neko mythmaking

neko, wellmont, 11/15, originally uploaded by ipushthebuttons.

The mystery of the Curious Case has captivated me.  I'm not a singer in a rock band, but I do make a living on Neko's side of the audience.  Who and what people see in me often has more to do with them than me.  Who they are.  What their expectations are.  Where they're at in the moment.  I myself am constantly negotiating the difference between my public performance and my intentions and expectations.  Am I aloof or approachable?  Who decides?  Who cares?  Do I?  Should I?  Interpreting myself to others is part of the job, but it only goes so far, especially, I think, as an introvert.  So Who I Am is a story that's out of my hands.

So, even during her Wellmont show, I wondered, Who is Neko Case?  Having heard her previously on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," I expected a different show-persona.  I expected she would be warm, engaging, laughing, telling stories.  But she spoke to the audience only a couple of times.  She didn't even introduce her band.

Meanwhile, back-up singer Kelly Hogan chatted, introduced songs, and gently explained and joked after the shocks and after Neko snapped at that guy.  It was like Kelly was the maître d' of the band.  Just watch.  This video picks up just after the second shock.  You'll see one of just a few glimpses we saw of Neko's warmth and humor.  She's charismatic, but Kelly interacted more with the audience here than Neko did the whole show.

Curious.  I've never experienced a band dynamic like this.  A reviewer who saw one of Neko's shows in Boston a week earlier said,

Case proved not to be the most dynamic when it came to interacting with the crowd. One oddity was that Hogan talked far more to the crowd than Case. Case did not appear to be either a shy personality or short on voice. So, it was curious why she would cede valuable airtime to an underling.

I too have only ever seen lead singers be the lead audience-engagers.  Is this the same performer who bantered on "Wait, Wait" with such good cheer?  And, can I get someone else to "interact with the crowd" on my behalf?

But the big question from the Wellmont show was, what happened when that guy in the audience called out?  What did he say?  Why did Neko respond that way?  Like the friends I saw the show with, other viewers heard it differently.

While many commenter's disagreed, Music Snobbery heard it this way:

...after Polar Nettles [when she got shocked twice], [Neko] went on with the show, breezing through new and old songs. She even told off some guy in the audience who yelled to her to not put on her sweater. That was weird. Neko ended the exchange, "And this is where the show gets ugly." And laughed it off. Eventually towards the end, she was motioning to her band before "This Tornado Loves You". She said good night and never came back. The crowds tried encouraging her to go back on even when the lights came up. No luck.

But "shang" who posted on the Cowboy Junkies forum heard and interpreted it differently:

...someone yelled out from nearby me: "Ne-ko!" OR "-Go!" I cannot be sure which it was??!! .....while Neko was getting her sweater on. She promptly replied with an awkwardly nasty comment assuming the guy said "go!" She said something like: "you fucking go!" Some light strained chuckles followed from the crowd and Kelly looked at Neko weirdly as if to say "WTF?" Well, something snapped in Neko and she said "thats when she turned on them" and moved ahead with the next song. During the next couple of songs, Neko was clearly not into things and moved hastily to alter the setlist... Then all of a sudden, she waved goodbye and was gone. I think the audience was not sure what was going on and began to immediately call and clap for an encore. Despite people not leaving their seats and yelling "Encore!" for several minutes, there would be no encore. Some people were actually getting fairly agitated and screaming at the stage: "where's the fucking encore?" The venue had to crank up the music and start shuffling people out to lower the tension level.

While I was further away from the stage than shang, I walked away with much the same sense of things. I felt awkward after Neko's reply, thinking she overreacted.  I was confused, not angry like many others.  But I also came as myself, with my own expectations, from the place I was in.

But what does it all mean?  Who is Neko Case?  Still curious, I turned to her album, Middle Cyclone.  Let Neko tell us through her music.  What I hear is a person who perceives herself as a force of nature.  Tornado.  Man-eater.  I'm An Animal.  "The dangling ceiling from where the roof came crashing down."  (I mean, God knows Neko's voice is a force of nature.)  What I hear in Middle Cyclone is a force of nature coming to terms with loving and needing love, impatient with others coming to terms with her and what it means to be in relationship with her.   This Tornado Loves You.  "I'm a man-man-man, man-man-man-eater / and still you're surprised when I eat you."

What surprised me was how much exploring "Who is Neko?" revealed about "Who is Clark?"  I could never have named it this way before, but I too experience myself as a force of nature.  Wild, driven, intense, dangerous.  I too am impatient with people learning to live with me, because I am also still learning to live with myself.

This insight reminded me of Village Voice's review of Where the Wild Things Are.  The reviewer praised the film, but noted its shortcomings.

What's weakest is its blandness, the sense memory of a child raised on Sesame Street. The psychic environment is less King Kong's Skull Island than Fred Rogers's neighborhood: Where the Wild Things Aren't.

Wild Things isn't overlong, but it is underwhelming. Who is the audience? Children brought to see it might find it a downer—a case of what the New York Times has called "misery for art's sake." Triumph or travesty, this movie is more likely something for Jonze's generational cohorts to love or loathe. (How many suburban garage bands had the name Wild Rumpus?) For me, it seemed like group therapy with the muppets.

Neko tapped into her truly Wild Thing for Middle Cyclone.  Her album is filled with real killers, not fuzzy, bumbling monsters.  It's real houses that get destroyed in her stories, not play-houses.  She's a man-man-man, man-man-man-eater and still you're surprised when she eats some guy in the audience?

So I've made my own Neko myth.  Neko is an unapologetic bad-ass.  A warm, thoughtful, self-aware, unapologetic bad-ass, alternately fearful and fearless, and no less fearful and fearless in the face of her own not-fully-comprehensible powers.  But is this Neko, or my projected ideal of myself?  Who is Neko Case?  Who am I?  What really happened at the Wellmont?

Now we see through a glass dimly.  But one day, we will see face to face.