The Lykke Li show at 9:30 last night was one of those times I didn't want a camera. Such emotional hypnosis is pretty hard to capture,
even if you and your galpal are looking fresh. Just not worth it. More worth it to try to do the reality screen-shot, which maybe we're forgetting how to do now that we have cameras on us almost constantly. So that's what I did--click, click, click--and now I have an indelible memory that was hand-crafted to selective perfection.
Four long billowy black curtains hung from the ceiling and a red fog covered the stage floor. A few white strobe lights initiated the hypnosis as the track from "Untitled" filled the speakers. The band came out in the dark and started up "Jerome." You knew she was about to come out in a black unitard and black flowy something. Sure enough, the drums signaled her arrival and there was her chin-tipped silhouette--come forth blonde raven sadness queen everyone's yelling, the tiny pubescents and their eager 6-foot boyfriends.
They played pretty much the entirety of Wounded Rhymes and "Little Bit," "Dance, Dance, Dance," from Youth Novels. Songs like "I Know Places," "Sadness Is a Blessing" crushed the soul, absolutely, to smithereens. She stalks around the stage with such authority and deep moaning pain and that face that breaks apart in front of a sold out crowd. You kind of feel worried for and intimidated by her. It's awesome. She interacts with the crowd, literally pulling forth our energy, alchemy for dark metals. It transcends the pleasure of one and becomes the connection of many, yes including the douchebags who you kind of wonder why they are there. So I tried to imagine them away (shit to gold folks) and connect the pyramid of interest amongst her and us. Her voice was even a little hoarse but I'd like to see my voice hold up against a world tour. Plus she uses such a more daring range in the new album, and I suspect she's following up with the goal to have a rougher female voice like latterday Joni Mitchell by keeping a healthy cigarette regimen. (Good thing those ladies made their impossibly high register albums early on, 'cause hearing Mitchell sing "Big Yellow Taxi" these days sounds more like a campfire than a songbird, no disrespect.)
The residual feeling is that of relief. LL has said in interviews she really is disappointed with where pop's gone. What she's accomplishing is a more artistic fusion: using the pop song form when it's appropriate, but not adhering to or dependent upon it for expression, departing pretty dramatically from it in songs with more abstract or overly despairing concepts...which is to say she has as much to contribute musically to her sound as she does lyrically and compositionally. She turns the focus inward, where art is most sincere than your daily marketing images. But when it comes out,it sounds the way it feels, but made new: into something pleasurable. We are saved from the vacuous monotony of "Partypartyparty let's all get wasted Friday Friday Friday partyinpartyin--yeah!" Pop has lost that nineties self-deprecating anthem of "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me, get funky with the Cheez Whiz," etc., in favor of and "I Whip My Hair Back (and Forth)" which is just the ultimate self-indulgent act...but seriously are women so deprived of examples of their innate virtues that we have Katy Perry and Ke$ha telling us the best we have to hope for is to get dressed up, drunk, and make everyone want us? Materialism is so out. Heart is in. And Lykke Li fuses her talent with her heartbreak, causing this sinewy, seductive dream haze or stormy wild woman. It's common, when she's onstage, for her to grab a drumstick and leap around a cymbal or two. Then she comes back to the mike with two in her hand and uses them to sing. If conversation is no easy thing for her, sexual expression is like breathing. And yet it's the heart she wants to seduce, I think that's probably not so clear to everyone. I feel a little protective of her actually. She rips open her own vulnerability for us to come and inspect--but it's really her courage we're looking at.
The main idea here, I guess folks, is that I have a raging girl crush on Lykke Li for her warrior bravery and stylish femininity: pure pussypower.
Therefore I hereby present the artist Lykke Li with the enviable Pseudo-Bi-Monthly Hot Fudge Sundae Pussypower Award, hip-pip!
Not that it needed it, but this project is putting our lil city on the map of best cities for art. It's a near-decade-long vision of artist Will Shanklin and features the art of Baltimore artists alongside the ads that make the whole project possible. It's a vision of beauty in the night sky overlooking 83 and the Station North Arts District. After you're done blowing your mind on it, you can see a show at Metro Gallery, get swank food at Chesapeake, Plaza Theatro, see a movie at the Charles Theatre or a play at Yellow Sign Theatre or the Chicken Box, or get coffee at Kanteen, a crepe at Sophie's Crepes, a burger and sundae at Lost City Diner, delicious Jamaican food at Caribbean Paradise or a drink at Club Charles, the Depot, (Gatsby's?), or drugs at the after-hours underworld 1722. There are links on the website to the artists' individual pages where you can view and buy their art. Check it out.
It's this weekend and I already have my bodypaint. I've only lived in the city a few years, but I don't remember anything like this happening. A ton of acts, the weird and the internationally-known, from our humble city will be performing in a campground that apparently also has lots of witch conferences. I long burned out of the big-name wannabe Woodstocks of my late teen years, but this festival feels like the real deal, ie. not a money-making scheme by big corporations or record companies, but a genuine effort to bring all of Baltimore's weirdos out in a big field together to play.
