This past Friday night, my family and I were watching the opening ceremonies* of the Olympics. During one of the brief commercial breaks, I asked Nicholas to try a Fig Newton (as I bought them because Nicholas told me he didn't believe in figs, nor in cookies made from them). He did, and his face turned sour. I stifled back a laugh and asked him how he liked it; "Not so much," he said. I told him that figs are an acquired taste, and then I had to explain what that term meant.
A few seconds later, the commercials ended, and the opening ceremonies resumed. The Parade of Nations, which had started about thirty minutes earlier, continued. Soon, Hungary was introduced, and Nicholas said they must all be hungry there. Penny laughed, and I groaned. Nicholas continued, saying the reason they must all be hungry is because all they have to eat are Fig Newtons. I laughed at that one, and Penny said, "Look!"
I did, and we both had a good laugh. Bob Costas did, too, though he held it in. After noting the entrance of the Hungarian Olympians, he began to note these outfits, and he paused for a few seconds, then said, "Well..." and another pregnant pause, "everyone has different ideas about taste." Penny and I about split a gut, and then Nicholas asked why we were laughing. We tried to tell him, but I don't think he understood that to someone, these clothes looked pretty, that sometimes it just boils down to variant perception; one man's garish, Jackson Pollacked, flower-printed, polyestered, pant-suited nightmare is another man's representational idea of beauty and national pride. Or something like that.
There's no accounting for taste, yeah, but sometimes one can acquire an appreciation for art outside the realm of one's ususal sensibilities. Case in point, The Blood Brothers' "Laser Life." First time I heard it a couple of years ago, the Wurlitzer electric piano (the kind brother Richard played on The Carpenters' "Top of the World") started playing that carnival-like, bouncy, funk-lite groove, and then the drummer came in, syncopating on the toms, and I started bobbing along. Cool. The lead singer Jordan Billie's high-pitched squeal grated, but the music rocked and rolled and bubbled, and I thought that as long as the music was more prominant than the vocals, that I could continue listening and liking the song. Then the chorus arrived. And I turned it off a second later.
Who in the world told this man-child he could sing? Why is he screaming like that anyway? This wasn't death metal. This guy sounded like the worst parts of Iggy Pop, Perry Ferrell, and Johnny Rotten all mixed together. His voice was like Chipmunk Metallica. How does band have fans? Who can tolerate this? Why is this band getting critical praise? (Okay, I could answer that one). I thought it was the worst thing I'd ever heard, so I had to hear it again. I had to at least make it to the end of the song. I was a man. I could do this.
I started the song over, and I started to see the charm in Billie's delivery (if not his voice), and the music remained funky. I make it through the chorus...okay, that was catchy. I don't know what in the heck he's screaming, but it's catchy, and then the post-chorus, where Billie screams something that's immediately off-set by the bass vamping up and down the scales--that's pretty tight. The verse again, the chorus again, and then....whoah! The song comes to a dead stop, and the lead guitarist starts double-picking on a string for a full eight counts. Okay. This is some serious stuff, here. Innovative. Not quite sure I've heard a moment quite like that before. Not in a rock and roll pop song.
The song starts back, surely transitioning back to the chorus, but no; the song takes a left turn, introducing a short piece that I didn't hear coming, one that the music hasn't alluded to or foreshadowed at all, and then Billie's banshee wail transforms into a caterwaul, and my head starts to ache. A few more seconds, and the song returns to form, and then it ends. Thank God.
Do I want to hear it again? Yeah, but I need to clear my head first. I need some quiet time. I need to think. I believe I was too dismissive of the song at first, especially Jordan Billie's singing (if you can call it that). Maybe there is something to all this screeching that I hear in snippets of death-metal songs; maybe it's not that the music is unlistenable, but that I'm just not listening. I'm sure that's at least partly true. At any rate, "Laser Life" deserves kudos for the keyboard sound, for funky groove, for the couple of times they experimented with pop-song structure, and--maybe--for Billie's voice...or at least how his voice interacts with the music, even elevating it at times. I know it's art, and for that I'll list it here; I just don't know if it's very good art...kind of like those Hungarian outfits.
The vagaries of taste...who knows? Like Billie screeches, maybe we should just blame it on the laser life. That's sure to be better than blaming it on the rain.
*Note - The Opening Ceremonies were completely magnificent, the best performance art I have ever seen. I was amazed, even awestruck at times. No amount of purple prose or hyperbole can do justice to the beauty, scope, precision, and design I saw displayed Friday night. I asked myself if I had ever seen such perfect, harmonious, and congruent imagery before, and something about the ceremony's use of colors and repeated patterns seemed familiar, though I couldn't recall where I'd seen anything like that before.When I started searching for the image of the Hungarian athletes seen above, I saw many other pictures of the Opening Ceremonies (and boston.com had the best of these photos), and then it struck me: Raise the Red Lantern. That's the title of a 1991 movie by Chinese (nee Hong Kong) director Zhang Yimou, a man who helmed many other exquisitely beautiful (and brutally honest) films such as Ju Dou, The Story of Qiu Jou, To Live, Shanghai Triad, as well as the aforementioned Raise the Red Lantern (all of which detail the harsh treatment and tragic lives of women in different eras in Chinese history). It was the images in Yimou's work, Raise the Red Lantern specifically, that I recalled, I thought, so I googled and discovered that Zhang Yiumou conceived and directed these 2008 Opening Ceremonies. Wow. Goodonya, mate.
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