Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles

Chapter 5. ‘‘Los Angeles at Its Best’’

5 ‘‘Los Angeles at Its Best’’ Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square; gather the people together there, and you will have a festival. Do better yet; let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves; make them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau Los Angeles is at its best at Grand Performances. This is a diverse place, but usually everyone is separate. Here people come together—people of all different socioeconomic groups and races. —Grand Performances audience member ‘‘So the next song, this is a very special song, I’m going to try to hold it together emotionally, as we play this, it’s one of them songs you know, one of them songs. . . . It was written by Parliament and Funkadelic.’’ Hearing this, some in the audience yell in appreciation and recognition. ‘‘It’s called ‘Come In out of the Rain.’’’ Double G cues the orchestra and we start playing. A man in the audience who was, as he described it later on his Web site, already in ‘‘almost full groove’’ was overjoyed at hearing the song announced, his personal dedication to Parliament Funkadelic emblazoned on his sweatshirt with the letters PFUNK (PFUNK 2003). People dance in the Upper Plaza. One person waves her arms in the air, moving to the music. Another, with a bleached crew cut reminiscent of white rapper ‘‘Los Angeles at Its Best’’ 129 Eminem’s hairstyle, beats his head, a little off the beat, pauses, finds the beat, and then is on his own time again. The solo violinist starts the guitar solo of the original Parliament recording. She plays wildly, her left hand at the farthest edge of the fingerboard and her face contorting with expression. Her long brown curls fly and she bends backward as she reaches the highest point, repeating the notes over and over, their sound given a warbly twang by the fuzz/wah pedal that she presses with her foot. The lights illuminating the musicians flash like strobes and the MCs sing the chorus, ‘‘When will the people start gettin’ together, learning to live and love one another, hee -e-y hey, h-e-e-e-y hey. When will the people start findin’ each other, learnin’ to give and help one another, he-e-e-y hey, he-e-e-y hey.’’ Written in the early 1970s as a critique of the violence of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and revolutionary protest tactics in urban America, when performed at California Plaza in 2003, the lyrics of ‘‘Come In out of the Rain’’ articulate aspirations for an experience at public concerts made possible by musical performance. Peace as a political position becomes a sensibility for civic participation organized around consensus. Rather than taking a stance on urban and international social concerns, the audience looks to itself for the recognition of social aspirations, allowing it to serve as a synecdoche of the city. At civic performances, music is a motor for the realization of ideals of public life. In a process that is at once sonic and spatial, music brings people together, sounding an ideal Los Angeles that is heard, felt, and danced. These experiences evoke the recognition and fulfillment of some of the general aspirations for Grand Performances, for Los Angeles, and for contemporary public life. An audience is constituted through affective, participatory, sensory experience. Depending on spatial proximity, it is ‘‘a crowd witnessing itself in visible space’’ (Warner 2002:66). Yet the live audience remains largely untheorized. What is this face-to-face group? What meanings are generated from the experience of audience members? And how, as Barber asks, ‘‘do audiences do their work of interpretation’’ (1997:357)? What are they interpreting and to what effect? How does a moral community emerge from affective experiences of individuals who listen, dance, and watch performers onstage? The affective, embodied, experiential, and sensory recede in discussions of text-based publics, in which moments of coming together are primarily understood to validate identities generated by consumption of circulating media (Warner 2002).1 Yet public concerts suggest something significant is happening with audiences of live events and that what is hap- 130 Chapter 5 pening there might reveal critical insight into the contemporary condition. The public concert audience is constituted and recognized as a...