Neko Case Live 4-12-14

Neko Case does something very well.  She takes the southwestern musical tradition and puts it in a bottle that everyone can hold up to their ear and identify.  Echoing in this same bottle are Emmylou Harris, Giant Sand era Howe Gelb, Calexico, Catholics era Frank Black and others of the like.  We suggest that this bottle be plugged, tossed into the ocean, and discovered in the future.  We'll help describe this disparate future for you.

There once was a time when barrooms were filled with the naturally sweet smoke of tobacco.  In the future, metallic sanitary devices will turn nicotine juice into vapor.  Where there once was the flicker of matches and controlled fire, the ambiance will be replaced by people who aim little communication devices at the band and blind them with useless flashes in order to capture the performance, rather than remember it.  Where beer went down smooth and ice cold, it will be replaced with skunky macrobrew at $8 a plastic cup.  In this future, barrooms won't even exist.  Instead, we will pay $40 apiece to gain entrance into crammed ancient theaters where we stand on one another and clap in unison for an obligatory encore.  Bands themselves will quit a few songs early, in order to oblige this requirement.

The authenticity of the music is not the problem.  It's the fact that in this future we will have bred our souls too thin, or we will have bred soul out completely.  Individuals and choice will no longer have any meaning.  Instead, we will be reduced to an electronic page of information, the amalgam of which will define how we are no different from the other drones in our human hive.  We will line up for our prescription Levi Trucker jackets and our mandatory beards.  If and when we uncover that lost bottle of music, our dejected and dismal soul residue will resonate with the steel guitar and we will vaguely wish for a Nashvillian past that will never again return.  

karat y chop