I went to a concert

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I have always had a complicated relationship with music—a relationship whose complications weigh on me even now, decades after they should have evaporated. The first thing I remember about music is not wanting to hear it: In the early days of elementary school, I would get out of the occasional concerts programmed for us by complaining to my teachers that the violins hurt my ears. In fifth grade, I managed to go through an entire year of music class without ever being called upon to play an instrument—a proud, early feat of willed invisibility.

At the same time, I was drawn to music across genres. I danced—wildly, secretly—to the Star Wars disco track. I listened to my parents’ Beatles tapes and bought the Beat Street soundtrack on vinyl, and from a comfy, ratty armchair watched MTV while housing a half-gallon of Breyer’s mint chocolate chip: Billy Idol, Eurythmics, Duran Duran, Prince—all of whom I was ashamed to admit I liked. I took guitar lessons for a while, then gave up. I took saxophone lessons for a while, then gave up.

I liked everything, I liked nothing. I memorized Beastie Boys lyrics and Weird Al lyrics and Monty Python lyrics and Doors lyrics. I got obsessed with twiddly guitar metal for a month or two, so I took guitar lessons again and then gave up. In high school, my Toyota Tercel was stocked with De La Soul and Primus, Misfits and Onyx, Tracy Chapman and Simon & Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix and Smashing Pumpkins. It was a typically disparate array of musicians and styles, but what united them all wasn’t just the predictability of their appeal to teenagers down the years—it was that I didn’t really choose any of them. What I listened to was what my friends listened to. If they liked a band, I liked it. If they ridiculed a band—and its fans—I did, too. Different friend groups had contradictory tastes; I went along with them all, hating and loving whatever everyone else did.

What this meant is that I didn’t really know what I liked. I mean, I know what I listened to, but I didn’t really know what appealed to me. It was impossible to say. In the same way that as a kid, you wind up befriending the kids you happen to live near, or interact with because you’re in the same classes, or because you’re all skateboarders in a place with relatively few skateboarders, such that you can’t really say you chose, for explicit, objective reasons, to be friends, so it was with me and music. Did I truly enjoy the songs and artists I put on, or had I just been socially conditioned to think I enjoyed them?

This wouldn’t have been such an emotional issue for me except that so many of my friends were deeply into music. Half were in bands—some of which were very good—and the other half cared visibly, often combatively, about their musical tastes, arguing over bassists and drummers, traveling to shows, studying lyrics for hidden meaning.

Or maybe it’s wrong to say it was “an emotional issue,” because it was the opposite: I didn’t feel the deep connections they seemed to feel. I liked the music okay! But it didn’t matter to my sense of self, except as a form of cultural camouflage. Because I knew enough, because I liked enough, I could fit in.

And the music that did touch me tended to come from bands on the periphery of popularity: the speedy, melancholic narratives of Velocity Girl, the noodling of Firehose, the wacky taiko drum group Ondekoza. With their work, I could feel what I imagined my friends felt, but still, because they were so odd, I had no one I was brave enough to share those songs with.

Then, in the mid-1990s, when I was almost done with college, things began to change.

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I don’t know enough music history to explain how this happened, but here’s what I saw: In 1994 and 1995, a new type of band came along that encompassed everything. These groups blended hip-hop and country, punk and polka, R&B and old-school folk. More important, they were organic and artificial at the same time, layering movie-soundtrack samples over thick bass lines, scratching vinyl to harmonize with ethereal female vocals, drum machines dueting with human beat boxes. This music was obviously, intentionally constructed, but it flowed, it vibed, it grooved.

It was as if they’d picked up all the stray hooks and rhythms scattered through my brain and assembled them into a symphony. It was a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle where every piece had come from a different image, yet fit together seamlessly. This did it for me. Finally.

There weren’t all that many of these bands. Beck was and is the most famous of them, but before I’d heard his name I’d fallen in love with Stereolab¹ , post-rock weirdos who sang Marxist theory in French and English over lounge-drone pop melodies, and Cibo Matto, two Japanese expatriates in New York whose songs were animated by “food madness”: “I know my chicken, you got to know your chicken,” they commanded in one song. “Shut up and eat!” they screamed in another. “Too bad no bon appétit!” The culinary enthusiasm, the unadulterated weirdness, and the blizzard of sounds and references quickly implanted themselves in my brain.

Then, after I’d graduated from college and moved to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, my friend Ian handed me a CD. He’d tried giving it to another friend, a Vietnamese guy named Minh, who’d hated it. I looked at the cover. It was mostly navy blue, crossed by a horizontal stripe of an image, a grainy, high-contrast photo of a seated woman in a blue silk dress. The album’s name was Dummy. The band, Portishead.

I was about to say that Portishead changed my life. But really, they defined it. Here’s how I described that life in my travel memoir, The Turk Who Loved Apples:

They were, for me, the right band at the right time. Portishead made my Vietnam solitude bearable; they got me through bad nights and made the good nights even better, because I understood how I’d gotten there. And I know I’ve made their music sound gloomy, but it really isn’t: It’s about embracing the negatives of life alongside the joys, wallowing in the gloom long enough to learn your way around and experience its subtleties, knowing that at any moment the fog could lift and treat you to the beauty you’d forgotten you were waiting for. If I have a guiding philosophy, I guess that’s it.

By the time I returned to the U.S. the next fall, they had a new album out, and a few months later I finally got to see them play live, at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. This was a big deal, especially because, never having been much of a fan of any band, I never really went to shows at all.

The music, obviously, I loved. The songs off the new, self-titled album were, let’s say, scarier than the tracks from Dummy, but the band had taken their mix of natural and artificial to new heights: They pressed whole tracks to vinyl just for their D.J. to loop and scratch alongside the live instrumentation. Soon they’d record a performance at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic² .

But there at the 9:30 Club, something captured me beyond the music. It was the singer, Beth Gibbons. Trim and pale, she performed almost entirely in shadow, her face hidden by straight brown hair that fell just past her shoulders as she hunched over the microphone, gripping it with both hands—with seriousness. The spotlight, if there even was one, backlit her. You could not see the perfect right triangle of her nose, the focused squint of her eyes. And yet her voice sang out with utter emotional clarity. There was nothing obscure in its plaint.

The meaning of this was so full I never needed to put it into words until now: She was there but not there, commanding all my attention even as she deflected it—just as the band itself was both live and recorded, organic and computerized. They were the two ends of everything, contradictions joined together. As the Washington Post put it, it was “dysfunction you can dance to.“

This, I’ve discovered over the 28 years since that show, is what Beth Gibbons does. In 2008, when Portishead released their third album, I caught them again, here in New York, and bore witness to the same “you can see me but you can’t see me” performance. And then again, just last month, when Gibbons again passed through on tour, promoting her new solo album³ , Lives Outgrown, at the Beacon Theatre.

This time I went with Ian, the friend who’d handed me Dummy all those years ago, and we sat up in the balcony with decent sightlines of the stage. Surrounding us were people just like us—same age, same styles, same affect, but maybe, of course, not quite as good-looking. It can be off-putting to realize that your own highly personal taste, honed over decades of joy, suffering, and accident, merely lands you in a well-defined cohort. But because this was Beth Gibbons, I could appreciate that everyone around me might have been through what I’d been through, and that her ecstatic mix of loneliness and fear and desire, the elements I once imagined were hers and mine alone, had an appeal that united us. We were not alone, even if we’d once felt that way.

When Gibbons, now 60 years old, took the stage, she was as good as ever, her voice resonant and pure, imbued with the same clarity of feeling that pierced me in my youth. Her solo music isn’t precisely Portishead, but it’s not far off, especially in the agility with which it encompasses genres and instruments: bombastic soul in “Tom the Model” and gentle folksong in “Whispering Love,” a keyboardist who switches mid-song to tenor sax, plenty of fiddling, occasional birdsong. Once again, her face remained hidden by hair, shadow, and distance, though even if I’d had a better seat my eyes would likely have failed to perceive her in the dimness.

As she sang, I reflected on having watched and listened to this woman perform three times over three decades now. For most music fans, especially Deadheads and whatever you call people who like Phish, Bruce Springsteen, and the Stones, that’s not much, I know. But those bands tour all the time, and Gibbons doesn’t. Instead, her music lives an artificial life, an imaginary life, streamed on infinite shuffle through speakers into my ears, my head, my soul. Her appearances as an actual human being are so rare, so fleeting, that I count myself truly lucky to have caught them those three times. They were all I could have done, and all I probably needed, and yet even when she was right there in front of me, a few dozen feet away, she was barely even there at all. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and never more so when the absent one is present.

Will that be the last time I see Beth Gibbons? Will she want to tour after her next album, six or eight or ten years from now? When she named this album Lives Outgrown, whose lives was she referring to, ours or the many she’s surely lived herself? Is this the swan song, or will she continue to plumb new depths of romantic darkness until we’re all six feet under?

The show was not long—maybe a little over an hour—and after a standing ovation, the house lights came up. For a few minutes, there she was, fully illuminated, beaming: Beth Gibbons the performer, cheerfully signing posters and T-shirts for the front-row ticket holders who could now, finally, see her face. I could see it from the balcony, too, and it was just as I remembered, or maybe as I imagined. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Jane Weaver

I literally just discovered this singer yesterday, and she’s pretty cool:

1  Who I learned about via NPR, of all places, and whose music is now often used as a cue between news segments on All Things Considered.

2  Sort of. Whether it’s the Philharmonic or not is debated. But I don’t really care.

3  Her former bandmate Geoff Barrow worked on the movie Civil War, and you can very much hear Portishead’s influence in the soundtrack.