Dan Deacon in DC

Sunday, 09 November 2008

So, on Friday night I made it out to the Hirshhorn in DC to check out Dan Deacon. Just happened to catch a blurb in the Post for it so I figured this was my chance to see what he's all about. I'd heard about the trend of setting up on the floor to blur the artist-audience lines and this seemed like a good place to catch it in action. Some topoi and cell phone cuts:

Scene: The Hirshhorn is a Smithsonian museum that emphasizes contemporary art and sculpture. For the summer season it holds "afterhours" events with music, drinks, and dancing. We thought, cool, we'll roll up and pick up some tickets. Once we get there, however, the line wound around the corner. After a two hour wait we manage to work our way in. The museum is a circular building with an open middle (a big doughnut) with 4 floors. The main floor is mostly a large open-air plaza that connects the center of the building with its perimeter. The house PA is set up in front of a wall of plate glass windows with white sheets hung in front. The museum has a camera set up to film the crowd and project their images up on to the sheets, while throwing in some psychedelic images for good measure. The weather is perfect; bars are set in strategic places.

The screen, clean and psychedelic.

Tech: We walk right up behind the performance area (there is no stage) and park behind Deacon's gear. A random hodge-podge of stuff: some old analog effects pedals (most of which were made for guitar), a cheap keyboard controller, lots of wires, a mic or two, and an iPod shuffle to play the tracks (I couldn't see it but I've seen youtube vids where this is what he does). All the gear is laid out on a rectangular card table, locked down with ample amounts of duct-tape. This is the total lo-fi set-up. He even brings his own small PA to run everything through, partly so people in the front (including himself) can hear it, but partly because pushing the smaller speakers to the limit gets more of the distorted, analog, lo-fi sound out of the digitally played backing tracks.

Deacon’s table/gear.

Audience: Given the venue, there is a rough mix of three different crowds: the younger kids (teens to early twenties) who are there to see Deacon and are clearly fans; a "middle" aged crowd (mid-twenties to mid 30s maybe) who are there primarily to dance (DJ Gavin Holland follows Deacon); and an older crowd (40s and up) who are members of the museum and come to see and be seen, or to feel like they are in touch with a younger crowd. I think we are the anomaly--old dudes there to see Deacon. It is all very ethnographic on my part though, workin' the participant-observer angle ;) The fans are clearly the centerpiece of Deacon’s artist-audience work, but the other groups play a role in insider/outsider distinctions and group definition.

Deacon and a true devotee.

Mediation: Given the tech set-up, nothing much is played live. And because of the artist-audience blurring, nothing much can be played. While we are waiting, Deacon sneaks up behind the house PA, and the crowd gathered around his gear goes nuts. He announces that he's waiting on a friend who is having trouble getting in--an indication that he is not much different than his audience. By the time he comes back, the crowd around his gear is formidable. He moves his small PA up around the table, gets a couple of roadies, or fans I can't tell which, to buttress them. After some opening banter and exercise, the first track kicks in and the crowd implodes on him. In the mêlée there is pretty much no way he could physically play keyboard, or even work very many controls. Most of the backing tracks are prerecorded; he holds down a key to change the tempo or scale in a couple of songs, and twists knobs on the effects units to alter his vocals in a couple of songs, but that's about it. In addition to blurring artist-audience, he's blurring the lines between live-recorded performance. The music is thoroughly mediated via technology to explicitly give the impression that the performance isn’t mediated at all (the mediation allows the audience to have direct contact with the performer). This is the oscillation/paradox that Bolter and Grusin identify in their book Remediation. If they ever do a second edition, they should do a chapter or section on Deacon. It is also hard to miss all of the cell phones and cameras, mine included, encircling Deacon, documenting his performance, and then posting the images and videos to the web, which fold back in to the audience’s expectations and anticipation, becoming a part of the performance, in a wider, expanding sense of that term.

Deacon mid flow.

Rhetor(ic): Deacon is, simply put, an old school MC (a deacon presiding over his church). He *literally* moves the crowd. This is clearly his best skill as a musician-artist-singer. He's really none of those. He's a performer. Just one of those people who have a certain kind of magnetic persona that draws people in. Before the first tune, he had the crowd (his fans anyway) stretch and warm up for the coming exercise. Before each track he barks out orders for the activity that will correspond with the song, without giving the impression that he's setting down the rules to be followed. He was in control of the chaos while allowing it moments to overcome even him. In contrast, he's heavy-set, balding, and wears big, beat up glasses. He really cultivates the everyman geek to downplay the force of his charisma. He doesn't want to be a celebrity--that's too traditional rock and pop--so he has to do something to offset his rhetorical skill.

The fans doing calisthenics with the inner circle of the Hirshhorn as a backdrop.

Sub/Cult: Deacon's act seems to crossover three earlier sub-culture scenes without being reducible to any one of them in a fine postmodern pastiche tradition. From house he plays the DJ, spinning tracks mainly for dancing and enticing the crowd and draws on house's blurring of audience and artist, but his tracks don’t really conjure up the kinds of dancing you’d see at a rave. From hip-hop he takes on the traditional MC role, working the crowd, drawing out participation, making connections, but there’s no rap, no sampled break beats, and hardly a black kid in the audience. From punk he gets the whole lo-fi, DIY ethic and he cultivates the insider/outsider rhetoric of punk. During the show he played up the division in the audience between the younger "in" crowd that was participating and the older outlying voyeurs. At one point in the show, he instructs his minions to run as fast as they can around the big faux water fountain in the middle of the plaza. About half-way through the track, almost as if on cue, a security guard plows through the crowd up to Deacon and tells him NO running. Deacon pauses his track, asks his fans to stop running in a mocking/ironic tone, and kicks the track back into high gear. It only reinforces their transgression and identification. This is classic punk. There is no guitar, no live instruments, but his tracks are simple, fast, and hard, his vocals are noisy and distorted, and the energy inspires an old school pogo-styled dance somewhere between a mosh pit and a dance hall.

Music: This is the one area that didn't do it for me a 100%. There really wasn't much to his tracks: a basic drum loop, a bass-line or keyboard riff, a mid-break in some songs, an intro in others, and some half-sung, half-talked, half-screamed vocals drown in effects (well, shouldn't those be thirds then instead of halves?) On the one hand, if Deacon broke out with some Crystal Method-inspired tracks and song writing, he would kill. I mean slay the crowd (or have them slay themselves). But on the other hand, that would totally detract from the lo-fi, DIY ethic of the whole thing. The audience has to think to themselves, shit, I could do that, in order to further enhance the artist-audience blur. "Ethically" he can't be too professional. It blows the whole game. It makes me wonder whether he'll hold fast to his underground roots or succumb to the industry as they come calling (if they haven't already). Hang in there DD and keep it "real."