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‘P
lay normal music!” ■ The woman yelling this at Neil Young
stood three rows away from him at the Rosemont Theater
in 2004. Between each song, as he spoke to the crowd
about the next chapter in “Greendale,” the theatrical rock
play he was presenting (complete with actors and rudi-
mentary set pieces), the woman behind me loudly made her demand. For more
than an hour. He, and everyone else, should understand she wanted none of this.
■ She wanted the hits. “Normal music.”
For all the good it brings, success can
also become an obstacle to advancing the
creative impulse. Audiences are stubborn,
and they will often complain if their favor-
ite rock auteur decides to scratch an itch in
public that produces a work that is not
reflective of the familiar fare he or she may
have produced decades earlier. Social
media has not helped but has only created
an echo chamber for obstinacy. The great
irony is that most agree, in theory at least,
that great artists are inherently restless and
operate by discovering a voice, listening to
it and responding when it whispers in
their ear. The best we can hope for is that
the art it produces challenges us to think,
see or experience the familiar. If we are
entertained, even better.
But in Chicago, we’d better be enter-
tained. And it had better not be super
weird.
That was the kind of dark cloud Billy
Corgan entered late last month when he
announced plans to perform electronic
music inspired by the 1922 novel “Siddhar-
tha” by German writer Hermann Hesse.
The announcement, made over his Face-
book page and the website for his Madame
ZuZu’s tea shop, made it clear this would
be a quiet affair in his Highland Park shop,
streamed online for fans. Tickets were
offered free, first-come, first-served. For a
rock star like Corgan, who has sold mil-
lions of records worldwide in his role as
frontman of the Smashing Pumpkins, the
event was obviously a personal, not com-
mercial, endeavor by someone who just
wanted to share his love for a novel that
spoke to him.
But Chicago wouldn’t have it. “Preten-
tious,” railed Tribune columnist Rex
Huppke, in a ludicrously rigid opinion
piece that ran before “Siddhartha” even
opened and that subsequently inspired
Corgan to ban the newspaper from cov-
ering the event. Huppke scolded Corgan
for attempting to perform for eight hours,
an act he described as adolescent, unlike
what is considered normal by “pragma-
tists” like himself, “people who’ve reached
a stage in life where intellectual pretense is
no longer necessary and a rerun of ‘Law &
Order: SVU’ can be artistically preferable
to eight hours of interpretive synthesizer
gurgling.”
Similar vitriol showed up in Chicagoist
(“sleep-inducing adventure”), Pitchfork
and the AV Club. Vice blamed Highland
Park: “Clearly, Billy is beloved here. In
Chicago, he might have been heckled or
the room might have quickly drained.”
Even Jonathon Brandmeier piled on, say-
ing “The snoot needle is spinning out of
control.”
The reaction, not just negative but par-
ticularly mean-spirited, reflected a similar
carpet-bombing that writer Rachel Shteir
received following her Sunday New York
Times book review last year that dared
suggest Chicagoans were thin-skinned
about their city, and “trapped by its … limi-
tations,” particularly boosterism. Again,
many of Chicago’s most respected com-
mentators, including Carol Marin and Neil
Steinberg, dashed out reaction pieces that
can only be described as shrill and hys-
terical.
What’s going on here? Why do many of
those who profess to speak on behalf of
Chicago speak so condemningly when the
city’s shortcomings are challenged? Why
do these voices sound so parental — just
like that woman at the Neil Young concert
— whenever they are nudged outside their
comfort zone? If Chicago proudly bran-
dishes such steel-plated nicknames like
“Chi-raq,” “Chi-beria,” and “City of Big
Shoulders,” why are its loudest, self-ap-
pointed protectors so frail?
A lifetime here means I’ve grown accus-
tomed to this larger attitude and have
always found it an embarrassment, espe-
cially because I’m familiar with the rich
tradition of artistic outsiders that Chicago
has attracted and groomed. These have
included the burgeoning group of young
writers — including Edgar Lee Masters,
Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg —
who established a colony in the building
ruins of the 1893 Columbian Exposition
starting in 1910; the freethinkers who
coalesced around the Dill Pickle Club for
decades; the folk music radicals who estab-
lished the Old Town School of Folk Music
in 1957; the Chicago Imagists, who
emerged from the School of the Art In-
stitute in the 1960s; the free jazz musicians
who founded the Association for the Ad-
vancement of Creative Musicians in 1965;
the avant-garde theater makers of the
Curious Theatre Branch and Mary-Arrchie
Theatre Co.; and the countless left-field
writers, cartoonists, filmmakers, photogra-
phers, musicians and artists who have
created difficult, confrontational and ulti-
mately acclaimed work far below the
scope of the major media gatekeepers.
Which is to say, Chicago is, and always
has been, wonderfully weird. Even though
“Chicago” has refused to recognize that
The enlightenment of Billy CorganBY MARK GUARINO
Michael Tercha/Tribune photo