Pop Rock Nation

Author: Joelle Renstrom

Tiny Spirits in Paradise

“What the hell is this?” The guy standing next to me asks his friend. His friend shakes his head.

Cocorosie has just begun to play to a packed Paradise Rock Club in Boston.

A woman in a newsboy cap strums a harp and when she opens her mouth, opera warbles out. A tinny prerecorded loop plays the mooing of a child’s toy cow.

A few minutes later, the same guy says, “what is this?” This time, he’s staring at the band, enraptured. Converted. The rest of the crowd—exactly the kind you’d expect to gather on a Saturday night to hear a woman sing opera while her sister plays a series of cat meows—is similarly transfixed; faces have turned like sunflowers toward the stage.

There’s no way Cocorosie could play an average show—there’s nothing remotely average about them.

As a band, Cocorosie defies labels, though their record company, Touch and Go, aptly describes them as “tiny field mice singing gospel.”

Two sisters form the band. Sierra sings opera and plays the harp, guitar, piano, and kazoo. (The fact that the previous sentence is completely devoid of irony or sarcasm indicates the originality that makes Cocorosie so compelling). At the show, Sierra, with smudged eye make-up and exaggerated facial expressions, resembles a weeping clown. As she sings, she sometimes rocks back and forth as though comforting herself. Her unholy voice rises and falls manically, like a ghost haunting the opera.

The other sister, Bianca, has the tinny, trembling voice of a shriveled grandmother (with impressive range, of course). She manipulates various children’s toys, electronics, and other strange noisemakers. She wears a bandanna over hair that splits into two braids and she’s painted a V over the front of her face so that she looks like a cross between Skeletor and Raggedy Ann.

They’ve got a bassist on stage, but he’s practically invisible. A beatboxer supplies percussion, changing up and laying down grooves that ground the soaring voices and echoing loops.

They play only a few of their more upbeat songs—I’m surprised by the absence of favorites such as “Noah’s Ark.” The crowd dances when the beat picks up, but dancing isn’t the goal of the audience or the band. The show primarily consists of songs that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Sierra’s vocals induce shivers, especially when her voice curls in on itself and becomes achingly plaintive. She doubles over and croons, “All I want in my life / is to be your housewife,” pulling at nothing with desperate hands. I keep thinking that the crowd will grow weary of this bizarre slow sadness, but they don’t. Cocorosie creates a mood I’ve never quite seen before at a concert—the sisters have cast a spell like a net over the crowd.

The fairy tale story of Cocorosie’s formation is consistent with their magical aura. Sierra and Bianca were estranged for much of their adolescence; Bianca studied in Brooklyn and Sierra moved to Paris to sing opera. In 2003, Bianca showed up at Sierra’s apartment and the two of them almost immediately began recording La Maison de mon Reve, which they recorded in the acoustical epicenter of the house—the bathroom.

They intended to keep La Maison among friends, but in late 2003 Touch and Go got the album, fell under the spell, and pursued a contract with the sisters.

Cocorosie perform as though they’re curled up in the bathtub in a roomful of friends. I feel communion with the band and with everyone else who has shown up and submitted themselves to Cocorosie’s charms. We all—even the skeptic from the beginning of the show—have fallen for this strange rainbowarrior music and for the band that takes spare parts, vocal gymnastics, and magic to make it so.

September 18, 2009
Always Something There to Remind Me

Sufjan Stevens. Image via Wikipedia

On my second day in Peru, my iPod died. I was on a bus the size of a Volkswagen, trying to stand in the narrow row between seats as we careened around hairpin turns. People sat on the roof; people sat on furniture that had been tied to the roof. Many passengers had portable radios in their laps, cranked over the din of kids whining, babies crying, couples bickering. One minute, I was safe inside my headphones, and the next, I could hear everything—a cacophony of chaos where my travel playlist should be. On the iPod screen, a sad face drooped over the URL for Apple support.

I restarted, I reset—nothing but the grind-click of a seriously sick machine.

I had three weeks to go; at least six long bus rides, two long plane rides, and countless hours of meandering. Music wasn’t a luxury, it was a necessity.

Music provokes more intense and contextualized emotional reactions to places and allows us better access to the aesthetic of a city or a work of art, or even our own brains. As a solo traveler, I learned this quickly and employ it regularly: Sufjan Stevens in my ancestors’ birthplace, Sigur Ros in the Sistine Chapel, Aphex Twin in the Van Gogh museum. Silence in Auschwitz.

Headphones help me keep my distance, which is especially useful when passing through cities or ports where people try to sell everything from personal services to carpets to baby llamas to hotel upgrades, or when in an area populated by pesky and/or intoxicated men who regard American women as spectacles worthy of dogged harassment. Plug in, check out, and cruise on, (relatively) unbothered.

The iPod drowns out the boy band LPs played in bars and coffee shops, the muzak of stores and trains, car horns, screaming children (and adults), and snoring hostel-mates.

Certain music makes me feel more connected to home, friends, and family, which at times feel so far away that they seem nonexistent.

Thus, my iPod is in the “top five items I can’t do without” list, along with my passport, my notebook, a positive bank account balance, and underwear.

When I got back to my hostel that night, I went online to Apple support. The consensus was that the sad iPod face was a bad, bad sign, and indicative of hard disk problems. A couple of guys at the hostel took a look and listen, and one even made a go of plugging my iPod into his laptop and trying to reformat it, but they supported the terminal diagnosis and we pronounced the iPod dead. I thought about buying a cheap MP3 player, but Peru isn’t known for its electronics, and I would then have had to find a way to download/upload all the songs I wanted, which meant squandering far too much time doing what I do every day at home.

I made a drastic decision: for the next three weeks, I would actually listen to the sounds and music around me.

Myriad street performers play pan flutes and windpipes, many of them dressed in traditional Incan garb. At first they sounded like any random track on a traditional cheesy world music cd, but then I realized that I recognized some of the songs they were playing, such as Elton John’s Sacrifice, Every Rose has its Thorn, and Like a Virgin.

Peruvians have discovered and are almost uniformly obsessed with 80s music. When I first arrived in Arequipa, my cabbie rocked out to Dire Straits’ Walk of Life, which, I had forgotten, is a great song and almost impossible not to rock out to (though, since I heard it at least six more times, I won’t be listening to it again until 2015). And Karma Chameleon! The first time I heard it, I felt like I was reuniting with a good friend from college—I got all nostalgic for my crappy little dorm room and 8 o’clock classes. I heard Bon Jovi, which makes me fantasize, just a little, about feathered hair and mullets and boys who play hockey. Erasure, the band that made me realize at the age of ten my fondness for flamboyance.

Peruvians can’t get enough of Queen; I love Under Pressure anytime and anywhere, and I chuckle a little remembering Vanilla Ice and his ridiculous hair and dance moves. Of course, Michael Jackson was ubiquitous; I was asked at least a dozen times how I was handling his death. Bruce Springsteen, who, despite his Born in the USA stretch, I’ve come to appreciate. Even though Sting has been annoying for a while now, listening to the Police brought back the good times, including the memory of reading Lolita in high school after listening to Don’t Stand So Close to Me on repeat.

In addition to the cultural, historical, social, and environmental characteristics of Peru, the likes of which I’ve never experienced anywhere else, the trip provided an unexpected visitation of my own history and landscape.

I’d be in a remote village 13,000 feet above sea level, catch someone singing or playing INXS, and become instantly transported back to the fourth grade talent show, in which I played the piano wearing a jean jacket over a mustard-yellow knit dress and a shy kid named Corey blew everyone away with a shockingly seductive rendition of I Need You Tonight. I’d recall the day Michael Hutchence died, and think about how he always seemed like a poor man’s Bono. Then I’d spend far too long thinking about Bono. At the end of these reveries, I’d stop for a minute, look around me and think, holy shit, I’m in the Andes!

The extent to which Western culture has infiltrated other countries, especially developing ones, is obscene. But outside of Lima, there weren’t many McDonald’s, no TGI Fridays, and only one Dunkin Donuts. At times, Peru felt still fairly untouched—until I turned on the radio or went out to hear live music, which invariably would be an 80s cover band. Even the bad asses, like our army vet canyon guide, listened to Van Halen and Journey and Mr. Mister. Unlike with other aspects of Western culture, Peru’s absorption of American 80s music charmed me, especially because through their love of the music they thoroughly embodied the spirit of it.

Surprisingly, for the most part, the death of my iPod enhanced my experience in Peru. It also made me realize how often I’m plugged in, and thus, tuned out. How often I create my own aural landscape rather than listen to the sounds around me. How much I might be missing by effecting, and visibly expressing, that preference. How sometimes, music best exercises its power when we take off our headphones and let the playlist assemble itself.

August 21, 2009
Boogie Wonderland

We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance. ~Japanese Proverb

A message from the City of Cambridge Manager’s Office:

“Put on your dancing shoes and join us as we move to the groove.”

Well, okay. If you insist.

In times of budget cuts and knotted purse strings, one gets a sense of priorities. Hats off to the City of Cambridge for continuing to prioritize the age-old communal art of getting down.

On Friday June 26, the City hosted a massive dance party on Massachusetts Avenue and the City Hall lawn. Turns out, the City knows how to throw a party – there’s no cover, age restrictions, dress code, velvet ropes, or $5 bottles of water for sale. Just townies and neighbors and friends, some of whom planned to attend, others of whom wandered up Mass Ave to investigate the music echoing through Cambridge. First conceived in 1996 as part of Cambridge’s 150th birthday celebration, popular demand and a keen sense of priority transformed the party into an annual, much-anticipated event.

The kiddos kicked off the party at 7:00, getting their grooves on before bedtime. As the sky darkened and the lights rose and swirled on City Hall’s facade, people poured in from every direction, as though summoned. Some watched from the City Hall lawn, others stood on the sidewalk, and most beelined for the street to dance away the week or June’s consuming rain.

As I circled the crowd to get my fill of people watching, I crossed to the south side of Mass Ave and noticed that the racial configuration of the crowded had changed – the party had become a microcosm of Boston’s ethnic cartography.

That’s where Michael Jackson came in.

More important than relief from the weather or stresses of the week, the dance party provided a venue for people to grieve and celebrate Michael Jackson in the most appropriate way – by breaking it down together where people normally aren’t supposed to go.

At around 9:00, the standard dance music gave way to a Michael Jackson tribute. People flooded in from the periphery, pulled toward the center, the crowd contracting like a giant jellyfish and then, after an intense guitar lick or fade out, expanding, exhaling. For about 45 minutes, hundreds of people – black, white, Asian, Hispanic, corporate, homeless, yuppie, hippie, old, young – busted a move to Way You Make Me Feel and Billie Jean. Glowing raver chicks joined a group of little girls hula hooping and compared tricks. A flashmob-esque dance to Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough broke out near Bigelow Street.

The tribute culminated in Thriller, which inspired hundreds of people to curl their hands into zombie claws and emulate the undead. What better way to honor Michael Jackson than by vamping collectively in the street?

The crowd thickened until it became nearly impossible to avoid stepping on someone’s foot or catching an elbow in the ribs. Still, people grooved on unfazed, equalized. As the night wore on, the humidity rose. Everyone danced in the sweat of his neighbor with good humor and impressive stamina. At around 10:00, a light rain began to fall. Illuminated by the green and purple spotlights, the rain looked like fat snowflakes or silver confetti falling down toward a magical place.

July 2, 2009