Sing a Song of Sadness

a pocket full of thoughts about the silly movie Sing.

The other day I was on a TV station in Houston talking about Astroworld, and the superscript over me said, “Crowd Control Expert.” I’m not a crowd control expert by any means, unless having read “Crowds and Power” by Elias Canetti makes you one, but what I am is, an expert on crowd scenes in novels and the media. Here are a few such that I mentioned in my PhD. thesis titled Rock Crowds and Power (Stanford, 2011):

*  “Crowds” by Baudelaire (poem)

*  The scene where they retreat from Borodino in the novel “War and Peace”

*  The photograph “May Day,” by Andreas Gursky (below)

*  The Quidditch World Cup scene in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”

*  The sardine scene in “Finding Nemo”

*  An ad for Verizon wireless

It looks sort of ridiculous written out like that, but Ph.D. theses are sort of ridiculous, at least, in literature. (Or maybe in anything – I have a friend who did one in Physics and his advisor told him one of his chapters was bunk, so he waited six months, resubmitted with no changes whatsoever, and his advisor said it was great. And I fear that is typical.) My PhD. thesis was 438 pages of me jamming together pretty much everything I could think of about crowds, and then theorizing something or other – a something or other that in fact came to be at Astroworld, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is just that I filed ten years ago but I still go around looking for crowd scenes in the media, and there was a great one in the movie “Sing 2” which I saw last night.

“Sing 2,” like its predecessor “Sing,” is about a bunch of animated creatures who want to put on a show, more or less like the ones my kid used to do every year at her summer camp which we called “Air Band,” at which all the little campers would mime and dance to popular music. In “Sing 2,” the show depends on the promoter, a koala bear called Buster (played by Matthew McConaughey), convincing a washed-up rock star to come out of retirement and save the day. Guess who the washed-up rock star is? I know, right…so many choices! But…wait for it…it’s…BONO.

No need for me to belabor the rest of the plot for you any further, because you can guess what happens. Suffice to say, the final scene has Bono hiding in the wings while a gi-normous arena full of people sing “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in unison to lure him out. It’s a silly movie and a trite scene and yet, there is a certain truth to it, because I – and probably you -- have been in many an arena singing “I.S.H.F.W.I.L.F” in unison with a huge crowd of people while Bono and co. stood shyly on stage drinking it all in.

In other words, “Sing 2” recreates a very real moment that many people have experienced, and it’s a moment that is never less than heart stopping. It’s even kind of heart stopping in “Sing 2” and that’s saying a lot because it’s really not a good movie.

However. I’ve been thinking a lot about such moments since I went to see the Rolling Stones last October. (You can read a review of my experiences at it here.) Participating in crowd experiences used to be a pretty normative experience for lots of young Americans, and, as I argue in my thesis and my book based on it, that’s in part because experience music collectively has a particular and important valence that humanity really benefits from, and in part because it allowed us to participate emotionally in history.

But of course life here in the Corona-verse colors such moments and makes them hit differently – in real life, of course, but even more so when depicted in art. “Sing 2” is a good example: I choked up at this scene despite it being ensconced in an exceedingly dumb movie, and I can imagine that more such scenes in better movies could create an even more intense experience – a potpourri of memory, community, and collective joy.