Perfume Genius and inbetweenness
September 19, 2020
Perfume Genius Live from The Palace Theater through Veeps.com
The moment Michael Alden Hadreas, best known by his stage name Perfume Genius stepped onstage, he walked over to the microphone, grabbed it, and turned away, his body arrested as if the moment he and his amplifier connected was a moment too intimate to be seen. I was reminded of the first sentence of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth: Selden paused in surprise. An end to movement as we are all finding out during this pandemic can be more disarming than movement itself.
It’s been roughly 6 months since most of my industry (music) and many others have been paused. In that time, I’ve seen courageous and innovative attempts to move live music online. Some of it has worked, a lot more of it has failed. And really, who wants to go to a concert that just works? Music, especially live music, is something that offers a way out of your known self and into your unknown self. Into your body and a body politic. Between the musician and the listener, a contract exists. This is one of the only things in the world that is not about work, this is a conversation, an offering on both ends.
The live-streamed concert this weekend by Perfume Genius didn’t just work. It transcended. It was a haven of music and silence that didn’t try to pull the wool over our eyes, ignore how bizarre these times are, or make us forget what is happening outside of the stream. We know what’s going on out there, we know what this is, and we aren’t trying to make it something it isn’t. “I’m here… how weird.”
The pared-down set-up without an audience didn’t seem regrettably pathetic or lonely as some other concerts have seemed, rather, it seemed intimate. Perfume Genius knelt onstage, sat on the ledge, and took up space, moving and dancing when and where he wanted. He asked for respect in our homes and we understood that we were watching him in his home. The lack of an audience didn’t remind me, like so many online concerts I’ve seen, of how far we are from how we previously experienced music. The songs themselves are often so heavy and so transportive that I needed a moment after to relish in the silence as he seemed to relish in them himself, without feeling the necessity to fill them in. There was a moment when he put his microphone on his shoulder, resting it there a moment, acknowledging the heaviness of the music, our moment in time. If given a choice between silence or clapping, I might have selfishly preferred the silence.
Perfume Genius’s sound, the cleanliness of his voice against a backdrop of grunge was perfectly served by the Palace Theater which replicated at different moments for the artists a womb, a whale, a world.His ethereal falsetto (which brought me to tears as it rose to devastating heights in Fool) brings to mind the pure sound of a choirboy, but his approach to the notes, the way he traverses notes so entirely from one to the next, is nothing if not sensual. In fact, everything about Perfume Genius seems calculated for the cohesion of these two seemingly juxtaposed elements. His threadbare tank top with the chunky silver chain on his wrist. His structured jacket, loose and wide. His flesh and muscle roping around one another, the physical embodiment of his voice’s purity and sensuality. The slack and the tension of his mic chord which he coils like a snake or stretches against his body as he stretches his arms wide, simultaneously freeing and limiting himself. His vibrato, which always seems on the edge of finding its rhythm or remaining pure- it’s that lack of stability that is so captivating. The way he takes the traditionally masculine gesture of beating on his chest and makes it something more vulnerable, a pleading gesture as much about holding himself tight as it is expressing a need for something. Purity and sensuality aren’t represented as opposites in Perfume Genius’s sound world. They are in conversation with each other (much like the two halves of Fool,) simultaneously lifting and grounding one another to form a spirituality centered in inbetweenness.
Back to the first sentence of House of Mirth. Selden paused in surprise. We have been paused, in surprise, and utter dismay by the daily horrors that continue to multiply. I see our situation replicated by his first motion when after walking on stage, he stops and slows time. His abrupt turning away, that stunning stillness he can get in his body and his voice a disruption in his own time and connection. Yes, he is saying. This moment in time is a disruption, but it can be a time of turning inward, of intimacy with self. This concert at its core is someone who has always been estranged and isolated extending a hand to show us that our time of isolation and estrangement is nothing to be afraid of. Perfume Genius has always been an artist of our time but with this performance, he solidifies himself as a voice that is absolutely necessary for our time of inbetweenness, this time when we are all in limbo, waiting to be shown a new way to exist.
