The Fix

Down in front and up on the stage, everybody’s wearing party hats, because Shara Worden, aka My Brightest Diamond, is in a festive mood. She’s dolled up all in black and white, accessorized in face paint and feathers and accompanied by an orchestra of similarly clad string and wind players. “Let’s get this party started right!” she exclaims, affecting a dialect more street than aria, and the crowd whoops. This is the first, but certainly not the last time that MBD would test her street cred tonight, in what quickly became a puzzling night, bizarrely colliding funk and freakshow, and straddling the borders between eccentricity, esoterica, and inside joke.

First things first: I didn’t know I was going to a party. Recorded, MBD is a cool peddler of musical mysticism, as curious and untouchable as a rare gem and just as marvelous. She inflects the idiosyncrasies of Bjork with the steely elegance of Portishead, creating music that is strong in its fragility, artistic in its whimsy, familiar and peculiar at the same time. Her voice is ethereal, even inspirational.

Live, MBD broke through this fantastical looking glass to reveal a self somewhat at odds with her mediated presentation. She opened the set with “Inside a Boy,” the opener off her latest record, A Thousand Shark’s Teeth. The vocals were improperly mixed at first, but even so it was immediately clear that her music becomes much more bottom-heavy in person–the thrust of the bass, guitar, and drums taking a much more aggressive place alongside the orchestra and her own delicate yet commanding singing. This rockier feeling betrayed what here became the almost overwhelming jazz and near-funk influences in her music–so much so that she and her musicians frequently broke out into herky-jerky dance moves that were more akin to spasms, involuntary twitches in time to the music, cooked up in the mind and served in the bodies of the caricatures of the weird.

I couldn’t say I was ready for all the dancing, or for the repeated forays in Ebonics she made in between numbers, or for just how off-putting MBD’s weirdness became over the course of the night. A trembling version of “The Diamond” segued into an unsettling yet wonderful version of Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” and even as I enjoyed its metallic and haunting finish, I couldn’t help but feel like it was some kind of joke for which I missed the set up. Later, “Disappear” turned into Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” as she ordered (in gangsta) her posse of orchestra geeks to start dancing. And that was it, really: a gang of misfits, creating their own crew in which she is the head. Those of us not on the inside may never understand its curious rules or funny handshakes.

I can’t help but think that the disconnect I experienced was yet another precipitate of an MP3/iPod culture, where we’re so used to listening to music in isolation that we not only forget that music has a social context, but we are bewildered by it when confronted. Never had I been so excited to see an artist live only to wish halfway through the show that I could go home. In another time and place, I might not have become a My Brightest Diamond fan at all, because I wouldn’t have felt welcome among her fans. I got to experience the unintended and paradoxical consequences of a new day: on the one hand, loving an artist deeply and personally, and on the other, feeling like I could not and would not get any closer to her.

image courtesy of musicsnobbery.com