Stuart, the comic-book seller in the TV comedy The Big Bang Theory, at one point, as sexy Penny steps away from his counter, tightly mouths “I love you”. It’s something between a private whisper and an open confession, with pain anyway. The canned laughter doesn’t hold back.
What’s so funny about that? Oh, that we should all be able to relate to it – the desire of what cannot be requited, underdog lust like Weltschmerz, the old horror of beauty and the beast.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice works on something similar – it all turns on us recognising what is common to us all. We’re supposed to be satisfied that someone else feels just like us – and, because the novel is a world-wide hit, that the whole world must feel like us. Not about anything we’ve been publicly conscious of – just what we allow each other to privately admit. It is the private pleasure about a common good – one that novelists, poets, screen-writers, even song-writers, have all been able to reliably bank upon, over the centuries.
And then there was Duff. Let me detail here a few songs of Duff’s that don’t just deny this formula, they break it – and then transcend it. It’s an idiosyncratic formula of Duff’s you might say, but the predictability stops there. A common approach to Duff’s songwriting involves, yes, the confessionalism we, the masses, expect of great artists. Why? It’s all theatre anyway, as Bowie’s taught us about self and culture – that our need for sincerity is satisfied by artifice anyway – so what was our need to begin with? Duff’s lesson is related but different and as unique. He gives us a confession of extreme feelings we’re pressed not to relate with – feelings about being with each other that, we’re surprised to suspect, are not just Duff’s … No openly shared scenarios of emotion but what, if others saw them, they might have something contrary to say about, with “Triple-O” or Rambo in mind. These feelings don’t form a meme, at least not one that thrives on sunlight. But they are unpassable offers to us anyway. Here are a few to examine, à la Duff.
These are emotional scenarios, the “bio-semantic narratives” a cad would say, that we do not quietly admit, at least not as openly much as themes of impossible “beauty vs puny” desire, and pride-powered prejudice. (Austen’s heroine doesnt even, in the end, learn that much from the exposure of her prejudice – which should be more about herself and love than about self and pride. So much for the value of common feeling.) That Duff has turned each of these odd feeling-themes into a song implies his faith that they – weird twists of spirit and marginalia of mind that they might be – are not only his own. He expresses and maybe even celebrates here his speciality; and hurrah to that. But he must also be saying, all the while, that these phrases always merit our attention – not just because we are of that mind ourselves (as Austen and Bang Theory trade on), but because we care so much not to realise these things – as if denial was ultimtately important, as we crossed the brow of St Peter. Duff, ever the mystic, offers all these ultimate lessons to us all year long, in at least 233 different forms, from Dracula and Tooth Fairy fables to Molotov cocktails and explosive party chatter.
(See also Duff’s "Lost in my Room", "Duffodoll", and "Killing this Affair".)
The title here quotes Duff’s "Logical questions to God".
Now all this could be seen as quite a contrast to Duffo’s work. Jeff Duff was quite animated this evening, not colouring his voice alone; also offering a few radical body moves. Personally, there’s nothing left to see or hear after Duff’s opening “Star Man”, when he appears with golden angel wings and goes off on octavial flights like a dove catching galactial breezes. But he follows this with more subtley wonderful performances: like the simple offer of his figure in a new leotard – a b/w horizontally striped number, which he later worked well with a light jacket). The other performances on the night offered their individual takes on “giving to the audience.” Perhaps most distinctively to Duff’s approach, these all had the character of seeking a muse – by strapping on the leather, slapping on the lippy, hauling up the fish-nets, and so on. Compare that to how Duffo genially handled a costume mistake – his falling fly in his opening numbers. He gave us shy aghast when first rectifying it, mid-song, and let us know, at the end, that this costume was “a work in progress”. Most people would surely have fallen down dead-headed at the problem. Anyway, here is the difference between an artist who offers only himself when performing something so unique as Bowie’s oeuvre, versus others who reliably give us the oeuvre’s most public face. It’s a passing point, but the lady seated next to me, who knew nothing of Duff’s own work, was somehow compelled to tell me, during the intermission, that she thought Jeff Duff was the most interesting and talented of performers so far. I tried to continue the conversation as best I could.
