So, Wednesday night, while 99.9% of the Parisian male population was watching Monaco lose to Porto in the Europeans Champions League championship match, I was with the other .1% at La Cigale to see Blonde Redhead. I guess Blonde Redhead and soccer don't have a big crossover audience. The concert itself was very tame, very cool, very distant. But it was also very sexy. For some reason the sensuousness of the music doesn't translate as well on a recording as on stage. And although I was the same race as the vast majority of the other bobbing heads, I felt just as alien here as I did at Youssou N'dour and for one ironic reason. I'm a blonde. A curly-haired, natural blonde. Like a buoy in a sea of brunette, I danced when there dreamy ballads turned into real punk rock, while the others, lobotomized by weed and self-conscious introversion continued nodding at the same slow pace, occasionally grinding to a halt to ruminate. The band may be called Blonde Redhead, but not one member of the band (a japanese singer and two Italian brothers) can claim either of these labels and their audience, composed mainly of straight-haired brunettes, bangs falling behind their glasses into their eyes, messenger bags sprinkled generously throughout the crowd, happily plays into the paradox.

I always thought of music as being the most personal and self-defining of all art forms. It has this strange power to bring people together. Social groups (and to some extent socio-economic groups) can often be lumped together with a quick look a record collections and MP3 libraries. Headbangers, teeny boppers, goths, punks, opera queens, alternative culture, party kids, jazz cats. These labels that have come encompass a number of personality, political, linguistic, and fashion characteristics, were nonetheless derived from common musical tastes. My group of high school girlfriends was bonded together through a common love of Ani DiFranco, constantly challenged by my second string of artsy girlfriends who made their case for Tori Amos, or the artsy guys who opted for Rage Against the Machine. You can't really say the same about litterature or the visual arts. These tastes seem to focus much more on individualism. Why then does music seem to have this immense double power to form such strong bonds between people, while also creating huge rifts between the groups? Or maybe it is just because I am a music person that I notice this. Maybe if I was more of a book person, I would see how groups form around the appreciation of urban fiction or fantasy or the Beats. But still...