Notes on Chelsea Knight's Lost Time

 The minstrel, a functionary, only played what his lord commanded him to play. As a valet, his body belonged entirely to a lord to whom he owed his labor. If his works were published, he would receive no royalty, nor was he remuner­ated in any way when others performed his works. – Jacques Attali, Noise

Chelsea Knight’s latest work, Lost Time, reverberates through a loosely-threaded “meta-narration” of what music might mean to the performer itself, at varying degrees of engagement, and how that might reflect on a larger understanding of our own identities. 

In similar fashion to other work, she fuses semi-autobiographical elements: the recounting of a Ray Bradbury story from youth (“The Long Rain”) the intimate hymnal quatrain performed ad hoc by her and her father, with varying degrees of performance, of viewing performance, of editing performance, and in doing, meditates on a kind of musical caste semi-system of that hints at, and sometimes stabs at the heart of an insight: we all want to be seen. 

She opens on a rainy day in New Orleans, and depicts a long-distance duet of herself and one of her many subjects singing a Prince song. This opens a cascade of performance: amateur, child, professional, staged, unrehearsed, that casts a wide net of possible meanings. Are they all aware that we’ll be comparing them at the end? 

Repetition offers another challenge to the analysis of the behavior of agents in classical economics and Marxism: musical consumption leads to a sameness of the individual consumers. One consumes in order to resemble and no longer, as in representation, to distinguish oneself. What counts now is the difference of the group as a whole from what it was the day before, and no longer differ­ences within the group. This socialization through identity of consumption, this mass production of consumers, this refusal of what in the recent past was a proof of existence, goes far beyond music. – Attali

Ms. Knight occasionally pokes fun at her characters, but not pejoratively. She observes with an inquisitive lens. The bad karaoke singer, the slightly off R&B singer, the virtuoso pianist, none is taken more or less seriously, (although, to me, the highlights happen to be the karaoke singing of the artist’s mother, and the aforementioned duet with her father).

This implied hierarchy, or at least this observation of various types of music, is concretized when children are contrasted to Megan Gale talking about “The currency of cool being so stupid.” In the relative references Ms. Knight displays, (80s, 90s, to some extent, the super-popularity of the Nutcracker), it indeed IS stupid (“vapid” is a word Gale uses as well). Music, while never really having left a type of tribalism, became acutely weaponized by an industry that quickly absorbed smaller, new types of music. 

The purposeful non-conformity of, say, 60s free jazz, and the political non-conformity of 70s and 80s punk were cottage-industry level, (independent) production of music, which slowly led to a larger “alternative” music, which then gave way to an actual radio platform with a large, mainstream audience, on large corporate labels, called, ironically, “alternative”. Non-conformity began as political, sometimes left-leaning, sometimes right, but always to pivot away from an already-done style. To critique the “Currency of cool” is to critique the middle-class nature of a mediocre dialectic, and to criticize the struggle to avoid being overtaken by a hegemonic industry. And it often did get overpowered by the 80s and 90s. But the point/counter-point “anti-aspirations” didn’t go away. it was simply whittled down to New Wave, then heavy-rotation “alternative”. 

And that’s where the glimmer of the opening character, applying literal face glitter, while singing a Prince song, sheds that small beam of Bradbury’s ray of light in the “Long Rain," and, it must be said, there is a quiet poise in her work, shed largely by avoiding over-arching discussion of the politics of music. For the performers, for Knight, and for us, what's perhaps the richest insight: in a life filled with constant rain, no matter how good, or bad, or amateur, or virtuoso our performance may be, it can shine in all of us.