The Fey Highwayman
On Sufjan Stevens's indulgent, hula-hoop-plagued BQE symphony
by Rob Harvilla
November 5th, 2007
All my friends who don't live in New York hate New York. Near as I can tell, they imagine the city as one giant, loathsome American Apparel ad, a crass, joyless, narcissistic, careerist, emaciated, insincere, hopelessly uptight, suffocatingly twee cesspool of white-privilege Williamsburg hipsterdom. I'm paraphrasing; they're stereotyping. Mashed into the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House Saturday night, beholding the third and final sold-out performance of Sufjan Stevens's half-hour symphony dedicated to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, with roughly 15,000 musicians crammed onstage unleashing whirling, whimsical dervishes as five vegan-thin dancers cheerfully gyrate with glowing neon hula hoops and three video screens blare arty auto-erotic footage overhead, I revel in what my friends are missing even as I concede their point. Only in New York. This is precious, precious, precious stuff.
Let me say up front that the world is a far more interesting and wondrous place with Sufjan in it; furthermore, one of his songs frequently makes me cry. We'll come back to that. For now, I have the hula-hoopers to contend with. They are a wee bit unnerving, the hula-hoopers. A toxic overload of Cute. The program includes a two-page essay, penned by Sufjan himself, explaining exactly how hula hoops pertain to the BQE, and to the symphony he has written in its honor. Something to do with the wheel, perpetual motion, the rotation of the Earth, etc. "As a symbolic construction, the hoop is an existential goldmine," Sufjan writes. Oh, do go on. The BQE is Sufjan's first symphony, one of myriad distractions from his (suffocatingly twee) "write an album for all 50 states" enterprise; "rock and roll is dead," he recently announced. His approach here is sheepish and self-conscious—the hula-hoopers aren't a metaphor but a distraction. Subtract them and the video projections (pure Wes Anderson, with their coyly formal title cards and fey shoebox-diorama odes to tires, brake lights, bodegas, prominent landmarks, and yet more hula-hooping), and you've got a tremendously elaborate but frequently clumsy sonic spectacle, way too cluttered and way too loud, with one of Sufjan's ornate and intricate orchestral-pop melodies occasionally wriggling loose and breathing free for 30 seconds or so before it's overwhelmed again. Every so often, an abrupt, triumphant final flourish—ta-dah!—indicates the end of a movement. Flawed but ambitious, etc. You know the drill.
rest of article here:
http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0745,harvilla,78238,22.html
Wish I could've been there.
