ArtsEtc.

House party proves value of drunken musicianship

The levels are way off, but it doesn’t matter. Everyone is packed tight and jolly off a bitter keg that sits in the corner under a canopy of cobwebs. Those who didn’t pay the five bucks clutch the bottom of someone else’s warm champagne bottle, comfortable in the self-delusion that its rightful owner will never return. Everyone else who’s just unemployed or too cheap to buy a tiny plastic cup takes guarded swigs of the whiskey sitting in the cupboard and washes it down with stale water. No one can stand to be sober in this place.

It’s fucking filthy and mangy hipsters are sketching all over the walls.

“After that drawing, you gotta stop. The landlord doesn’t like those,” one of the guys who probably lives here says.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and if we had a picture of this place and a brain cell that wasn’t treading in a shallow pool of booze, we’d be out at some bar or hanging out with our parents or watching other people get drunk in Times Square on TV. But we’re all here, and that makes us a family — one of masochistic drifters who can’t stand all of the purpose that’s imposed on us every day, but a family no less. There is no purpose here, no reason and no ambition. It’s liberating. We all got some variation of the same call.

“Come to my New Year’s party. We’ll be drunk, and there’ll be bands playing in my basement.”

Some of us are in those bands, and others have a vague feeling their friend is in one. But it doesn’t matter which bands they are or who is in the bands because it’s guaranteed that no money will be involved in the transaction. When the musicians finish playing a set, they melt back into the party, and maybe one of the drunk girls with all the piercings and the radioactive hair would wave and chew her fingernails at him. Payment enough.

There’s a turntable missing, so I pull out my shitty, old laptop and spend 15 minutes rigging the rubber band that keeps it plugged in. The family filters into the concrete hole where their eardrums will be irreparably damaged by the giant amps stacked on either side of the microphones. None of my friends outside the people who live here even bother to show up, and I can’t blame them. Most people prefer to be bored by the reassuring repetition of a bar on New Year’s. After all, there you have a purpose — buy the beer, kiss the girl and make some asshole rich. All that makes too much sense for us, though. All that purpose is just a burden to be fulfilled.

We’re the only rappers here, and that’s a big improvement from being the weirdest act here at a normal hip-hop show. They’re mainly impressed by our set because we don’t suck like the rap they probably hear on the radio. Most underground rappers would agree that the best beats usually don’t even sound like ringtones and will never be made into them anyway. My colleague takes care to bring select women on “stage” (the area of grey concrete behind the amps and duct-taped microphones) and serenade them with the dirtiest lyrics in his arsenal. I elect to keep to myself and hide my own sleaze, figuring we probably shouldn’t be the same stereotype — I’ll play the revolutionary poet today.

The next guys yell lyrics into the microphone over driving three-piece rock. Of course, you can’t hear a damn thing he’s saying, but that’s not the point. It’s that he’s saying something, and you can hear his face and his inflection and the push of a mosher behind you and the body of the one beside you fly into some poor sap as you lower your shoulder. The crowd stands inches away from the band, banging bodies with guitars and swaying melodically in a trance where someone’s sitting on the fast-forward button.

Wait. The stocky kid whose hair is under siege by strings of gray grabs the microphone. 5…4…3…2…1… The make-out session is interrupted by alternating sticks that crescendo to a haze of strings ordered haphazardly by the hum of bass. The tall pretty girl whose father would probably kill us all is overtaken by the epic grandeur of the whole scene, and snatches the stubble-filled face of the lead guitarist and drives her tongue between his lips. We all cheer, and he somehow keeps up the song, but we all feel uncomfortable because she’s still eating his poor face.

The shows ends and so does the beer, but there’s still whiskey that’s been sitting out a while and water to go with it. The ladies pass it around, letting it slosh brilliantly onto the floor. Everyone appreciates it. The lead guitar smiles in the living room, reminding us that he’s got nothing to complain about. The tall pretty girl is attacking another face in the dining room.

Concerts are great, but they’re not real. All that precision and all that purpose and the crush of expectation turns them into theatre. Damn entertaining, but everyone, even the audience, is following a script. Insert stimulus A and expect reaction B — hands in the air, mosh, clap, cheer, boo, be quiet, watch for the klieg lights, ask for another helping (if you don’t, you’ll get it anyway), and go home.

It’s not the dank basement or the bitter beer that makes a real music show. It’s the people who make the music playing your music because they are you. No elevated stages or checks to be written or merchandise to hawk.

It’s your family sharing no purpose. Just be there and let yourself be with everyone else who isn’t capable of imagining having it any other way.

 

Bassey Etim (betim@badgerherald.com) is a senior majoring in political science and journalism. He’ll play in your basement.