Essay on Music: The National & Modern Congregation
I am here underneath the Hungarian sky, carried by the sound of the venue into the heat of the crowd and this summer night.
«Babe, I am afraid you are no longer the hottest thing on the island», I scream to him trembling, shivering, and laughing in part from ticklish fear of falling from his shoulders and in part from seeing this hot mess on the stage pulling somebody’s floral hairband up his leg as if it was a bridal garter. Not the type of the upbeat behavior you would expect from the frontman of the Sad Dads - the nickname assigned to the National by the sorrow squad, which has, in turn, became a nickname for the band’s fanbase. But I will learn those handles later when I will rapidly cinderella down the rabbit hole to join the rest of Alices lost in the Wonderland of complex emotions. I will also learn that Matt Berninger, the hot mess on the stage, is actually about the age of my father and forever since will have very complex emotions about it. Yet, soon enough none of it will matter because the more I’ll learn, the more I’ll listen with closer attention, the quicker I’ll grow out of the lost little fan-girl stage and, as Penny Lane famously named it in a film «Almost Famous», will become a Band-Aid. I will be there, in the back of the Warsaw later that same year, and up near the ceiling of Carnegie Hall at the beginning of the next – for the music.
Yet, tonight we are still in the heart of Budapest that beats as fast as ever, pumped on music and drugs. Matt reels up the mic’s cord around his arm, preparing to throw himself into the vortex of people tearing between being in awe and losing their minds to him singing
«God loves everybody - don’t remind me»
with an ironic smirk.
As a frequent concertgoer, I have seen this all so many times, and too the audience members breaking into tears during the first few notes of their favorite tune. I had never had that experience, and I hungered for it. And finally there, unexpectedly, there it hits me. It hits me like the sunstroke hits one on a rocky beach of a Greek island. Here they are my first few notes with the lights from dragon fruit pink - the fruit I think about whenever I hear Matt’s growling baritone sing «All my thoughts of you - bullets through rotten fruit» - turn angelic blue, the shade you see on a cold, early morning fall mist somewhere in England. With those heavenly lights in the back of the stage, everyone on it appeared apostle-like, with Matt, a god of suffering, in the middle. The most diverse flock of all that I’ve ever seen sung along with him. It sounded like a gospel, turning the festive sight into a modern congregation, where 15000 people gathered together to confess «I Need My Girl». My moment of the sacrament, holy purification, or ablution (with tears), if you will.
It is a matter of one’s own judgment how to perceive the National’s music. While one - or, to be honest, all of my closest friends - find these records to be bluntly depressing, another – not-the-hottest-thing-on-the-island, who shoulder-lifted me in Budapest - would say that «the National-s are for the accomplished, intelligent ones who find that there is something to them that is still missing». I subscribe to neither.
The National frankly celebrates sadness in the juxtaposing light of simple life pleasures like sitting in the garden with holiday rainbow lights and an icy drink brought to you by a loved one. It’s about the mundane insecurities and questions we are too much of I-have-it-all-together proud jerks to admit we ask ourselves every other day. Or at least I do. It’s for the people in the blue-collar shirts with their 9-to-5 shifts and those in the ripped Levis jackets who turned out to be reckless or privileged enough to ditch this convention.
The National serves as a beautiful soundtrack to this unstable journey. The tune that plays at that moment, at the end of that movie, where the main character finally finds the courage to say «Fuck it!», to kick the engine and ride into the sunset towards their big, bright future and whatever it brings, while the camera rolls up revealing the great wide open, the horizon that symbolizes that everything is possible.
The only thing, though, that needs to be reviled is that there are no such phenomena as the «big bright future» and I am sorry for every main character of every movie of that kind. No matter how wide your horizons are, there is still traffic in which to be stuck, no matter how hot your lovers are, their devotion, yours is still an uncertainty, and even if her majesty the Queen will honor you into the knights, there will still be anxieties to battle, - and the National is there to lowly remind you about it.
