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Good Letters

From this essay about the recently-departed English science fiction writer, J.G. Ballard, I found this comment interesting: “‘People who read Empire of the Sun have often said to me, What a strange life, how unusual,’ he told the BBC World Service in 2002. ‘And I say to them, actually, the life I led in Shanghai before and during the Second World War was not strange; it wasn’t unusual. The majority of the people on this planet today and for most of this century and previous centuries have always lived lives much closer to the way I lived than to, say, the comfortable suburbs of Western Europe and North America. It is here where I live today that is very strange by the world’s standards. Civil war, famine, flood, drought, poverty, disease are the norms of human experience.'”

More suburbanites are aware of these truths than the mockers of suburbia would admit, and, anyway, suburbia isn’t heaven on earth, and nobody living in it is exempt from human suffering.

But reading this passage made me look at my surroundings in a fresh way. I’ve been spending this summer in my childhood home, nestled deep in the immaculate Kansas suburbs, with wide avenues, strip malls, five Baptist churches, a Target, a Wal-Mart, and an Applebee’s all surrounding my pleasant neighborhood within, say, a five-mile radius.

On a sunny day with blue skies, my neighborhood looks strikingly similar to the set design of Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, but with nicer people. Few things—the sighting of a veteran, maybe—remind us of the terrible wars going on in distant corners of the world. Few things here remind us of war, period, or even of history. (I was born in a city in South America where one could glean the history of the country from the names of the streets; the names of the streets in my cozy suburb are numbers, and “Smith,” and “Johnson.”)

Ballard is right: we Western suburbanites are frightfully lucky, and we should be grateful.

Then why did I choose to leave these suburbs? Why do some people desire to leave and “see the world”? The standard response is that it’s only natural, when one is young and whatnot; but why? In my public library I have, at my disposal, the best books, films, and music ever written, directed, composed. I could find a decent job and explore it all on my free time.

But when I do indulge in the greatest works of literature and the greatest images, they all hail from a different place, and they are beautiful but also tense. Unless I’m reading early John Updike, most of the novels I’ll be reading won’t be set in my time or place; and unless I’m watching Sam Mendes movies, most of the films won’t either. I am drawn by curiosity to the less clean and tidy places of the earth, inspired first by books and images.

This is roughly the experience of many people in my generation, Americans who attended college during this decade now closing, and we’re still wandering around and figuring it out.

I was happy to discover the band Beirut because instantly I realized that their work is a fruit of this experience. Their lead singer, the trumpet and ukulele player Zack Condon, is barely 23 years old, and he recorded his first album, Gulag Orkestar (2006), in his parents’ basement. The album is a mélange of sounds and instruments he learned about while bumming around Europe—mostly Paris—with his brother. The sounds are Balkan, and the song titles all evoke an exoticism of the sort that a long time ago, European writers cultivated when they cited Asian names. But for Condon and for us, “Brandenburg,” “Bratislava,” and “Rhineland” are exotic enough. Even the name of the band romantically calls out to a faraway place.

The album was a success, and was followed by another, The Flying Club Cup (2007), also using the sounds and textures and instruments of the music that Condon heard in Europe. Once again, Condon relied on arrangements where the brass dominates the center of the song, and the lyrics—always minimal—are almost chanted.

Since then, the band has put out a few other EPs. For their latest album, out this year, the band travelled to Oaxaca, Mexico, to discover different sounds, and the result is the album March of the Zapotec/Holland.

Condon is from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and most of his bandmates come from the same city. That city is not a suburb like the one I described above, and the remnants of the Spanish empire around it are enough, I suppose, to remind one of history. But we’re not Spaniards, and it’s more than likely that the band, growing up, felt the same personal ahistoricity that I feel walking through my childhood town. The irony is that, when Condon traveled to Paris, what inspired him there was primarily Balkan music which, while traditional, was also uprooted from its country of birth, by virtue of being in Paris.

Out of this encounter—American and Balkan in Paris—comes a sound that is a meeting point between a pop musical sensibility and traditional folk music, but in a completely different way than what we find the in the “folk rock” of the 1960s. There is a wistful feeling to all of Beirut’s songs, and Condon’s voice oozes a melancholy that sounds almost innocent, almost like he’s mimicking a wrinkly Eastern European grandmother. His great wail, which appears most elegantly in the title track of Gulag, isn’t the angsty wail of Grunge rock, or the sophisticated wail of Thom Yorke, or the mock-rebellious wail of the pop-punk bands of the last decade. It’s a wail that’s searching for seriousness and gravity. It’s an authentic wail because there is an authentic yearning behind it.

If you listened to a traditional Balkan folk song and then to one of Beirut’s best songs with Balkan influence, “Gulag Orkestar,” the deepest difference between the two, beyond the musical differences, is that the former song is firmly situated within a tradition and place and culture, and the latter is shifting around and trying to find a home. Beirut’s music is about nostalgia for a place one has never been to; a more real place.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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