Virtuosity and Scraps
“I don’t need most of the things some folks can’t do without.” Marcia Ball, “Love, Sweet Love”
I didn’t want to waste the bread I had sliced a few nights previously which we never ate, so I made an onion soup one afternoon last week. The onions were starting to asexually replicate themselves, so it was also their time too, and so I just got to chopping.
We had a brussel sprout stock in the freezer from the Thanksgiving trimmings, and the last knob of ramp compound butter from Spring 2023 went in after the red wine.
While the soup reduced, I worked on a collage for my nephew and we listened to “Eastern Sounds” by Yusef Lateef, “Dreams Come True” by Marcia Ball, Lou Ann Barton & Angela Strehli and then “Crack-Up” by Fleet Foxes. That evening we listened to “Mulatu of Ethiopia” by Mulatu Astarte and “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” by Phoenix.
The first music I listened to as a child was on audiocassette, vinyl and even eight-track (I am no ingenue), and if you wanted to hear a full album, you’d have to buy it. Individual songs could be taped off the radio, but otherwise you needed to commit, and that was budget contingent.
One of the first albums I ever owned, which my cousin bought for me on audiocassette as a birthday gift, was Steely Dan’s “Katy Lied,” and although I think the physical cassette is long gone, it sparked a lifelong love of the band, and it was while working at a restaurant that only played vinyl, many years later, that I discovered “Gaucho” in it’s entirety—another great album to listen to in full.
As compact discs were replaced by the IPod, my partner and I amassed quite a collection of cds and vinyl thrifting, but as much as it pains me to admit it, I do really enjoy Spotify. The business model doesn’t favor the artist, not that the previous setup did particularly either, but the ability to listen to almost any full album at any given time is a dream for a late Gen Xer like me.
I buy albums on bandcamp to support artists with a smaller footprint, but the access offered by music streaming services has been a game changer. The song recommendations based on what you’ve already listened to are also often brilliant. I discovered my most listened to song of 2023 “Where Love Lives” by Allison Limerick and Frankie Knuckles, via algorithmic recommendation.
2.
Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” landed in my life during a difficult, peripatetic year, and as it refreshed my interest in the very Chicago genre of house, I was able to push my knowledge of the genre outwards thanks to both Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations and also a particularly brilliant set by “Seven Inches of Sound,” who djed an event at the hotel this Summer.
Traveling between Chicago and Boston, “Alien Superstar” and “Heated” in particular were in high rotation, but the brilliantly chopped up, collage-like nature of “Renaissance” as a whole gave me a little gas in my empty tank, reignited my interest in listening to full albums, and then led to a newfound interest in actual physical collaging.
Two regular readers and dear friends introduced the idea of taking in an album in full in a single sitting, like a film, but “Renaissance,” an album so layered with queer history, pathos, humor and pretty much everything else you can imagine, has the elusive aesthetic quality of teaching you how to listen to it, and it reminded me how satisfying an album can be as as a full, discrete musical statement.
As a gay man, I’d always had friends who loved Beyoncé, and I had actually held her coat for her once, but I never connected with her unfurling artistry as a solo artist until the visuals of “Lemonade” (that image of her standing on a sinking car in vintage-looking Gucci was cinematic in both style and pathos) and we loved “Homecoming,” but her songwriting still seemed almost conventional in contrast to other new and brilliantly wrought aspects of her continuously tightly -imagined self presentation.
That feeling changed for me with “Renaissance.” The amplitude of her vision, the seriousness of purpose of her homage to the genre of house and her reproduction and ornamentation of both the profound seriousness and gallows humor and playfulness endemic to black and brown queer, drag and trans culture lifted up the entire album, making her both an amplifier and post-pioneer of the genre.
The album bears every re-listen. I remember returning from a visit to one of the many medical facilities I visited during the time of my Father’s serious illness last year, and standing in the back of my family’s apartment, when I first heard heard the line “I’m just as petty as you are…” Having mastered a level of composure at that point necessary to the times, it was blissful to let Beyoncé “read” both herself and I, and briefly acknowledge that while I was coping, I was also fraying. No one, she was reminding me, has it all together, not even a genius at the peak of her form.
3.
My collaging began as a one-off in tribute to “Renaissance” for my dear friend who introduced me to the album. I rewrite song lyrics in my head (this led to a more recent reimagining of Alien Superstar from the perspective of a fish), and one day I found myself singing “Gotta lotta mackerel on me,”which led me to imagine dramatic fish couture on the Queen. Perhaps all the extra time in Boston this year left “fish” on the brain.
My second collage was also fish-inspired, but as one experiences growth in process, I started to see glimmers of what dialect within this new language would become the most natural to me, at least for the time being.
I was trained to write, by virtue of my academic background, so my standards for myself are more rigid in prose, but New England prep schools and private colleges don’t really teach collage, which means I started with scissors, glue, some semblance of an idea, and was free to make every cliched choice and amateur mistake I wanted to as I let the materials speak to me, and taught me to listen to them.
Maybe this work will someday reach a level of sophistication that might make it sellable, but I honestly hope not—each one is made for a specific person “in a different, unique and specific way,”and witnesses ways in which we connect—inside jokes and shared passions. I like that scope for me, at least right now.
Coming from the “high achievements or the highway” New England upper middle class ethos, doing something regularly I have no pretension to having special skills at is nourishing, meditative and also an opportunity to skewer our grim consumer culture with scraps of its own propaganda.
Our collective human existence in this country, particularly at this inflection point in American Democracy, and in the midst of an unending pandemic, is absurdist at its best, and absolutely disheartening at its worst, so beyond fighting like hell to eradicate bad actors from operating without restraint in the public square (remember the vile Chris Rufo from an earlier essay? He was a prime mover behind the recent firing of the President of Harvard, Claudine Gay) we also need practices that center ourselves, even briefly, in creativity and flow.
For me, listening to great art while cooking a *pretty good* soup, or making a *pretty good* collage is salutary.
I’m fairly certain I’m never going to produce my own personal “Renaissance,” but I can still revel in its unapologetic queerness, artistry and multi-layered cohesion with gratitude it exists.
A friend I made a collage for wrote me a poem as a Thank You. In my wonderfully weird family, poetry writing is a love language, and I felt so delighted to receive it. An acknowledgement of real worth. I am currently flattening it to frame imminently.
At home in the withering cold this mid-January we listen to Funkadelic’s “Maggot Mouth,” Hooverphonic’s “Blue Wonder Powder Milk” and Fela Kuti’s “Shakara.” S. went shopping for salad ingredients just now, and we have a giant meatloaf in the fridge. I have a new collage freshly started. Just past dusk, it is zero degrees, but we are safe and warm. I don’t take any of it for granted.