Transcript
Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. This is the episode for Tuesday, March, gosh, 5th, and a few hours late, but today I wanted to talk about.
The maybe authenticity of live performances.
And so the other day I was reading an article in The Atlantic that was called called The Risk at the Heart of Live Music. And it was about Alicia Keys singing at the Super Bowl and how when she first started, she was sitting down at the piano and the first note that she hit, she actually missed. And there was controversy about it. One, because she missed the note. She's supposed to be this really incredible singer. But two, because afterwards, I believe the videos had that mess up scrubbed from the history. And so people were like, why did you delete that? So there was also that.
But, Matt, I'm playing with my phone.
And the other thing, you know, so I was reading the article and they're talking about a lot of things. And at the end, this one passage really struck me. He said, or the person said, Such a combination of fallibility and hyper-exposure seems like all the more reason to celebrate the enduring and deeply human bravery of live performance. As the late David Berman of the indie rock band Silver Jews once sang, All my favorite singers couldn't sing.
And I read that line, and I loved it. Honestly, in the moment, I thought, maybe I should sing. Because I think there is so much more to just getting the technique perfect.
That there are so many other dimensions that we're listening to. So I think about doing this podcast. And these episodes, I do them almost always in one take. If it's two takes, it's because I flubbed the intro, and typically it's only if it's, you know, I totally mess up the first three seconds, and I will stop and delete and go. But that happens once every three weeks or something. Otherwise, this is completely unedited and spur of the moment, off the cuff, whatnot.
And I like it that way because it feels more real. It's not spliced together, it's not cut together, you're not, I'm not pulling out my ums and my uhs and a lot of these, I think they call them disfluencies, um, um, right, see I said um there. Even in the transcripts, I often try to keep them in to keep it more accurate to what happened because I think there's a deeper genuineness? Or authenticity? Or humanity...when we basically don't hide behind edits and filters and all sorts of masks and things that can hide the things about us that we don't want people to know.
Or frankly just there was one ted talk back in the day i saw a tedx talk in boulder i was actually i think they're watching it but the lady said something like we hide from other people and we're like pretending that we're not humans to other humans we're hiding our humanity from other they're humans. And so I love live performance for that. I love going to see theater. I love going to see concerts. I love watching live television, but live television. I love, you know, so in the U. S. there is a New Year's special now on CNN that has Anderson Cooper and Andy D. Cohen. And it's live, and they also drink alcohol sometimes. And it's so refreshing for me to watch unscripted live interaction.
And...
Even a lot of the concerts seem so scripted and so curated and so endlessly choreographed that when something goes a little bit off plan, I actually really appreciate it. And I hope people who are listening also appreciate this, the unexpected joys of.
Live stream live stream i don't know uh the unexpected joys of recording this past my bedtime and having to wake up early in the morning uh joy maybe it's not the word but anyways just wanted to talk a little bit about that and how Wow. Yeah. Man, I love live interactions so much. I'm trying to make this podcast feel live, even if it's not live, because it's kind of hard to coordinate live events across time zones. But a part of me likes the asynchronous nature of it, I think. But yeah, I think I'm running and out of words to say, and you're probably, hopefully, appreciating the characteristics of this.
Yep, words are totally gone. I will talk to you tomorrow. All right, bye. .
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