What Means the World to You: 2015 in Musical Memories
November: Chandra — “Kate”
November 14th was a normal Brooklyn Saturday, with nice enough weather and plenty of things to do. It wasn’t so surprising to find a matinee show in a record store, featuring a musician who wasn’t very famous when she recorded as a kid in the early 1980s and definitely isn’t now, sparsely attended. There was a time when I held the dumb certainty that seeing older returning artists—who just must be desperate to recapture a bit of faded glory—was a waste of time. Now, I try to see every impossibly lost act I can and emerge, more often than not, with a sense of borrowed triumph. But go to enough of these things, and you’ll come out feeling melancholy eventually. This wasn’t one of those.
The circumstances of Chandra Oppenheim’s short music career are remarkable. As the daughter of downtown artist Dennis Oppenheim, she was born entrenched in Manhattan’s great multi-discipline cultural renaissance of the late 70s. It’s certainly unusual, but not unfathomable that he might broker the help of The Model Citizens, a steadily gigging, John Cale produced, New York New Wave band, to fully realize Chandra’s pre-teen songwriting. The music that resulted is pretty unreal, though. I went there, almost entirely, to hear “Kate”, the song I consider the sharpest, realest song ever written and recorded by an actual kid. It’s not beatific and sweet, but sour, petty, and jealous. In it, Chandra sings her plain, spiteful, twelve-year-old feelings towards a classmate who shines just a little bit brighter. “There’s a girl named Kate, and she thinks she’s really great. But she’s not!” It is, in a word, childish. But who else, in 1980 or now, stood behind that sort of universal, unsentimental, unexpressed adolescent unease? Who allowed it the weight of the era’s storied punk rock?
Chandra is the opposite of a wayward child star on stage now. She seemed chic and put together, like the city-dwelling sophisticate we’d all like to think we’re just on the cusp of becoming. Her band was light but killer, bubbling with a smooth Stereolab slide and some smiley ESG funk. For “Kate” she brought her small, adorably pajama-ed daughter onstage, and gave her a mic to sing right beside her. It was an inspired way to imbue the song with the currency of its original experience, and not just remember it on cue. It felt like a parent validating her own adolescent feelings, while granting her own kid a degree of connection by singing along to her own honest imperfections. Watching from the balcony, I felt weirdly validated too. I left content, for a minute, that letting years or decades pass in a city that makes things hard on you while gifting you this insane degree of cultural access, might actually be a perfectly reasonable way to grow all the way up.—Jeff Klingman