Who is Seth Kauffman and why does he have it all figured out anyway? Google says he’s some sort of doctor? a surgeon of I don’t know what. Or maybe he is the VP for Marketing with Pepsi Co. That’s what they call it, you know. Pepsi Co. Some wizard came up with that and got paid. From what I remember of the search I did, the Seth Kauffman we are looking for is the band Floating Action. (Kind of like how Stevie Wonder is a band.) I’d like to tell you more about Seth, but I’m 32,000 feet over Little Rock and the only thing I can access on the Internet for free is Facebook. It’ll cost $11.95 to see anything else.
Nothing comes for free. Angi Ruth West can graph it for you. Those three nights in San Diego are going to come out of your ass at some point. Life keeps rolling on and you’re missing something while you snack on cheese beside the rooftop pool. Are you sure you want to pay that price? On the other hand, if you don’t pay the cost, the opportunity to make something out of yourself goes winging on by while you’re stuck in Benton selling mufflers. Not that there is anything wrong with selling mufflers, if that’s your thing.
Or making music? Is that your thing? Can you find that Kauffman-esque balance between making music and making something out of yourself? On her latest record,”Opportunity Cost” Angi West tries to cross over the chasm between the two using only the tensile strength of her voice for a wire to walk on. Maybe she wants to impress us by doing it blindfolded too.
Ok, maybe not blindfolded, but conscious of the fact that what we see may not be what is real. “Boot” starts off the record by outlining this very problem and the joke of trying to tell a story by recounting observations, as if our observations were equivalent to the truth. Getting over the gap is going to take something more. If we are going to move forward, we have to accept the risk that something terribly bad could, and probably will, happen. Being honest about this, as West points out in “Utility,” opens up the possibility that something tremendously good could happen too. But we get distracted by externalities we cannot control. Like the weather.
Far better to focus on what we can control, like our willingness to trust the people who are foolish enough to trust us. It’s the least we can do, right? What’s the worst thing that can happen? That someone may love us and break our hearts anyway is more to be expected than feared. So the real problem is that they or we might go away and never come back. Death makes the best subject for a good hillbilly song.
“Floating Action” doesn’t sound much like a hillbilly band, and a woman who simultaneously pursues an MBA and a singing career doesn’t sound much like a hillbilly singer. There is, however, enough of Loretta Lynn in Angi West’s voice to make you wonder what her father did for a living. Pairing it with the hum and melody of Kauffman’s synthesized settings make me want to coin the term “technobilly” if such a term doesn’t already exist and if I were presumptious enough to thow it out there. And why not? Fear of rock-n-roll critic death of course.
But I’ve died before and it hasn’t killed me. At least not for long. West artfully weaves the chemical and biological process of our dying and being recreated into a solemn liberation in “Aggregate.” Whatever the worst thing was that happened to us, it becomes essential to who we are now. Hopefully that is something greater than we were before. At least it is different, and whatever kind of death we experienced isn’t the end of that story.
So what is? Love, of course. That’s what you’d expect to hear on a perfect West Coast night on the roof beside the pool eating cheese. It’s harder to say but much more reassuring to hear in the icy cold of an Appalachian February. If love gets the last word, then maybe we can make it over that chasm. With the voice of steel as our guide we can get to a place that maybe won’t be free of disappointment but it will be real. In the process we may have made something of ourselves or we may have made some music or maybe both. Either way, it will be more than enough.