Note: This is a review of a Jamie XX show from 2016, which devolved into a reflection on music and ritual. It was originally published in the Stanford Arts Review, which has since disappeared from the internet (RIP). I’m re-posting for personal posterity. Photos by Chase Porter. (If they look blurry, it’s because they’re ripped from a Wayback Machine link.)
“It’s kind of funny,” says my friend, “Because in one sense, all this really is is a mixture of sound waves of different frequencies being pumped out of a few cones in some speakers chained to the ceiling of an old movie theater.”
In other words, it’s all just basic physics, bolstered by hundreds of years of amplification technology, layered with cultural ritual and tradition and culminating in a mirage of bright lights and thick sounds. It’s all just primal sonic euphoria that doubles as a climax to what might as well be considered a modern religious pilgrimage, begun in the digital caverns of Ticketmaster.com, continued across CalTrain and Bart and concluding in the haunted halls of The Fox Theatre, a venue once home to some of the first “talkie” films that replaced silent cinema and tonight hosting Jamie xx, puppet master of digital sound.
This “music concert as religious experience” paradigm (similar to the “tribalism of professional sports as a kind of religious practice” paradigm) isn’t particularly novel, though it does a find a reluctant new prophet in the form of Jamie Smith, the man behind the turntable. Smith’s recent rise to both commercial and critical acclaim as Jamie xx represents another swing in the pendulum of popular music taste. He first burst onto the scene as producer of The xx, the indie rock band responsible for injecting a pinch of bitter British minimalism into the late 2000’s as a rejection of the soaring melodrama of emo-infused alt rock that had established itself in the mainstream. In contrast to the fuzzy drunk purrs of Kings of Leon or the Napoleonic theatrics of Coldplay, The xx’s eponymous 2009 debut was street smart, sober-cold and infectiously pragmatic. (Kid Cudi was performing a similar feat in American hip hop with Man on the Moon, an equally chilly, though certainly less sober affair than The xx’s breakthrough record.)
It’s no coincidence that Smith has adopted the surname of the act that launched him. The prodigal son’s debut album, In Colour, feels like a similar pumping of the breaks, a throwback to the British club music of the 1990’s in response to an American electronic scene that has answered Kanye West’s generation-defining question of “Can we get much higher?” with a resounding and repetitive, bass-booming “yes.” While mainstream EDM continues to be sucked into the carnivalesque of Vegas-oriented frat-bro culture, consistently reaching for crazier and crazier “drops” of sonic free fall, Jamie xx is more or less just casually chilling in his black t-shirts and jeans, quietly triumphant.
During his show he never once asked the crowd to jump or bounce or get ready for any kind of face-melting bass-explosion. In fact, he didn’t say anything, or even appear to have a microphone with him on stage. The lights of the venue — spectacularly simple in their minimal use of strobing and consistent emphasis on full, single color flashes — rarely ever shined upon the performer, again suggesting a throwback to early the British club scene as if this were less of a performance than a party, with Jamie Smith just playing his assigned role as Jamie xx.
The Fox Theatre was an ideal venue for Smith’s music, both logistically and thematically. The PA system was impressively dynamic and well balanced, offering clarity for both treble and low frequencies, allowing the strength of Jamie xx’s sound design to manifest itself in its entirety. Smith’s magic resides in his ability to wander without ever being lost: his music often reaches out into disco, dub and trip-hop before returning to a classic 4/4 house beat, making it simple yet effective. His ability to meld genres was especially evident live, as he bounced from recent collaborations with Gil Scott Heron and Young Thug to classic UK drum-and-bass tracks.
The only weak moments of the show were the times when he stuck with one genre for too long, often repetitive disco-infused house. These parts of the sets were lacking in emotional weight, largely because of how straightforward they were in their mimicry of UK house. But through this, these lapses also worked to demonstrate the secret to Jamie xx’s wide-ranging emotional appeal: it’s not so much that he comes out of a British tradition as it is that he tries so very hard to reach back into one that he was never truly apart of. It’s this melancholic nostalgia, a feeling that you’ve lost something you never even had, that provides Jamie xx with his emotive power, and made the Fox Theatre such a fitting venue, given its cultural value as a historic movie theatre in which very few living people have actually ever seen a movie.
Jamie xx readily admits to his fascination with an older British club scenes that he never had a chance to experience. This longing for a history that isn’t one’s own helps to provide that adolescent, romanticized feel that has made Jamie xx’s brand of electronic music so widely-appealing. “Gosh,” the opening track of In Colour (and likely my favorite song that he performed) is structured almost identically to the opening track of Burial’s seminal self-titled 2006 debut, “Distant Lights.” Both tracks begin with a chanting high-hat/snare drum combo, but whereas Burial fleshes out his song with a haunting, subterranean bass, Jamie xx looks skyward, a single curious synthesizer drifting about the closing half of the track, wandering into the romantic unknown of deep dark space.
The industrial cityscape that early house music sought to document into a fragmented soundscape has become a place of spiritual refuge, the host of that utopic, all-night rave. Jamie xx’s music, like his show, is not only an attempt to halt the obnoxious steroid-izing of modern electronic music – it’s a reach back into the past, to that mythical party that may or may not have actually happened, but is somehow still felt in its melancholic hangover today.
This may be the core irony of Jamie xx: his attempt to go back into a distant past party makes his current music much more appropriate for an after party than it is for a rave, less for drinking and dancing than it is for smoking a cigarette on the street-side curb, head dipped in half-hearted reflection. This is probably why his music has found the popular success it has – why the Fox Theatre was packed, and sold out months in advance. And, at the same time, this is probably why he still seems quite detached and borderline sad in all of his interviews, and prefers to dwell in the shadows of the stage, rather than in its spotlight – he’s still conducting his own personal search for that perfect party, occasionally documenting his best efforts for the rest of the world to hear, allowing us a glimpse at his dream.
Of course, we all still danced — and were happy — friends, strangers, American pop fans and British house fans alike. That’s part of the religious ritual, when strangers who have taken different paths to the same destination come together in an extended moment of collective movement, dancing, jamming, smiling and every so often looking over at each other and giving both lifelong friends or passing strangers that look, that look that says “holy shit, we’re experiencing the same thing at the same time.” Jamie xx’s dancefloor melancholia helps to provide these kinds of small, simple epiphanies, where you feel like you have a little window into someone else’s life for just a single moment, for just right now.
And then it was over. We all left, wandering into nostalgia ourselves as the house lights came back on, the doors were opened, and the streets were flooded with once co-disciples, now restored as basic strangers, returning to the divergent paths from whence we came.
Our own party, fueled by Jamie xx’s search for that perfect party, had ended. But unlike Jamie himself, we get to say we were actually there, even if only for a night.