Lost Weekend:A Beruit Music Experience

Came back, ears mildly ringing, from Beirut’s show at the Avalon, which was peopled with a thousand hipsters and Douglas Smith of Big Love, who I noticed mainly as a secondary effect of noticing his girlfriend, one of the only people at the concert dancing, on the balcony. She was exultant, and unselfconscious, and so was he. Actually, he was kind of more than unselfconscious – he was ungendered. And it was wonderful.

Beirut lies, musically, somewhere between The Magnetic Fields and Kaiser’s Orchestra. Actually, you can triangulate by way of Broken Social Scene – there were like ten people on stage, working away intensely on brass instruments and violins. Beirut’s not really precious – because you need lyrics to be foremost for real preciousness and they’re more lost in mournful polka melody. So for a few moments, I truly got it, the sense of the draw of this new faux bohemian stuff, which is a complete rebuke to rock, providing a shelter from “adults” (because what Rolling Stones-adoring boomer could take more than fifteen seconds of it?) while obediently conceding that generation’s principal judgments. It’s music that says, “the world was conquered, and what falls to us is crocheting and philately, and modestly we embrace it.”

And the lack of ambitious libido can, as a style, foster hipsters, in their unwashed clothes and infinite array of hats, or this kid dancing on the balcony like it just doesn’t fucking matter if he looks like a boy; the first is a very minor evil and the second was sublime.