Cat Power at the Hiro Ballroom

Originally posted Friday, February 9, 2007

Monday, February 5. She was, I understand, unusually together, meaning that of the two hours she spent onstage, she played for nearly fifty minutes, finished most of the songs she started, seemed for the most part to recognize the difference between guitar and piano, and remember which song required which. The audience of hoodie-hugging Brooklynites and ageing ex-hippies sat cross-legged on the floor, laughing at her sometimes hilarious, sometimes awkward, sometimes plain incomprehensible stream of patter as one would at a friend’s flailing stand-up routine, willing success by pretending it had already come. What is it about this music – leaving aside for a second Chan Marshall’s painfully sympathetic stage persona, her sometimes embarrassingly intimate jokes and overbright “did-I-fuck-up” smile – what is it that makes these songs appeal to a relatively wide range of listeners (the average age of the audience was probably about 28, but I saw plenty of middle-aged fans too)? I mean, what is it that makes the sadness with which she imbues the thin sentiments of Sea of Love or Sweedeedee into something so common, so wide-reaching? It is, I think, the exact opposite of what makes the self-absorbed songs of Harvilla’s emoist speak to you and only you. Cat Power doesn’t speak to my life, at least not in its particulars, and I don’t think, in the way she seems to wrench the platitudes (“love of my life”, “way down in the bottom of that hole”) from the depths, she really reveals that much of her own. I’ll defend the cause of insular, neurotic, involuted songwriting against its critics – the right of middle class songwriters to write about being middle class, about limitations that are themselves fairly limited and unimportant, but still have the ability to fuck people up. But this is something different. Better, I guess, but harder to talk about, because who needs to explain Cat Power? Or Will Oldham, or Robert Johnson, or the blues, or feeling sad because the sun is shining, or happy because your kitchen is on fire and the world is ending? Only idiots and music critics, obviously.