22·01·07: For Kyle by Jason Anderson
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In a tiny epiphany earlier this week, I realized (no idea why I didn't think of this sooner) that one of the very, very best things about YouTube is being able to watch little pieces of Jason Anderson shows as they happen in various moderately-packed living rooms and school gyms across the country. Although Jason is, basically, the best performer I have ever seen, I will admit that I was a little unsure at first about finding this stuff online. Because Jason's whole thing as a traveling singer is a kindof trademark, dangerously-sincere overemphasis on the *here* and *now* and *precious moment* of each and every single concert, mechanically reproducing two-and-a-half minute snippets of these spontaneous, rather private events, and distributing them all over the internet, seemed to me to miss the point a little. But the videos are, actually, really great. All those annoying little imperfections—camera shake, clipped songs, shitty overbright exposures, shots of singers' backs, over-driven levels, et cetera—that are the amateurish trademarks of the fan-shot YouTube concert video, actually work perfectly for this material. YouTube turns out to be a good genre for JA: these films (most of which, I'm guessing, were shot by people younger than even I am, probably on cell-phones, or on digital cameras not really made for that sort of thing) capture the adolescence, collectivity and unpretention that define his shows probably better than anything else would. Sorry—I really didn't mean to get so bloggish/armchair-art-critical here, but I just like these songs a lot. This one is named "For Kyle," and is the first, best song on his record New England. |
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