When first faced with seeing Blood Orange perform his new album, Negro Swan, at the Moore last Saturday night, I had some questions: What did Negro Swan even mean? And how would Dev Hynes, the man behind Blood Orange, translate his album, which I found a bit choppy, to live performance?
Having never been to the Moore in my entire Eastside-dwelling life, I'd always imagined the venue to be full of concertgoers dressed in furs, velvets, and sequins, all having SIFF memberships, and who donated regularly to KEXP. I planned accordingly. I put on my most expensive-looking $20 H&M dress, adorned my ears with something shimmery, and made sure I smelled like a god. My mother was my date to this concert—I hoped she would like Dev Hynes's fusion of R&B, pop, and ‘80's nostalgia. I envisioned us getting drinks in Belltown beforehand, talking about what it means to be a woman, and getting appropriately tipsy. In reality, we both shoved Dick’s cheeseburgers and fries down our throats while I tried to navigate our minivan through downtown. In a desperate attempt to not smell like fast food all night, I rolled down the windows to air everything out, covering my sleeves in rainwater.
Shockingly, no one in the crowd looked like they belonged in the Gold Room of the Overlook Hotel—there were only flannel and Gore-Tex-clad older millennials, hunched over their overpriced spill-proof sippy cups full of alcohol. We are in Seattle after all.
Empress Of, Lorely Rodriguez's synthpop/R&B project, opened the night with a stripped set-up—just her and another female bandmate behind keyboards and other music-making machines. Rodriguez faced the crowd, while her bandmate faced her. Both women were dressed in oversized suit jackets and jumped around wildly on stage. The music shook the theater—I could feel the beat of "Water Water" vibrate my pelvic bone. But as usual, the Seattle crowd remained unmoved, even in the face of music that would make any other sensible person gyrate wildly. Before she played her most recent highly-infectious single "When I'm With Him," Rodriguez asked, "What do I gotta do to get you guys up?" A weak "Woo!" went up behind me. She soldiered on with an inspiring amount of energy and lung capacity. By the end, most people managed to stand up, some even dared to sway.
Dev came on shortly after, opening with "Orlando." He was tucked away in the corner on the piano, hard to locate at first. He spent the night hopping around the stage going from piano, to guitar, to mic stand, to keyboard, and back again. Dev’s musicianship is obvious and a thrill to experience live, with "Charcoal Baby" being the high point of the night—he shredded the guitar and his backup singers sounded like literal angels. But at times I couldn't help but feel like I was intruding on his privacy. Like he was a talented cousin your aunt would always make perform whenever your family came over for Thanksgiving. He'd hit some Michael-Jackson-meets-Willi-Ninja moves all with his back to the crowd. Whenever I’d be getting myself comfortable in a song, he'd switch gears so suddenly that I’d be offbeat.
At one point, the connection between the audience and Dev was so low that I actually saw some people sit back down. It was at this moment that a friend my mom and I had met up with dipped, remarking, "I saw what I came to see," and that was before he sang "You're Not Good Enough." To my surprise, he played the spoken clips of Janet Mock and P. Diddy from the album in his live set, adding one from Paris Is Burning's Venus Xtravaganza. I felt that the clips, in a live context as on the album, spoke more to his theme of "black depression...and ongoing anxieties of queer/people of color" than his performance or music itself did. I also felt that, in a majority white crowd, some emotions and references just didn't, couldn't be translated successfully.
He definitely gave the other musicians onstage a chance to shine. Backup singer Eva Tolkin hit every note on Cupid Deluxe-era track "Chamakay" and Ian Isiah broke it the fuck down for everyone on "Holy Will." Dev even brought back Empress Of for Freetown Sound's "Best to You." After his last song, he mumbled some quick words of thanks into the mic and everyone wandered off stage. The crowd whooped and hollered for an encore but the house lights quickly, pointedly came back on and everyone filed towards the exit.
As my mom and I shuffled back out into the drizzle, I was still left with my Negro Swan question.
"Mom, what do you think he means?" "I don't know—swans represent beauty and grace, being black is what makes it something different, something more." "Huh." I opened my umbrella. My thoughts went to a swan that lived on a lake near my college that was rumored to have drowned a dog. Maybe complexity and inscrutability come along with such beauty, grace, and viciousness. Maybe.
