Music for the Elderly

A few days ago, the good folks at FLUX FM announced the National’s imminent concert, or, as they put it: “music for the elderly.” I shudder to think of what equally sensitive words they would have chosen to mourn Lou Reed’s passing. Last night, with the help of our walkers, after an Early Bird Special at the Waffle House, my friend Katharina and I made it to the concert right on time, surrounded by 8,000 other 30-something geriatrics.

The happiest people at the concert were, safe to say, not the happiest people on earth. You don’t sing your heart out to “Sorrow” if you’re walking on air. Katharina and I were among the devotees, dancing to such downers as “Afraid of Everyone” and “Humiliation.” The lead singer, Matt Berninger, wore a three-piece suit, and had the affect of a dangerous dinner party guest, sipping red wine before stepping to the mike and ripping off the proverbial Band-Aid.

One glorious thing about last night was watching the horns, which operate in counterpoint to the band’s bummer lyrics. A trumpet can sound despondent (the loneliness of “Taps” on a summer night). But in the National’s arrangements, the horns tend to be a shimmering, triumphant thing. On stage, the trombonist and trumpeter played with shoulders squared, straight-backed, while Berninger hunched and bucked.

When I was a kid in the late eighties and early nineties, I loved listening to country music: Trisha Yearwood, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Wynonna Judd, Randy Travis. When we moved to Shanghai, I even had Country Music Magazine forwarded to our apartment on Nanjing Lu. All of my friends thought country was the lamest thing on earth,  but I loved the humble storytelling. The National is more fumbling evocation than narrative, but I appreciate the lines they repeat, like a thought that keeps rising the more you try to repress it. I’m sure the haters at FLUX FM would have something nasty to say about that, too, but in the words of an early 90s country star, Travis Tritt, who was wearing black T-shirts featuring howling wolves long before the hipsters, “Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUJKxm7hdOI