When Movies Lack Music

Music is sexier than movies, and I imagine few would jump to disagree. Movies follow people as they bumble and chat and fight, and the good ones will make you feel for those people and understand the context and causes of their unrest. Good music, on the other hand, rides a melody or groove or just a feeling from start to finish, sometimes telling a story through lyrics but more than anything expressing joy or longing — in a word, energy — toward some thing, which even if afforded a name (for Bob Dylan, Johanna, for Mac DeMarco, Viceroy cigarettes) can always, for the listener, stand in for something or someone else.

This is my roundabout way of saying I saw Fifty Shades of Grey. The movie frontloads most of its heat, with bitten lips, steely eyes and rattled breaths overwhelming the first 20 odd minutes. It’s the kind of experience you’re implicitly paying for, and the kind of gaze-fueled desire that movies, whether they aspire to high art or schlock, do best. But when it’s time for the cuffs and cat o’ nine tails to come out, the film cools, stringing together flicks and shudders into montages only a notch hotter than the wind currently barreling over Cayuga Lake. Fifty Shades of Grey lacks music. 

Adapting an erotic bestseller for an audience wide enough to deliver a $94 million opening weekend presents few opportunities for music anyway. The sex scenes are the selling point, so they demand center stage, and not just the sex but the gear, too — leather and ropes and slings, arranged before walls of red deep within Christian’s antiseptic Seattle penthouse. The 13th time Christian pesters Anastasia to sign her submissive’s contract, I swear the leather evolved to become the most sentient creature in the room. With too many studio notes to film a love scene as elliptical as Don’t Look Now or Out of Sight’s, and with too much money to just make pornography, director Sam Taylor-Johnson settles on an aesthetic somewhere between bad camp and HGTV.

The almost yearlong lead-up to Fifty Shades roped in the collusion of a real artist, that of course, being Beyoncé. Accompanying last summer’s debut trailer, her remix of “Crazy in Love” swaps fast for slow, horns for strings and her pop-perfect voice for a feistier tenor scratched up through a filter similar to Julian Casablancas’. In duration and texture, Beyoncé’s new “Crazy in Love” is a better Fifty Shades of Grey adaptation than the feature film, conveying and sustaining a dangerous intimacy for as long as an entertainment medium can. For all the conservative pushback on the sexualization of popular music, sex is something music not only sells but understands, and Beyoncé deserves all the praise for long fashioning the eroticism of her voice and image into messages of empowerment and pride.

There is a lot of strong, lovely music making waves right now, Björk’s Vulnicura being one of the most notable. It aims to fill the heart just as it breaks it, with Björk’s infinitely malleable voice oscillating between defeat and hope as it is besieged by violins, synthesizers and drum machines. Björk is a capital-A Artist, the first popular musician to receive a full-scale career retrospective at the MoMA (due in March), and the indeterminacy of her music lends itself to unfiltered, bewildering expression, which makes her success all the more remarkable. Father John Misty’s I Love You, Honeybear, released last week, takes a more deceptive approach to the love album, tempering fuzzy feelings with liberal irony and self-loathing. In “Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins),” after telling his love she is “something else I can’t explain,” Father John Misty adds, “You take my last name,” in effect mocking his gendered obligation of ownership via marriage. The song sounds blissfully radiant, with a mariachi band blasting over the bridge, but Father John Misty can never seem to give himself a break. There’s a poetic density, and not to mention a stand-up’s hilarity, to his lyrics and his particular pairing of word to melody produces an album open to interpretation even as it serves many pleasures.

You can say movies are too burdened by images, and thus some kind of aesthetic obligation to the real world, to capture and critique one man or woman’s personal expression. And so, love and film is not the most natural pairing, even if it is regularly attempted and often enjoyable, if only in spite of its sincere intentions. The sexiest films need the help of music, whether literally on the soundtrack or spiritually through the movement of camera and assembly of images, to power through the awkwardness and achieve a transcendent effect. Classic Hollywood excelled at this better than the studios today, while the French, naturally, are masters to this day.

There is a moment in 35 Shots of Rum, a Claire Denis film from 2008, when the action comes to a full stop and the four main characters find themselves fortified in a bar on a nasty, rainy night. Their taxi broke down, and they missed their show, and not one of them knows what to do, until music starts to play: “Nightshift,” by The Commodores. It’s a slinky, funky song, bringing the characters, one by one, to their feet and to previously untapped life. The dance ends on a note of discomfort, as a young man carries his affection for a girl too far, but there is no disputing there was life on screen for that brief glimpse of time, a connection between clothed bodies more felt than seen.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun.

Bob Dylan Concert Review

Bob Dylan
At Barton Hall, Cornell University
On Sunday, April 14, 2013

If there is one lesson to take from Bob Dylan’s Sunday night performance at Barton Hall, it is pretty simple: Bob Dylan isn’t a folk singer anymore. To those familiar with any of Dylan’s output from the past 35-odd years, this is old news. But for those expecting the mythological man and his guitar of the 1960s, the film I’m Not There or his own memoir Chronicles, the Dylan of 2013 might have been an unwelcome surprise. To enjoy any Dylan concert, you have to throw out all expectations and just go with the flow. No, he’s not going to play “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and even if he somehow did, he’d morph it into some unrecognizable blues number with a slower tempo and steel guitar solos. There’s a reason Dylan concerts have reeked of weed since the early ’60s, you know?

Due credit must first be paid to Dawes for starting precisely at 7 p.m. and delivering a truly professional 40 minutes of music. The band’s arena rock stylings, with clean guitar chords and repeated arpeggios, worked in Barton’s otherwise awful acoustic environment. In “A Little Bit of Everything,” lead singer Taylor Goldsmith pulled off his best Springsteen while flexing his guitar muscle with southern fried fretwork. The band did not overstay its welcome and left that huge stage with earned cheers and hollers.

Before Dylan took to the stage 20 minutes later, the thousands standing (in contrast to those who filled Barton’s bleachers) squirmed and packed closer and closer to one another. Viewing the stage became problematic, but this is Barton after all, and I am 5’7” (as is Dylan). To my left, a conga line of concertgoers pushed past; the hooligans must have been around the age of my parents. Many non-students attended Sunday’s show, and I have a feeling that the level of satisfaction only increased with age. Dylan might as well be the anti-Avicii, and I tip my hat to the Cornell Concert Commission for mixing things up with class.

But regardless of how many Dylanologists were in attendance, few were enthused about the first five songs of his set, mostly picks from last year’s album Tempest. In retrospect, they served as a preamble of sorts, toppling our preconceived notions of Dylan and reinstating another side. The opener, Oscar-winning cut “Things Have Changed,” could not be more nu-Dylan, with a shuffle feel and his notoriously raspy voice accenting every line’s last downbeat. People have been complaining about his voice for over half a century now, so it’d be silly to criticize his performance on the basis of it, but let it be known that today’s Dylan jumps at any chance to throw in a harmonica solo or duet with the electric guitar. In “Soon After Midnight,” we found Dylan at the keyboards to croon a sweet love ballad, while his band had fun with the bluesy “Early Roman Kings,” with its Bo Diddley riff that piqued the audience’s attention because George Thorogood also ripped it off in “Bad to the Bone.” These songs did segue into greater, more famous material, but his experimentations with genre set the stage for how those supposedly familiar songs would be wholly reimagined.

Case in point: I would assume most attendees know “Tangled Up in Blue,” but with this slowed-down, less guitar-driven arrangement, a calculable audience response did not register until the chorus (when, of course, he sings the name of the song). The timeless “Visions of Johanna” picked up some sunshine when played faster, although this and his propensity to string together lines in quick triplets presented some difficulty in understanding the lyrics (more than usual, at least). “Blind Willie McTell,” perhaps Dylan’s most revered song from the past 30 years, benefitted greatly from its new arrangement, morphing from a barren piano ballad into a sexy tango that lost none of its original melancholy. Attribute this to the song’s final, chilling harmonica solo that snaked up and then down, down, down like a scenic train ride into Hades.

Perhaps the least-modified song was also one of his most recent: “Thunder on a Mountain,” from 2006’s Modern Times. The lights turned off and built back up one at a time in tandem with the intro’s glorious chord progression. For its energy and Alicia Keys namecheck, “Thunder on a Mountain” has settled in as a live favorite, and this performance introduced an element of swing, where the musicians improvised solos over a sweet vamping loop. “All Along the Watchtower” followed suit, with similar improvisational juices flowing. After Dylan finished singing, the instrumentalists softened and softened until the audience thought the songwas over, only to come roaring back on a thrilling crescendo that met one of the most enthusiastic cheers of the night. Here was Bob Dylan and his band, playing with the same devices employed by the dubstep “drop,” only with more nuance, less predictability and without probably knowing what the hell a “drop” is.

As an encore, Dylan treated us to one last song, one of his most personal. With its solemn pianos and themes of misunderstanding and alienation, “Ballad of a Thin Man” has long lived in the dark, and Sunday’s moody harmonica solo only bolded in its true colors. In a way, the song was a culmination of the night’s efforts, or those of all his live performances: add new voices, mix up the rhythm, but keep the soul of the song intact. When it was over, he walked in front of his microphone and just stood there, flanked by his bandmates. No bowing, no speeches, no nothing — with the incandescent spotlights above and his hands at his side he looked like a turn-of-the-century gunslinger. This is a man who has nothing left to prove to anybody but himself. Sharing a room with him should be enough to cross a number off of everyone’s bucket list, but seeing him move about, listening to what he’s doing and witnessing how he continues to reinvent himself at 71 years young — how about that for inspiration?

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.