The True Meaning of PopThe show tonight in Oakland is at an art gallery/performance venue called Lobot. The various pieces adorning this cavernous industrial warehouse include an installation covering the south wall featuring dozens of X-rays of lungs; a selection of paintings, among them one hung above the bathrooms of a girl sitting on the toilet; a really bright green neon sign hung 15 feet up the north wall, the one just behind the stage, which flashes a message every few seconds, bright enough to tint green the whole of the cathedrallike space: "You Will Die Someday."
It's 12:30 a.m. when Okay arrives onstage, the last act on a four-band bill. As the assembled audience members take their seats on the floor and on what happen to be actual wooden pews, the show begins, as it always does, with Tingshas, which ring crisp and tinny, a thin percussive layer of high-frequency Xanax. Warm keyboards ooze up, and strummed guitars set the pace. The song is called "Adi Mantra"; Anderson sings, in his quavering, effected voice, "I've been waaaasting so much tiiime." The music swells, keyboard sounds double up on each other, and a cymbal slithers out above the din.
Akim Aginsky
Akim Aginsky
Marty Anderson, Anna Weisman, and Yosef Lewis.
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The green neon sign blinks: You Will Die Someday.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The musicians fire their cap guns at one another, which gets a laugh, communicating that yes, this shit is spiritual and important, but no, we're not taking ourselves too seriously. Next song: "Bloody," a perfectly deranged pop ditty. Anderson's keyboards are all cute and cuddly, emitting syncopated chords as he sings, "Bloody bloody/ Our way is going to be the way/ Bloody bloody/ We don't ask why." Then the tune explodes -- literally, because before the show Lewis handed out little exploding party-poppers to select audience members, so that when Jay Pelucci slams his cymbals and Panda bangs whatever she bangs and Anderson yells, "OUT!/ Of our way," bursts of confetti spill from various corners of the room, and the music turns into something like a lost Ringo-penned Beatles tune, romping and stomping, before everything drops out and it's just Anderson singing over a vaudevillian keyboard line, "You're gonna die but how/ You're still alive right now/ You're still alive right now/ What to do?" Then the band joins in and it's Ringo's romper room again, and the party builds and builds -- like weather, I tell you! -- and then stops.
And the green neon sign blinks: You Will Die Someday.
The song ends and there's a moment of silence, about a minute's worth (which is sort of awkward for the audience, to tell you the truth), and the silence is broken by the musicians pulling out those things that look like kazoos and blowing in unison a loud, squeaky fart. For "Wild West" a few songs later, after Anderson sings the refrain -- "We're not headed for disaster" -- and the song ho-hums its way into a sashay of keyboards, Weisman and Panda punctuate the sound with the wheezy, percussive chirps of deflating balloons.
Maybe this scene sounds cheeky and twee, but the kazoos and the balloons and the cap guns are all necessary, because something needs to lift this zeppelin off the ground, because when Anderson sings, on High Road's "Compass," "I consume all the sadness/ That you throw over me/ And I spin like a compass/ That don't know where you be," he's singing a song he wrote when the girl sitting behind him was tearing his heart out by sleeping with the guy standing to his right -- and somehow he's forgiven them both. Which is some heavy shit. And when he sings, on "Give Up," "I'm gonna give up/ I've got to give up/ And on you go," and it's not really clear which towel he's talking about throwing in -- his life? his relationship? -- well, that's some heavy shit, too. But it's cool, Anderson wants us to know. Maybe that's why he closes out the show with "Sing Along," a snappy kazoo-laden tune that bounces around your head like a pingpong ball: "It's all right it's such a sad, sad fucking song/ It's all right if you're still singing along."
You Will Die Someday. It's not a warning or a threat, merely a reminder.
