Pitchfork Music Festival 2009: Saturday

Saturday

Despite ye Gods trying to prevent me from going,  I DID make it down to Pitchfork on Saturday after an EL detour, miles-long walk, and then forgetting my tickets back up north.  The challenges did not stop there.

On the stage was DOOM (previously MF Doom).  The limber linquist already had his work cut out for him on Saturday.  A long line of Union Park hip-hop performers had already set the precedent: Hip-Hop acts at Intonation/Pitchfork do not do so well.  Aside from Public Enemy’s stellar set last year, Clipse, Ghostface and De La Soul all seemed put-out by the festivals lack of crowd enthusiasm.  What made DOOM different was that he didn’t seem to need or want crowd participation to put on a good show… he simply powered through.  Disguised, as always, in a silver villain’s mask, DOOM’s lazy but deceivingly limber voice rolled through head-scratching couplets at a confounding rate.  The rhymes switched rhythm and pace so often that watching DOOM fans sing along to their favorite lines was like watching them try to quote their favorite movie in fast-forward.

DOOM

Next up was eastern European tinged folk-rockers Beirut.  Helmed by Zach Condon, the troupe plays fairly straight-ahead American folk music but adds on ukulele, horns, tuba, accordions and a voice that is distinctly… Old World.  Where in the Old World, who the hell knows, but it feels European to us state-siders that wouldn”t know the difference anyway.  The sound was very nice, and crowd favorites like the wonderfully arranged “Elephant Gun” and “Postcards from Italy” transitioned very well into the live venue.  The only downside was that the music was a bit plodding.  This is completely understandable given their m.o., but in a festival setting most people think, “If I’m going to be standing, I may as well be moving,” which explains the gradual  (gypsy like?!) flow away from Beirut and towards Matt & Kim.

Matt & Kim at Pitchfork (Photo from Twitpic account: Michaelgoneil

Matt & Kim were, as expected, pre-pubecently giddy and dropping f-bombs left and right for added sincerity points.  If you need to know anything about this duo it’s that they’re a boy/girl keyboard/drum duo that excel in their live performance, and what they lack in chord progressions they more make up for in enthusiasm. Their performance on the Balance Stage, which they proudly claimed to be their largest ever, did not disappoint.  There were fist-pumpers, crowd surfers, and full waterbottle-throwers galore.  Matt’s keyboard got kicked unplugged. (BUT WHO CARES!?!?! WE USED TO PLAY IN BASEMENTZ!!!@!#!!).  It was an uprorious shout-along set and I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about defecting from the Balkan stage.  Unfortunately, as it’s evident the VIP/Press backstage fences have swelled even further into the paying crowd’s space this year, I had no sight of the band from far stage right, and thusly no fun photos.  But you have to LOVE this Twitpic from Michaelgoneil that M&K retweeted… (Kim’s on the right).

Did you get the memo?

Can you believe it’s been nearly a decade since Office Space? That’s roughly 36 financial quarters of bad Lumberg impressions and Swingline stapler jokes. The unforeseen longevity of a movie like Office Space -– a cynical look at corporate drones — stuck with the American audience long after its theatre run. Though the defining modern corporate farce is getting old, it seems like “life at the office” has become an increasingly prevalent touchstone. A new breed of unflinching, cynical, critical, tragi-comic and sometimes downright depressing office themed productions have hit a cultural nerve.

There have always been the silly corporate comedies and hyper-real farces a-la Office Space, Dilbert, and (can I throw in) Fred Savage’s short-lived Working, but it seems the new crop of pop-culture corporate landscapes have a biting, sad, desperate underpinning. What’s the deal?

The obvious jumping-off point is NBC’s excellent adaptation of The Office — a satire that turns a documentary-style camera on the lives of paper salespeople in first-world Nowheresville. It’s a show that’s both funny and melancholy — simultaneously hilarious and hitting a little too close to home. You’ve also got the inanity of Carpoolers, a silly single-cam show that’s the brainchild of Kids In the Hall graduate Bruce McCulloch. If you flash back 50 years and add some slick suits, the politics, binge drinking and philandering could easily be that of the sloganeering Madison Ave execs of AMC’s period drama Mad Men.

Elsewhere in the business world, author Matthew Beaumont documents the hilarity of London’s fictional Miller-Shanks office in a story told strictly through exchanged e-mail in e. If the U.K. doesn’t hit close enough to home, local cube dweller Joshua Ferris is getting stellar reviews for Then We Came to the End, a wry comedic novel chronicling the dismantling of a Chicago ad agency.

Of course, I can’t get too far into an office-themed blog without mentioning OFFICE, the group of former Chicago worker bees who produced a killer EP, quit their day jobs, and now professionally churn out bouncy pop tracks with some seriously sardonic underpinnings. Elsewhere in the music world there’s been a huge response to the National’s CD, Boxer. The album, with equal parts charm and anxiety, chronicles the Willy Loman-esque slide of a modern corporate worker into a nostalgic shut-in.

So if popular music, books and television are meant as means of escapism, what’s to say for an audience that’s developed an interest in fictionalized versions of working stiffs? Is the emergence of corporate-themed amusements just a mere coincidence, a blip on the radar, or a hint of more to come? Whatever the explanation, the subject matter has resonance and the writing is good, so I will continue to ignore the inherent irony of hanging around the office every week to talk about The Office. -Brian Howe Battle