Hazards of Love
11 February 2010
Here’s another one I got at the library: The Hazards of Love, by the Decemberists, which was recommended by Emma about a year ago and which has been in my queue or whatever since then. This is a rock opera in which a woman goes into the forest and finds a wounded fawn, but the fawn turns out to be the (human) adopted son of the forest queen, who has only turned him temporarily into a fawn for safekeeping, and the girl becomes pregnant by the transmogrified fawn, and then the forest queen is angry, and then the girl is abducted by a rake.
I did not know any of this when I first put it on. I thought it was just a normal album. When I realized what was happening I became excited, and immediately after it finished I listened to it a second time with the liner notes in front of me to figure out the story. This second listen was a peak experience that I will forever remember fondly. Since then I’ve had no particular desire to listen to it again, though I’ve done so several times to be thorough.
Is it credible? Can we now go into a store and buy a recording of a fully realized fairy-tale indie-rock opera? Yes, we can; our civilization has produced such an object. Like an Esperanto translation of the Iliad, it fills what would otherwise be a cultural void.
Is it good? It’s pretty good. It has catchy bits and tragic bits, and I like the voice of the forest queen. It seems more like story than a collection of music, which is I think why I don’t care to listen to it again; stories (novels, movies) are things you might return to occasionally, but not things you put on repeat.
As I understand it the Decemberists are a popular band and this is a popular album. Not Beyoncé popular, but popular. So the album would seem to bring us another step closer to a world in which ordinary people spend a substantial part of the day thinking about fairies, and perhaps spell it “faeries,” and are not reluctant to listen to or even perform rock operas featuring these creatures. That’s a world that I’m curious to live in, although of course one has one’s reservations.
Here is a fact about fairy tales: people don’t often tell them anymore. You might read them to your children from books, but that’s different from telling them fresh as you remember them; and if you do tell one from memory it’s probably your memory of the version you read in a book, or that was read to you. That doesn’t mean fairy tales are over. It only means that the role played by fairy tale in The Hazards of Love may be different from the role played by fairy tale in Parsifal. What stories do people tell these days? I would like to listen to a rock opera about Watergate.
Comments (2)
I don’t know of any rock operas about Watergate yet, but there’s always John Adams’ “Nixon in China”, an semi-minimalist opera about, well, Nixon’s trip to China.
Excellent. An RI library has this and I have just requested that it be delivered to my local branch.