Two Failed Shows and a Triumph of the Heart

In March, I went to a Pink Siifu album release party that was so chaotic and overrun by the earnest nonchalance of YNs and their groupies and apprentices, that I began contemplating failed concerts and live performances as an entropy we need to succeed in grafting an honest performance culture onto the current one, which conflates experimentation with error and demonizes both in the service of seamless, atomized spectator/spectacle experiences that appease online algorithms above all else. The show failed in the sense that many live music endeavors do recently, it lacked focus and a social center, tried to be maximalist without adequate resources, and the hype had exceeded the preparation. We were at a rented downtown warehouse venue. The opening acts, there were maybe five (it felt like a showcase), maybe more, in an effort to build suspense and anticipation for the headliner and his new songs, extended their sets beyond coherence and relevance even as the audience stiffened and thinned out into every room of the venue besides the one that housed the music. By the time Siifu took to the stage he had maybe thirty sluggish people in the audience, and that’s a generous inflation. The hyperactive fog machine added texture to the emptying room. The bass was so loud it was distorting the speakers, which attacked our ears with reverb and static. The show ended and we went to the taco spot to debrief. Siifu met us there. He kept a brave face on, which is not to say he was or should have been dejected. The triumph was in the parking lot turned restaurant, the comedown from weeks of being forced to promote himself when an artist is best suited for making the art and being received and anchored by responses, not anchored to them. People don’t know what to do with their bodies in public these days, especially while watching live music. The phone-as-appendage and comfort animal has rendered most audiences a disarray of semi-attentive zombies. This show had suffered from that disembodied viewership. Besides the parking lot taco huddle, my favorite moment of the night was when a friend and I convinced a girl we had just met to not text her ex, with whom she seemed to be in the age-old toxic cycle. We inflated her ego to half the level of the opening-act rappers who over-performed into their friend’s slot. The gods smiled.

A few weeks later; a failed funeral. I got a text about a benefit show for Madlib on an otherwise non-descript Wednesday. His house burned down in the Altadena fire in January. I was maybe the third person he informed of this after he’d escaped the scene and checked into a downtown LA hotel. He’d been texting that same day as if he wanted to ask me something but I was on a writing deadline and ignored it. The piece I was writing was personal and emotional and I’d cried that day for the first time in a while. Then around 7PM, the invite to this benefit. My visceral response was no, and I wish I didn’t know about it. Then I thought back to nights I’d been with him at the same LA venue a decade ago and the soft spot that had opened earlier opened again. We decided to make a cameo in support. It was like walking backwards into 2013 or even earlier. The crowd was the opposite of what we found at the Siifu show, though Siifu was a performer there too. These were mostly old heads and those who didn’t know better and looked up to them, gathered to support their homie who they’d been making music or going to parties or performing with for decades. The Alchemist was the headliner, its own macabre compromise. And it was sad. I overheard several people say it felt like a funeral. Especially because O decided not to attend. We ended up with Siifu again at a Thai restaurant in East Hollywood, a consolation prize for the uneasy feeling of several eras ending and restarting all at once that we’d experienced and called a party. Elegy is what all black music is reckoning with, trying not to flippantly bypass tragedy out of shame, trying not to lament too hard and create excessive shame. And if we don’t surrender, rooms full of thousands feel as empty as cemeteries. Bad, sad, unfinished symphony parties are just as important as those that rage into legendary evenings like the one in Sinners, probably more important because why can’t a night in black life be both anticlimactic and satisfying.