There’s music in everything.
Well, there is if you’re listening to your headphones at all times in public.
It’s Super Bowl Sunday in The City. The 22-Fillmore is as crowded as they come on a day when maybe some who aren’t used to riding the bus are doing it anyway and it’s definitely a risk. But it’s fun too.
If you’ve never been on Muni you should know it’s not a means to get from A to B so much as a lurching-and-abrupt-stop rolicking ride from where you came from to where you’re going to get off, panting, frazzled, nauseous and maybe a little vomity. But if you know what you’re doing it’s just fun to watch everyone else struggle.
So there I was, headphones in and waiting for a spectacle, some aerial trick from a Muni Newbie to make things interesting. Or at least make me feel smug. And boy did I get it. At the 59th second of the track “What She Came For” from 2009’s “Tonight: Franz Ferdinand,” on my first listen-through after freshly downloading the album that day, no less.
I’m on the bus. The song begins with a steady slacker beat punctuated by handclaps. The bassline teases out short burps of cool melody like the best of Cake. A Moog tweeters behind.
Sexy, skinny singer with the defiant look:
“I got a question for YA.
Where d’you get your name from?
I got a question for YA.
Where d’you see yourself in fiiiiiiive minute’s tiiiiiiiii–“
Right then, I see the body swing. It was a guy in a red fleece barely up from the stairs with one hand on a bus pole. No second point of contact. Big mistake. Right at the APEX of the singer’s “tiiiiiiiiime,” the bus lurches forward. His whole body pivots on that pole. As the notes at the climax of the verse fly into my ears, this mass is thrown in a great arc through space. The instruments have fallen silent in THIS split second, ready to bounce off into the next verse. And just as they do, the man lands on the lap of a young woman. She screams. And AT THE EXACT TIME of his crash landing the drummer crashes down on his instrument. Perfectly choreographed. Glorious. Epic.
And it was all for me. Like I said: there’s music in everything. Or at least, people willing to dance to your music.
…
I did eventually make it to the Horseshoe Tavern on Chestnut Street, a regular dive bar packed with septuagenarians and girls on the wrong side of thirty who still shop at Forever 21. Not too many people care about the game itself. By then the New Orleans Saints are down 10-0 to the Indianapolis Colts in the first quarter of Super Bowl XLIV. Because of Hurricane Katrina four years earlier, the Saints are the sentimental favorites. You can tell because of the lack of hollering at the intense moments. N.O. fails to score two yards from the goal line with two downs to go and the chatter barely registers.
Halftime show now. The Who has been dug up to play. We would later learn that 57 percent of American TVs were tuned to the Super Bowl on Sunday. That’s 106.5 million people with their eyes peeled to the boob tube. Okay, that’s a big audience.
So they made sure we were entertained. The teams may be from the Bayou and Indiana but the championship game’s in Florida. Why? Because they needed all that time to set up the stage, to time the lights just right. And you can tell they threw everything at it.
The Who started with “Pinball Wizard.” The band is standing on a circular stage, a sort of giant screen that reacts to whatever they play. “Pinball” plays so of course the band is now at the center of a target from a pinball game. Later, waves of lights pulse away from the band–perfectly in time with the beat of the music. It’s gotta be exhausting to be playing inside of those zany visualization screens packaged with iTunes. And there’s everything else. Fireworks, flames in a circle around the stage. Laser lights beam over the heads of the band members.
Okay, I guess it’s entertaining. But they tried so hard, you know?
For my money I’ll take the surprise aerial sideshow on the Muni any day. For that, you really gotta keep your eyes open. And the music blasting.
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