Last week I attended a Sufjan Stevens concert in Hollywood at the Fonda Theater. It was Sufjan’s Christmas concert tour, celebrating the immense collection of Christmas music in Suf’s catalogue (most recently the just-released 5-disc set, Silver & Gold, which includes no less than 58 tracks exploring Christmas from just about every angle imaginable).
The sell-out concert was memorable, to say the least. The music was alternately nostalgic, warm, absurd, annoying, jolly, kitschy, campy, somber and sacred. Kind of like Christmas.
Sufjan has always been an artist that no one category could pin down. Is he a devout Christian? Is he the savior of folk? A banjo-wielding, sometimes techno-inclined performance artist? A truckerhat-wearing, oboe-playing Liberace for the more clean-cut Millennial hipster? Probably all of the above.
Sufjan’s embrace of paradox manifests itself most importantly, I think, in the way that he very deliberately fuses kitsch, camp and irony with a disarming sincerity and insistence on meaning. In one moment he and his band--which included Rosie Thomas dressed as a chainsaw-wielding snowman--are spinning the giant “Wheel O’ Christmas” to determine which carol they will lead the audience in singing next. In the next minute he is leading his bandmates in the a capella singing--with four-part harmony--of old hymns like “Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates” or “Ah, Holy Jesus.”
Sufjan’s brand of camp embodies the sort of multi-level processing of meaning that Susan Sontag described in her famous essay, “Notes on Camp.”
“The Camp sensibility,” she wrote, “is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken … between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.” It is any approach to reality that “sees everything in quotation marks.”
Sufjan’s Christmas work is case and point of what seems like his desire to explore a milieu that is at once the pinnacle of artifice and yet full of echoes of the most meaningful things of all.
Take “Christmas Unicorn,” the 12-minute, cuckoo conclusion to Silver & Gold. On stage, the performance of this insanely campy Christmas anthem includes confetti guns, huge beach balls, techno dance breaks, Sufjan himself wearing a homemade “Christmas Unicorn” backpack and helmet, and about 5 minutes of nothing but the repeated chant: “I'm the Christmas Unicorn! You're the Christmas Unicorn too!”
And yet beneath the glitter, foil costumes, synth, and quirky preciousness, the song tries to capture a kernel of truth about Christmas--namely that it has become something of a hot mess of commercialization, sentimentality and religio-cultural-fantastical pastiche.
The “Christmas Unicorn” declares:
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