Three Recent (and Contrasting) Musical Experiences

Over the past week I have had three quite contrasting “musical” experiences. This has prompted me to write a blog on how I have reacted to them and a search perhaps for any commonalities. Perhaps it will be interesting also to see whether my blog recipients have significant differences from mine.

Experience #1: The rap of Kendrick Lamar.

I watched the half-time “entertainment” that accompanied the Super Bowl last Sunday. Enticed by home-made chilli, I joined Michael Peterman in the living room of Barry and Bev MacDougall’s home. The game was a blow-out with the hero of past encounters, Patrick Mahomes, a minor impact, humiliated. (His team, the Kansas City Chiefs, managed just one first down and 25 yards over the first 30 minutes.)

The opposite was true for the half time show, which featured another kind of “hero”, rapper Kendrick Lamar as the headline performer aggrandized. 

Most of the 12 minute space belonged to Kendrick although there were guest appearances from R&B artist SZA, tennis player Serena Williams, and a DJ called “Mustard”. An actor Samuel Jackson appeared in a recurring role as Uncle Sam, and provided satirical commentary and advice to Kendrick between songs to “illustrate the cultural divide of America”. (I also could have provided some “advice”, if they had asked.)

I expected that Kendrick would rap his famous “Not Like Us”, so before I arrived, I downloaded the words. There was a nasty bit about Canadian rapper Drake with whom he has been having a rap feud and, more dramatically, has accused Drake of pedophilia (a rather clever bit of marketing, I cynically might add, as everyone on the in was listening to what words he would use). Apparently to boot, Kendrick also questions Drake’s authenticity and connection to Black American culture.

I knew from past experience that I wouldn’t understand what he was saying simply in the English or patois or whatever enunciating code he would use. As it turned out, reading the actual words didn’t really help either, which I will now get to.

The rap starts off like this:

Psst, I see dead people

Mustard on the beat, ho

Ay, Mustard on the beat, ho

Deebo, any rap nigga, he a free throw

Man down, call an amberlamps, tell him, “Breathe, bro”

Nail a nigga to the cross, he walk around like Teezo

What’s up with these jabroni-ass niggas tryna see Compton?

The industry can hate me, fuck ‘em all and they mama

How many opps you really got? I mean, it’s too many options

I’m finna pass on this body, I’m John Stockton

Beat your ass and hide the Bible if God watchin’

(It goes on like this for another 88 lines.)

To directly answer whether the performance “was appealing”, I will start by pointing out that, as I understand it, rap is basically a mixture of two elements: it incorporates rhythmic speech and cadence, plus street vernacular. To the first – rhythmic speech and cadence – rap sort of occupies a gray area between singing, speech, prose, and poetry. It is said that part of rap originated in the jazz that came out of the African-American communities of New Orleans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots were in blues, ragtime, African rhythmic rituals, even spirituals. 

The blues of course were rooted in the work songs and spirituals of slavery. And to me that genre is an appealing one, so I am prepared to be open on this. (One of my favourite songs remains Ol’ Man River, particularly when sung by Paul Robeson with his beautifully resonant bass voice.)  But, while experimenting with rhythmic speech has a certain fascination, to spend much time immersed in it can be annoying (and in Kendrick’s case, it’s all the time).

But to the second feature of rap, the street vernacular, is where I’m really out of there; I’m lost! Most of what I heard was a stream of incoherent phrases that made no sense. When they are deciphered (by printing out the words and examining them), they become worse: cutely nonsensical, non sequiturs (perhaps, but I’m not really sure), certainly coded to the black experience which leaves me out, and repetitively rude. Just take another section that goes:

Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop, Dot, fuck ‘em up

Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop, I’ma do my stuff

Why you trollin’ like a bitch? Ain’t you tired?

Tryna strike a chord and its probably A minor

(With the cutsy “A minor” probably a Drake pedophile allusion.) 

So for me to respond to the question whether the performance “was appealing?”, the answer is unequivocally NO; it was annoying. I kept feeling like it was a big put-on with an overlaid white-black theme.

I’ll go one important step further and say that to select this rapper to perform in front of the largest TV audience ever assembled (a combined 133.5 million viewers domestically across broadcast television and streaming platforms) was an act that could be generously described as inappropriate; a perhaps better word would be absurd. 

Worse still if, in the judgement of those who make these programming decisions, it was considered appropriate and relevant, then the US population has descended a lot farther than I feel it already has descended when you consider the reality that 77 million people want Trump to lead their country.

So then “Experience #2” happens: Madama Butterfly at the Four Seasons Centre 

This was grand opera at its best with extraordinary talent and staging. The story is simple: an American cad, US Navy Lieutenant B. F. Pinkerton, is stationed in Japan, has an arranged (insincere) marriage with the earnest and oblivious Japanese Cio-Cio San, a geisha called Madama Butterfly. He knocks her up and then is called back to the States. Then he marries a “real American wife” and after three years (and a lot of pining by Cio-Cio) he brings his American wife back to Japan to get his son. Cio-Cio has lost everything. The end is tragic, and involves a knife.

The opera is a Cio-Cio dominated one. The role was played by Japanese soprano Eri Nakamura and it’s an incredibly demanding and emotional role – and she was certainly up to the task with a powerful, sustained performance. She’s on the stage for most of the evening. The rest of the cast were strong; I particularly was impressed by Cio-Cio’s maid Suzuki who had a voice that reached far into the theatre. Interestingly Puccini uses musical quotes from “The Star-Spangled Banner,” particularly as Cio-Cio sings when her long-awaited husband has returned, a moment of happiness only for her. 

The cavernous hall of the Four Seasons Centre holds over 2,000 people, and while it’s an excellent home for the Canadian Opera Company and better than the old O’Keefe Centre, it sure must be operatically demanding. The orchestra itself is huge, with over 50 members.

I managed to purchase one of the last tickets available, and was able to snag a seat in a box perfectly situated on level two (see the photos I took of the stage and theatre). I was joined in this two person box by a retired U of T professor of political science, advisor to the U of T president and former senior public servant by the name of David Cameron. We introduced ourselves and got along famously in our private domain!

The knowledgable audience knew in Act 2 when Cio-Cio San’s Butterfly began to sing “Un bel di, vedremo”, (“One good day, we will see”), one of Puccini’s most emotional arias. One cannot hear it and not be moved. And that’s what I felt about the whole evening.

Then musical “Experience # 3: Off The Rock, a tribute band to Great Big Sea. 

This took place the next night, down in sleepy Port Hope at their cozy Capital Theatre. I listened to Off The Rock, a tribute band to Great Big Sea. Six talented musicians played and sang (3 on guitar, a fiddle player, an accordionist all backed up by the controlled madness of the drummer). Penny and I joined Bill Lockington and Kathryn Fox for dinner first and walked over to listen to this frenetic music.

Great Big Sea was a Canadian folk rock band from Newfoundland that performed in the 1990s and early 2000s. They were best known for performing energetic rock interpretations of traditional Newfoundland folk songs; as they say it’s sort of “Celtic rock”. The band officially retired in 2016 but not to worry as this tribute band is really talented.

They interact with each other and the audience in a very spirited fashion. They also like their beer which shouldn’t surprise anyone that has Newfoundland experience. (It was amusing that the fiddler appeared to be getting sloshed near the end of the show!)

They joke around in the same fashion as a group would during a typical Newfoundland “kitchen party”: short personal asides, wandering around the stage joining up with one or two other band members, talking out to the audience, in fact getting the audience involved by wandering out into the aisles and interacting directly, all the while displaying how really talented in voice and instruments they were. 

The Great Big Sea’s music was apparently a unique brand of pop music founded on the Newfoundland folk music tradition, so in a sense their stylistic roots represent a departure from the predominantly American models that have tended to shape the mainstream currents of North American popular music. But delightfully mainstream acceptance is what they got.

Great Big Sea was talent. This tribute band was talent, too, which made for a great evening.

And this was all in five days, Sunday to Thursday!

Postscript: With all that’s going on politically between Canada and the US since Donald Trump assumed the presidency there is an interesting theme – and we may be destined to note these kinds of things over the next four years. Kendrick Lamar’s big hate-on is directed at a Canadian rapper; that was one of his calling cards during this big American Super Bowl event. 

The American cad, US Navy Lieutenant Pinkerton, in a good humoured way, received boos at the curtain call; it was probably more serious than it has been naturally in the past. 

And one of the differences in the Great Big Way has been a stylistic departure from the “predominantly American models that have tended to shape the mainstream currents of North American popular music”.

I think we are destined to find many more of these unique Canada-USA occasions, whether they take the form of booing the American anthem, not buying products sourced from south of the border or even curtailing our US travel. Political, cultural and personal choices, be they friendly or visceral, are unfolding.