In Which a Voice should have been Familiar.

Prologue: try to imagine that this was posted yesterday, and that I was not foiled by the lack of internet. If you are successful in doing this the tenses and "yesterday"s will be accurate.

Yesterday was Canada Day, which I must honestly say has never been at all relevant to me before this year. Yesterday, however, I was invited to a Canada Day Party, which was awesome, and which was attended by an interestingly diverse group of Med students. Understandably, I was mildly anxious at this, since as far as I knew, someone there was filled with Anonymous Ire for me. Fortunately for me, my self-absorbed neurosis proved as usual to be entirely unfounded (partly because it’s probably not important to anyone but me, and partly because the Usual Suspects were presumably packing for their trip to Brisbane for the AMSA conference where they are even now painted green or something).

In fact, it was pretty awesome, as I said. The party itself was great, and then wound down is the most highly approved fashion where a small number of you, dwindling to three, amble aimlessly down King St, pause at Istanbul, and then go and drink tea and red wine in someone’s flat. Yea, I say unto thee, humble blog reader; this experience is how you know you’ve been to Sydney Uni; it is the True Core of the Student Experience.

It was at about this point, however, that the evening got to be unusually novel and interesting. Having already discussed with these people that we coincidentally shared a bunch of musical taste, in a nebulous sort of way, (everyone likes The Smiths, surely, and Fountains of Wayne and Camera Obscura are definitely really neat),we got to talking about the experience of liking really obscure bands (yeah, I know, it’s so White of us). I volunteered that I’d always really liked The Crustaceans (weirdly, I can’t find any mention of them on my blog, but rest assured that “I’m Happy if You’re Happy” and that Bright Eyes album “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” were basically the only CDs we listened to in the Lilyfield flat, for basically all of 2005 and a bunch of 2006). And it’s true, what’s not to like about songs about wishing to be a guitar, and how it never rains in Sydney (which is a song which gets stuck in my head every time it rains in Sydney, so I call shenanigans), and going to the library and the beach, and talking about the Doppler Effect in ambulances? Quite frankly, along with Fountains of Wayne and Camera Obscura and Ben Folds, these would have to be some of my absolute favourite songs ever, with good interesting lyrics, both narrative and allusive, which is everything that songs should be. (“Everything that they should be” in the standard sense, not in the sense that that’s all there is to music. That would be wrong. Melody and what have you are also doubtless important, it’s just that I don’t know anything about those aspects of music, whereas I know where I stand with words. In this case I know that I stand in the middle of a hopelessly overlong parenthetical tangent, which is a place I’m very used to being, as I’m sure you’d deduced).

Anyway, this is all by the by, and merely background colour to the fact that at this point we had a fantastically and hilariously awkward moment when it transpired that I’d been raving like an idiot fan at the person who was actually the lead singer of the damn Crustaceans. I cannot emphasise enough how weird this sort of moment was. Felt rather like Carrie Fisher in that double-date restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally.

Part of what amuses me so much about this is that so many people aspire to meet the bands that they like, and I’ve never felt the least inclination to do so. You know, they have those radio competitions: “...And you could win tickets to the sold out Lily Allen concert, and then get to go backstage and meet her! How exciting and awesome! etc. etc...” No. How weirdly awkward and stilted such a conversation would be. You’d either gush and sound like an idiot or not gush enough and sound like a tool. You would know that they felt themselves to be contractually obliged to talk to you, but also know that they’d much rather not. And why should they? All you know about them is that you like their music which for all you know was written by another band member or something, and all they know about you is that you like their music, which would be the case for basically everyone they meet. How could this fail to be just weird and disillusioning?

In fact, the best thing that’s ever said of these meetings is that the “Star” was gracious and kind to the fan and humoured them, treating them like real people. This is another one of those things which I tend to more or less assume as a basic minimum for interaction with real people, but so strangely unequal would such a meeting be that it becomes an exciting Quality.

Conversely, the only weirdly awkward thing here (apart from the bit where everyone else says “are you kidding me?” and you have no idea why, obviously) is that there is no way I’m going to resist blogging about something like this, and the odds are good that one of the people who was there will read it. Which is fine, although maybe just a little odd of me: now it’s my turn to use the internet to be slightly creepy.

Heh, it’s just occurred to me that the situation I discussed yesterday is reversed here. When you listen to a band, you are the anonymous critic listening to the semiautobiographical stylings of someone who doesn’t know that you (personally) are listening. How tidy and balanced! The day before yesterday, I was the (sort of) public figure airing my thoughts while others anonymously critiqued. There you are, it’s all tied in nicely in a meta sort of way.