Back in June we went to see the incomparable Reggie Watts perform at Central Park Summerstage.
I think Reggie is one of the most exciting artists of our time, but it’s difficult to verbalize exactly what he does. His performances combine improvisational music and absurdist standup comedy into a free-associative yet oddly coherent and impactful whole. The best way to get an idea of what I’m talking about is just to see the man in action.
Reggie on Conan:
“Wax and Wane,” a video by Jake Lodwick:
See a video deconstructing the process behind songs like this. The delay/looping unit is a Line 6 DL4 delay modeler.
A ballad, Big Ass Purse:
A longer performance at Google:
Reggie’s most produced video blends his usual disjointed lunacy with a loving parody of hip-hop. It’s called F*ck Sh*t Stack, and obviously, the language is very explicit. And hilarious.
Reggie on Radiolab:
Hear many more tracks on this Spotify playlist. I’m particularly awestruck by the fifteen-minute “My History Thus Far.” It’s a wonderful autobiography unto itself, but if you want more background, check out this New York Magazine profile.
Improvised words and electronic music belong together
Barbara Singer and I had a somewhat similar idea to do completely improvised electronic music, and to combine it with improvisational comedy. Reggie’s method is better. First of all, instead of using canned beats like we did, he beatboxes everything himself. Secondly, he sticks to a pretty strict hip-hop/R&B song form: eight and sixteen bar sections, intros, verses, choruses, breakdown, outtro. The structure gives his improvisation a solid skeleton, keeping the music tightly enjoyable while the words go off in whatever random directions.
I went through my free jazz phase, but Reggie’s approach is way cooler than free jazz. Reggie is accessible and pleasurable in a way that free jazz only very rarely is. Relatedly, I like improv comedy as much as the next guy, but combining it with singing and rapping pushes it onto a completely different level. Reggie feels less like an entertainer and more like a transmitter for the collective unconscious of the culture. In a prehistoric culture he probably would have been a shaman or a prophet. It helps that he looks the part.
Studies of musicians who improvise while having their brains scanned show a connection between melodic improvisation and speech.
[Improvising] led to a surge in activity in a variety of brain areas, including parts of the premotor cortex and, most intriguingly, the inferior frontal gyrus. The premotor activity is simply an echo of execution — the novel musical patterns, after all, must still be translated by the fingers. The inferior frontal gyrus, however, has primarily been investigated for its role in language — it includes Broca’s area, which is essential for the production of speech. Why, then, is it so active when people create music on the piano? The scientists argue that expert musicians create new melodies by relying on the same mental muscles used to create a sentence; every note is another word.
Given these results, it’s not surprising to me that the richest improvisation combines music and language. The best jazz solos have a speech-like aspect. Freestyle hip-hop makes the speech-music connection literal, but suppresses melody. By combining hip-hop with melodic singing and discursive lectures, Reggie is hitting every brain region at once. When we laugh at his routines, it’s not because his stuff is “funny” in the traditional sense (though it can be.) I think we’re laughing at the delightful surprise of having so many new connections between our own brain regions being lit up at once.
So, the show we saw
Apparently it was taped for a Comedy Central special, that’s something to look forward to. As you can see in the videos, there’s a whole dance component to Reggie’s act, which includes waving his fro around hypnotically. It had been pouring buckets before the set started and it was still humid, so Reggie’s hair steamed visibly under the lights.
The beauty of the live looping is how unpredictable and context-sensitive it is. Sometimes crowd noise got recorded along with whatever Reggie was singing or beatboxing, adding to the texture. On one of the songs involving piano, he overdubbed two layers that were slightly out of sync with each other. Instead of erasing one and trying again, he just let it run, giving the piece a nice organic lopsidedness.
While most of the content came straight from Reggie’s subconscious, there was some pop culture too. He did a flawless parody of Radiohead. He shouted out nerd culture several times too, making references to rolling for initiative and Seven Of Nine. He aimed a surprisingly earnest lecture to computer hackers, entreating them to find something constructive to do.
Reggie’s best material went from the ridiculous to the sublime. He started one of his hip-hop tunes by shouting out all the boroughs – “Is Brooklyn in the house? Is Queens in the house?” That led to a rapped discourse on New York City, its neighborhoods, the way the streets down in the financial district and the Village are all oddly laid out because it was before the grid system, then the Dutch, the native Americans, the wooly mammoths, the formation of the earth, and all the way back to the big bang, which he described as “a black hole emitting radiation.” Which: wow.
In general, Reggie’s act feels like he’s explaining to aliens how humans work. I sometimes feel like that’s my job with this blog. It’s a thing with people who grow up between different cultures. In my case, it’s the conflict between my Jewish and Protestant ancestors. Reggie’s case is more complex, because he has a French mother and an African-American father. His Obama-like chameleon quality is the result of an Obama-like upbringing. He probably feels like an alien himself most of the time — too black for white people, too white for black people, too European for America, too American for Europe, too musical for straight pop, too pop for the academy. He and I share a fondness for Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature,” which is all about the alien perspective on humans. I bet he likes Björk’s “Human Behaviour” too.
The crowd was heavy on the hipsters, but more varied in race and class and age than you’d think. The people around me were uniformly enraptured, laughing at the random non sequiturs, bopping to the songs. The only exception was a woman standing front and center at the foot of the stage, who abruptly stormed out two thirds of the way through the set, angrily exclaiming, “This is not funny!”
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