Eclectic Company: How Is A Columnist Like Gomer Pyle? Complain, Complain, Complain!

As I write this, I’m listening intently to the Helsinki Complaints Choir on youtube, tunefully voicing their specific mundane and unexpected grievances which are simultaneously translated in a running caption at the bottom of the video screen: “Old forests are cut down and turned into toilet paper, and still all the toilets are always out of paper . . . We always lose to Sweden in hockey and Eurovision* . . . Why do people never agree with me? . . . tramline 3 smells of pee. It’s not fair.” A sister Choir from Birmingham, England, singing to a different tune, laments: “I don’t like bad hair days, and my beard it won’t grow . . . why does my computer take so very long, why can’t the bus driver talk to anyone, and why is the beer so expensive in town? I want my money back, my job’s like a cul-de-sac, and the bus is too infrequent at 6:30 . . . and I’m thirsty.”

I only heard about it earlier this year, but the Complaints Choir project has been around since 2005, when Finnish husband-and-wife performance artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen thought they might use the “hot air” generated by the incessant complaining of the people around them in a positive fashion. The Finnish word Valituskuoro translates roughly as “an endless chorus of complainers droning on and on about this grumble or that grouse” which led the clever couple to take the term literally and bring a complaints choir to life. After an out of town tryout with a group in England, the Kalleinens “collected the pet peeves and angst-ridden pleas of people in Helsinki and then [authored] this choral work around the list of complaints” to music composed by Esko Grundström. Other choirs with other complaints have sprung from the project, with different music, different sources of resentment and discontent, and many of them have put videos with translation captions on youtube.

Just to give you an example of how a Complaints Choir gets to work, imagine a group of seventy redheaded music writers singing lyrics like this: “This column is too frequent, the pay is too low, too few know what ‘eclectic’ means, and nobody appreciates my brilliance”† as the chorus to a litany of some irksome moments in the writers’ lives. Can you see us? No, well get yourself to youtube, or to the artists’ website, www.complaintschoir.org. I love the Helsinki group, am quite fond of the Birmingham and Tokyo Choirs and just discovered the plucky Canadians, but all of the assemblages from Singapore to Chicago offer some interesting irritations and agonies. You might get cheered up listening to the junk other people complain about, or be inspired to convene your own complaints choir because after all misery loves company, and there’s always schadenfreude — malicious joy from the misfortunes of others.

See, it’s been that kind of day, what with the superfast internet I had installed just the other day already down to a crawl, and to fix it, the exchange of old modem for new and reconfiguring the whole bloody WiFi system in the basement, then running upstairs to check the computers there too; and what with iTunes losing ALL my downloaded music and erasing ALL my playlists just as I was sitting down to write this column, and no one to talk to at iTunes until tomorrow morning (at 8 am, who is alive at 8 am?); and what with my printer suddenly chewing up every piece of paper I put into it. Besides today started with a visit to the dentist! and about 12 calls to the New Orleans traffic court because they suddenly woke up and put out a BOLO on me for a ticket I don’t remember getting in 2002!!?!! for driving without child safety restraints (I certainly have no memory of THAT ten years later . . .). Whew! What a day, huh? But you know what? Just complaining about it makes me feel better already!

On the other hand, the POSSLQ is dazzled:

Some singers depend upon the beauty of their voices. You can’t listen to Joan Baez or Nina Simone without wanting to hear more of their singing. You might prefer they cover good songs, like Joan Baez singing Robbie Robertson’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” or Nina Simone singing Brecht/Weill’s “Pirate Jenny,” but I’d pay to hear either of them sing “Yankee Doodle.” And either can be fully enjoyed on a CD. Other singers attract us through their lyrics; they may be funny, like Christine Lavin, or serious like Phil Ochs, but we listen primarily to their message. Again, recordings do full justice to these performers.

And then there’s Zoe Lewis. She has a nice voice, and she writes smart, funny lyrics, but anybody who knows her works only from recordings has been cheated. In person, Zoe generates enough energy to light up a small city or large concert hall. She can’t keep still, she must move, turn, and jump or her energy will consume her. She’s the ultimate little girl, full of mischief but quite certain she’ll be forgiven because she’s so lovable. She doesn’t invite us into her world, she pulls us into it, whether we want to enter or not. But we want to enter, because her world is so obviously filled with fun. We become her co-conspirators, her accomplices and allies in the great war against taking ourselves too seriously. And when her show is done and we must leave her world for the gray grown-up world we live in, we’re grateful for our too short sojourn in hers.

* A weird annual international pop song contest started in 1956 — featuring acts like ABBA, Celine Dion, Julio Iglesias and Riverdance — whereby countries, represented by their respective public broadcasters, participate in one television show, to be transmitted simultaneously in all represented nations.

† Actually, my enlightened editor Lauren de A appreciates me. ;>).

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