You only get one first kiss in life.
And I’ll bet that for many people, that first kiss sucked. Maybe you missed the lips, or slobbered, or quit too soon or too late, or, more likely, it wasn’t really the person you wanted to kiss so badly, but your second or third choice. Maybe you didn’t even want to be kissed.
But when the first kiss is with someone you really like, and your lips connect, and her lips are incredibly soft and slightly cool, and your arms feel just right around her waist, and she kindly puts her arms around your neck….
And you can’t experience the magical moment of exquisite tickled transcendence of hearing the Roche Sisters perform the Hallelujah Chorus for the first time again and again and again.
Sure, it’s great to see it again. I want to see it again. I enjoy seeing it again. But I remember the moment I saw them, on PBS in 1983, for the first time, and fell in love with what they were doing. They took a famous piece of music– which had been flogged to death already by then– and reinvented it. They turned it inside out and upside down and toyed with it, and that’s what I think really electrifies the listener the first time– the playfulness of the whole idea. The shocking delight of making something look funny and brilliant and powerful and poignant at the same time.
All right– you want to see it, don’t you? This is a pretty coarse, bad copy, but it will have to do for now:
Why I do not stand for the Hallelujah Chorus: You have to stand. You WILL stand. You are hereby ordered to stand because that is what everybody does and they’ve always done it and it shows that we are people of good taste and that we respect good music and do not dare to defy the authorities who have ordained that the Hallelujah Chorus is better than anything by Bach.
Well, tough. I hereby declare that from now on, I only stand in reverence for Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #5 or Cantata 42, Dylan’s “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and Cat Power’s version of “Satisfaction”.
Another Great Song by The Roches.