Encounterculture

A Night Out

I give up: having seen the Scissor Sisters live, I can't imagine that there's anything I can tell you about the band that you don't already know. Their pop songs sound catchy as all fuck in a live mix (less tight, mind you, so "Laura" isn't the slice of Max Martinesque perfect pop that it is on the album, but I freaked the hell out when they started playing it so let's not split hairs), their disco songs sound motherfucking reTARtedly great live, and if you think you're going to see them live without confronting the fact that the bulk of their appeal is to Gay Homosexuals, you should probably stay home and stick to your Korn records. And yet this is all stuff which I can't imagine being a secret to anyone who's ever heard them play music before, or read pretty much anything ever written on them by anyone ever.

But you'd think that would kind of be the point. If there is one thing I hate hate hate about seeing bands play live, it is the self-conscious Giving of Self by the artists, and I know you know what I mean: the eyes-closed arms-outstretched this-is-my-soul fart stench that wafts through so many bands shows (although I may just be hypersensitive to this having spent my teenage years in proximity to the Emo Capital of the 90s), or the other side of the coin, the self-conscious tarting up of a song with stage trickery. When I go to see Franz Ferdinand, I go specifically to hear them play "Darts of Pleasure", not to see them all retreat into a spotlight during the build just to explode into the air with the seeming intent of setting the population of the room's crotches ablaze, and yet that's what I get. I like Franz Ferdinand a whole lot and I love "Darts of Pleasure" a whoooooooooooole lot, but Rip Fucking Off.

Rock is not performance, unless of course you happen to believe that rock is best personified by Paul Stanley dressing up like a star-cat or whatever the hell his get-up is. Rock, rather, is the act of giving translated into music, which is close to performance in a lot of ways but completely different in most of the important ones. It's the difference between someone who wants Very Very Badly to read you their poetry and someone who organically says poetic things in the course of regular life, and if you can't tell the difference between those two categories then you probably fall into the first one. And yet the discourse of rock music has been overtaken by the poetry readers and the performers, by the Dashboards and the Darknesses and the Creeds and the Tools and the Vines and such, and consequently it gets harder and harder to separate the Cray-Zee Antix from the legitimate acts of Anarchic Rock Generosity that gave shape to the few genuine kickass Rock And Or Roll shows that I've been to.

I think the key word there is "generosity", because the truly great rock stars give and give to you, and not because they've already got your money and want to send you home with a good show - they give to you because you're there, and they just want to react to the music just like you. I always found it kind of quaint that people were so shocked by Iggy Pop slashing himself open on stage back in the day because violence is a perfectly legitimate response to the music for Iggy was fronting; those horrified people got nothing out of Iggy's blood that they couldn't have just as easily gotten from a copy of Raw Power. It's that consistency that makes a rockstar. Nobody wants to hear the Strokes just play their songs; they want to see the Strokes for themselves, to see if their rep in the press and the attitude they push in their music for being recalcitrant, snarky little jackasses who have an iron grip on the nutsack of your attention is real or just a put-on, and when it turns out to be legit, when the band gets in an argument on-stage and Julian starts cracking jokes about sandwiches and 90210, the crowd goes berzerk for it. Nobody wants to believe that the music they love comes off the rack; they want something real, and stage blood is a goddamn insult.

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I have to admit that my confidence level regarding the Scissor Sisters was not high going into the Troubador. The day before, I had been going through the same exact conversation with Michelle about the oncoming show that I'd been having with everyone else; I would express my apprehension, and the other person would ask why, and I would make all sorts of tasteless grinning jokes about The Gay Homosexuals ("The Scissor Sisters! In fucking WEST HOLLYWOOD! At the fucking TROUBADOR under the shade of that 'Mr. Gay' billboard!" etc) because anyone who knows me even a little bit is well aware of the depths of my inability to give a fuck about who or what anyone else does with their equipment. Michelle, to her immense credit and my immense discomfort, was having none of it, and kept refusing to let me off the hook of perceived homophobia before brilliantly coming to the conclusion that I was probably just nervous because it was a new crowd, and that I'm not really ever eager to dive into any new crowd period. She was right, of course - I was just as uncomfortable seeing the Like at the Troubador, and that show was populated almost entirely by loathesomely showy Silverlake scenesters - but for some reason that conversation stayed with me, basically up until the moment the Scissor Sisters actually took the stage.

I will cop to being afraid that this would be another in an ever-growing list of concerts where I'd gone and seen a fine show and then gone to another one, largely because I was so convinced that my straightness was going to be totally incompatible with the vibe of the place and that I'd just stand there appreciating like a jackass. It's just that there are few things I hate at concerts more than those people flagrantly trying to stake a claim to the responsibility for the good time, like the giant landcow who started bellowing "ORR YOO READY TO DANCE?!??!" at everyone at the Franz Ferdinand show. I wanted to see the Scissor Sisters because I love that fucking album (right now I'm going around calling it my favorite album of the year, although since both LCD Soundsystem and Gabriel & Dresden are supposed to be releasing albums I don't expect that to stick), and I had adamantine confidence that it'd be a lot of fun to hear it live, but at the same time I deeply didn't want to turn the concert into a field trip or ignore a crucial part of their music - namely their enthusiasm for the cock - in the interest of having some of a good time.

Well, good thing for me I'm an idiot, because the motherfucking Scissor Sisters came to play some motherfucking music for a bunch of people who wanted to hear it and have a great motherfucking time doing it. Within five seconds of their first song - they opened with "Take Your Mama", which at least locally is the equivalent of the Rapture opening with "House of Jealous Lovers" - two things became patently obvious: one it was really easy to tell who was jus there to Make Their Presence Known At This Scene, and two, the Scissor Sisters are really fucking great at being rockstars.

When I say that rockstars are supposed to be generous, I mean it; you can't hold anything back from the audience if they want it. What this particular audience really wanted was some good old-fashioned hamming about, resulting in costumes a-plenty (notably Jake Shears' full-on Wild West getup and Ana Matronic's boob-retention/highlighting thing which never seemed more than a lunge away from catastrophe) and self-indulgent yet witty interludes about New York and trannies and such. What all audiences, however, want from their rockstars is to hear them play the shit out of the songs they love like they mean it, and that is precisely what the Sisters went out there to do. You fucking wouldn't believe the setlist these guys threw together; I've seen world-class DJs pale in comparison. Opening with their hit song, then launching straight off into the most similar song on the album ("Better Luck"), for instance, was pretty much good enough for me to begin with, even if I was nitpicking at the time, but then they decided that the crowd wanted to go insane and launched into the disco stretch.

Think about that for a minute. Imagine being in that club, in that crowd, with that band telling everyone to pretend that "it's 1979, and the floor has the most amazing lights, and you've got on your brand new just-bought-for-cash leisure suit", and they start playing their disco songs. Imagine, those of you who've heard the album, the explosive release as everyone just started cutting loose to "Filthy/Gorgeous"; imagine hearing murderously effective non-album disco shit which was actually better than %90 of the album proper; imagine - oh god oh god oh god -Shears slowing it down with "Mary" only, during the break for applause, launching into COMFORTABLY FUCKING NUMB, the reason I'd ever heard of the Scissor Sisters in the first place, and you have no fucking idea how much better it sounds with live drums. Seriously. Two years ago, I went to Koreatown with a bunch of people to watch Korea play Spain during the World Cup, and when they won, I saw the streets run riot with the most enviably joyful people I've ever come across until last Tuesday night.

THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is what Rock Stars should do, and that is why we have Rock Stars in the first place. Rock music is fundamentally about honesty, but what rarely gets mentioned is that real rock music calls on the honesty of the audience by posing the question "Do you like this? []Yes [] No" as plainly as possible. You answer honestly, you get something of your own worth keeping and that you don't mind sharing with anyone else answering honestly. The genius of the Scissor Sisters, I think, is that they know how to make the music do that by ornamenting their songs with sounds and structures that have absolutely nothing to do with the hilarious straightwhiteyoungmale demographic pushed on The MTV and The ClearChannel, so that in theory, by the time you get to the concert you know what the deal is and you're ready for it all. And then they fucking give it to you, and they don't give a fuck what you are - straight, gay, trisexual, whatever; if you think that seeing a guy leap around a small stage while wailing on a cowbell like he had something to prove sounds like something worth seeing, then you're about to have a motherfucking Time, because they give you all of that you have. They're not giving you themselves, they're not putting on a show, they're doing something for you, something which wouldn't be totally complete without your presence, because otherwise who'd be there to remember it and tell everyone else? That is rock and fucking roll, guys. I don't care if they play disco songs about man-fucking with hilarious laser noises and nut-shattering falsettos, that's way more rock and motherfucking roll than anything Mudvayne will ever put out.

You should probably go see them if you get the chance. I think.