as a performance, which is what musicians do – at most there are readings of novels by famous writers, and that’s awkward too!
The crux of the matter for me is that any creative activity worth doing is an internal-thus-mental affair rather than an external-hence-externalised output. That is, the real intellectual feat in this life is working out a problem, coming up with a new idea, generating a tune, imagining a shape – what have you – in your mind, whilst writing something down, for instance, is always a compromise and a bother, but this is for another entry.
[i] KRS-One sounds exactly as in his studio albums, or even better. Talib Kweli and Mos Def do not sound much like in their recordings, and certainly not better.
[ii] When I say ‘live’ it is not necessarily in situ, as oftentimes it is better to watch live sports on TV than from the stands; think of sports such as Formula 1 or MotoGP, where you can only see a limited amount of action from the stands and the thrill of the loud noise becomes an irritation after a while.
[iii] There’s of course quite a bit of training and practicing of plays and tactics in professional sports, but these need to be tried out against an opposition on the day, with no guarantee of success. Well-thought-out plays tend to be more important in US sports such as gridiron football, which to a European fan looks very rigid, with all its start-and-stop action.
[iv] Free-style raps are a bit like practicing specific plays in professional sports, but without a rival who can stop it midway through, all else equal.
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