I was really moved by some of the music and imagery in the
Blue Man Group's concert last night in a way that I didn't expect to be.
To start BMG based their concert on a concept album they released a few years ago called The Complex; a dark, social commentary with themes of modern isolation and alienation, individuality versus conformity, information overload and the paradox of the information age. These themes really speak to me and they're explored really well in the concert.
What Blue Man Group did for the Complex and subsequent arena rock tour was take the iconography from their resident stage shows (the wacky invented instruments, the psychedelic projections, the characters like the Shadows and the Wire Men) and added to these icons and expanded them to express the themes of the show by visually supporting the music and lyrics. They basically took the essence of Blue Man Group and expanded it while maintaining the Blue Man's original spirit.
Here are some of my favourite songs and images from the concert:
Sing Along: The first single released from The Complex, the album version featured Dave Matthews on vocals. The song is catchy and the lyrics are simple but they really serve to illustrate the individuality versus conformity theme; "If I follow along will it mean I belong, or will I keep on feeling different from everybody else?"
Up to the Roof: Sung by the tour's powerhouse female vocalist named Adrian Hartley, I can really relate to the lyrics of this particular song. It's sung from a point of view of a person who's been trained to follow rules about what to do, where to go and what to believe. I draw a parallel to the dogma of organized religion or societal/familial pressures. The song's basically about rebelling against those rules and dogmas and making the decision to follow your own intuition and decide your own fate. One lyric speaks to me especially profoundly, it's a metaphor about the stairs the singer was told to take not leading her anywhere so she decided to take the fire escape to the roof instead, "I'd rather look at the sky than wonder why I let you take my time." I love it for its "fuck you" attitude to authority.
There are several particularly striking songs (both musically and lyrically) that explore the isolation and alienation fostered by the compartmentalization and separation that individuals experience in modern society and by the kind of artificial coping mechanisms we develop to survive in our society;
Persona is a haunting song about how we innately compartmentalize our personalities and create false images to fool others and even ourselves into believing certain things about ourselves. The singer's mournful moaning in between verses suggests that he's longing to stop hiding his true self but fears the vulnerability that exposing himself can create.
Shadows Part 2: The title is a reference to the track "Shadows" on BMG's first album (the soundtrack to their resident stage shows). In the concert the song is explained as
"Taking the audience on a Jungian journey into the collective unconscious by using the shadow as a metaphor for the primal self that gets repressed by the modern persona and also by using an underground setting and a labyrinth office design to represent both the depths of the human psyche and the dungeon-like isolation of our increasingly mechanistic society which prevents people from finding satisfying work or meaningful connections with others" That pretty much sums it up. The song features an awesome "scratch war" except the "scratching" is done by two performers on Airpoles, one of BMGs invented instruments consisting of a flexible fibreglass antenna that makes an acute "swish" sound when whipped through the air, the dexterity it takes to do an airpole battle that sounds like a DJ scratching must be enormous.
The same theme of being crushed under the monotony of daily life is again expressed in the album's title song,
The Complex, the lyrics vividly illustrate the maddening monotony of the daily grind. It could be an anthem to anybody stuck in a job they hate. "I saw my picture on the bathroom door today . . . So far in, I can't get out". It brilliantly illustrates the tragic mindset of someone who's abandoned the pursuit of his dreams and settled in a nine-to-five desk job but yearns for something more. At the climax of the song they showed a movie of all these office-dweller-type characters emerging onto the rooftops of the city and looking up at the sky, finally re-connecting with something primordial. The image really got to me.
But of course, the show is not all dark, moody explorations, most of it is actually light and fun. The BMG also does brilliant covers of The Who's
Baba O'Riley and Donna Summer's
I Feel Love, in both cases replacing the electronic synthesizers with their acoustic PVC pipe instrument. The PVC sounds amazing imitating the fast synthesizer arpeggios of these songs.
In the end everybody in the audience is jumping up and down together in unison in this artificial construct of the rock concert environment we manage a transcendent experience of coming together as a group . . . if only for the duration of the song.
