SOUNDTRACK: DIET CIG-Tiny Desk Concert #641 (August 2, 2017).
The guys at NPR have raved about Diet Cig for quite some time. Especially their live show. They played at a small club near me and I thought about going but I couldn’t make it. So I was happy to hear they played a Tiny Desk so I could see what all the fuss was about.
Diet Cig is yet another duo:
with drummer Noah Bowman propelling the high kicks and constant pogo bounce of guitarist and singer Alex Luciano. With a candied voice, she sings of being on the cusp of adolescence — but underneath that bright veneer Alex sings truth to power, and about what it means to be a punk in a skirt, dealing with disrespectful souls. “I think you’re the kind of guy / who would meet me at a party / and forget my name / and try to take me home all the same,” she sings on “Sixteen.”
And while the songs do have some angst, it’s the incredibly happy infectious nature of Luciano that made me instantly fall in love with them and berate myself for not going to see them in a small club when I had the chance–I see they’re selling out shows in London now.
They play 3 songs in 9 minutes (and the last one is pretty extended because Luciano is dancing all over the place: on desks, on the drums, everywhere. None of the songs are terribly complex, but that’s fine. They’re charming pop punk nuggets
“Sixteen” is what gets the parental warning. Its starts off slowly:
when I was sixteen I dated a boy with my own name / it was weird in the back of his truck / moaning my own name while trying to fuck
then it picks up and Alex starts bouncing around. And although the song is kind of sad, “I’ll never barbecue again, and you can keep all of your shitty friends” she can’t stop smiling all the way through.
“Tummy Ache” is when she really starts dancing–doing high kicks and bouncing around all while playing nonstop guitar. The lyrics are simple but great: “I don’t need a man to hold my hand / and that’s just something you’ll never understand.”
“Harvard” is the first song they wrote. It has the amusing chorus of “fuck your ivy league sweater.” She bounces all over the place, climbs on the desk, steps over to the drums and plays the last chords from the bass drum. As the final chord rings out she reaches into her fanny pack and throws confetti all over herself as she jumps down.
The set is delightful and adorable and boy, I hope when they come back to the area it’s to another small club.
[READ: August 2, 2017] “New World”
This story centers around a global event that I know nothing about. That combined with some confusing lineage angles made this story less satisfying for me than it should have been.
The story is about the independence of Ceylon (currently Sri Lanka) from Britain. The story presumes we will know a few details about this event (I knew none: Independence from Britain occurred in 1948, but had a convoluted history trying to attain full independence). I assume knowing that is useful to the story.
But for our story the impact is more local. When the new prime minister Don Senanayake spoke first in English and then in Sinhala–no one knew what he was saying–but they all heard the word Ceylon. Sir William (no last name given) left the country on the eve of independence and he left all of his property to Mr Balakumar, the Tamil manager.
The story is written from a “we” narrator: “We didn’t see Selvakumar approach.” The “we” are married ladies (who mustn’t be too old, although they do mention husbands at one point). They are mostly interested in Selvakumar’s story.
This character was fascinating but slightly confusing–at one point he says of himself: “How can an Indian bastard be prime minister?” Selvakumar worked for Mr Balakumar, and the man often whipped the boy for doing a poor job (I loved the grotesque detail that he was beaten so hard with the sugar cane that he “smelled like brunt molasses.”
But the real conflict for Selvakumar is with a boy named Muthu. Muthu, they said, would grow up to be like his father Mr Padmanathan who thought of himself as a big boss. Muthu was 10 and that was the only reason his father allowed his son to have a friendship an “Indian coolie.” Muthu would teach Selvakumar whatsoever he learned in school. The thing that stuck with Selvakumar the most was Marco Polo and his travels.
While the village was celebrating its independence, a storm came through the village. The rain came hard and fast and began to knock down the poorly made houses. It flooded the ground, which turned into raging torrents. When the rain subsided, the people slept “by the ruins of our homes.” And yet despite the destruction, they knew that Independence would be a more lasting and powerful event for them.
As they assessed the damage, it became clear that Selvakumar was missing. Had he been killed? Everyone scoured he area for him.
But I found this part really confusing. The main part of the story was full of so much detail that I was really surprised by how unstraightforward the end was. .
This sentence, once unpacked, makes sense but reading it in context created so many visuals that I couldn’t parse it right away.
By the time we discovered the yellow-tipped butterfly on the fat corpse, Muthu’s father had rounded the hillside, dragging his son by the ear with one hand and comforting the wailing Mrs. Balakumar with the other.”
So much is going on there.
Suffice it to say that someone has died. But something else largely unexpected has happened as well.
The end of the story sees the women imagining their future and the future of the boys in the village as well.
There was a lot going on in this story and I felt like some things came just out of the blue. It was strange how the story begin speaking of the future as one thing but then things changed dramatically after the storm. Although apparently not because of the storm.
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I have been wanting to see Diet Cig since I first saw their Tiny Desk Concert back in 2017. Things are always conspiring for me to not see them. This time it was that I already had tickets for the Waxahatchee show the same night. This was going to be a hard choice, honestly. Because I had seen Waxahatchee and really liked the new album (plus I already had the tickets!.
