“There’s always the funeral gift,” Rob Shapiro said as he leaned forward. “There’s always something that breaks into the pain of a funeral, whether it’s the story of the deceased that reminds you of why you miss them, or the drunk Uncle who embarrasses himself, there is always something that brings life into the context of death and grief. There’s always a funeral gift.” Shapiro went on: “‘The funeral gift’ is one of my most closely held philosophical underpinnings, and—this is true—is in part how my wife and I initially bonded, as we had both recently lost someone very close. It was the long conversation about the funeral gift concept that gave us our first insights into each other, a lot of deep laughs, and eventually a life together.”
Shapiro’s insight echoes Leonard Cohen’s observation in “Anthem” that “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” In my life I have seen the yin and yang of life and death, pain and joy in a different way. When comforting those who grieve—frequently anonymously, as a hospital or police chaplain—I remind them that the pain of the hello determines the pain of the goodbye. Of course, this is my riff on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reflection on absent friends during his imprisonment by the Nazis. Writing to his fiancée, who he would never see again, he wrote that God does not close the wound or take away the pain of absence, but keeps it painfully open to remind you of how irreplaceable they are.
Funeral gift.
Love and loss.
Fear and hope.
Joy and pain.
We all have experienced the tension between these poles—as well as their simultaneity. Rob Shapiro sought to put it to lyric and tune in his band Populuxe’s recent LP Beauty in the Broken Place. The album was released on October 27, the anniversary of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, the day of that tragedy being the subject of this hour-long song-cycle. The result is part historical reflection, part metaphor for the world we inhabit today, offering voice—and at times commentary—on the various points of view that collided so violently that day.
Populuxe started in Brooklyn in the mid-1990s but now exists as a crack trio whose combined talents offer a varied musical palette to paint from. Although social commentary has not been absent from their previous work, this is by far their most extensive exploration of our nation and world’s psyche. The genesis of this work was a photo, sent by a friend from Brooklyn, of a group of people in Prospect Park who seemingly spontaneously prayed the kaddish together in response to the shootings at the Tree of Life. The kaddish is a traditional Jewish prayer of mourning in which one acknowledges one’s grief, offers praise to a God whose love is undeterred, and calls for peace. Shapiro replied to his friend that this was the beauty in the broken place. It was, almost literally, the funeral gift of this tragedy. The Jewish people, their faith, and their hope would go on.
In reflecting on the phrase he had just offered his friend, he began to see more in it than he originally understood. So he did what songwriters do: he began to put that phrase and his reflections on it into lyrics and music. He built the tune on the foundation of the Shema, a core—maybe the core—Jewish prayer, affirming the singularity and glory of God. Like the Shema, Shapiro’s song offers hope while speaking in global terms. After all it is not beauty in a broken place, but the broken place. It is at once the particular—a synagogue in Squirrel Hill, a park in Brooklyn—and the universal: the brokenness of our world and the wholeness we seek, and find, in that brokenness.
The song came easily to Shapiro but seemed incomplete. Fortunately ideas kept coming, and over the next year he would create the song cycle that is Beauty in the Broken Place. He said this was one of the most creative waves he had ever ridden, yet his desire to have the work released on the anniversary of the massacre pushed him to work long hours for months to pull it all together. In the end he created a piece of music that is much more What’s Going On than There’s a Riot Going On. Like Marvin Gaye’s work, Populuxe’s opus invites you on a musical journey of reflection. I was listening to this album at the same time I was taking in Rafael Saadiq’s Jimmy Lee, which is much more like Sly Stone’s work and grabs you by the collar and screams, “Wake up!” This work, as Brian Eno said of ambient music, does not demand your attention but rewards it.
Though the phrase “rock opera” has been used to describe the album, it strikes me that it is more a song cycle that functions as an extended meditation. Certainly there are interstitial pieces that move a narrative along, like “There’s a Doctor” and “Miracle Cure” in the Who’s Tommy. But the characters here are less defined and more open to one’s imagination. Still, there is a definitive narrative arc to the work, the most evident being the passage of a day, from sunup to sundown, and all that took place that day. A secondary trajectory is revealed in the opening and closing tracks. The work opens with the sound of church bells and an organ prelude titled “Enter,” and it ends with a mournful mediation on piano and harmonica called “Exit.” Shapiro sees these pieces and the musical elements between them as reflecting the elements of a synagogue service, with prayers, scripture reading, meditation, and affirmations of faith leading to affirmations of life. Once recognized, this theme seems obvious—but not as apparent as the one underscored by the second song, “Green Light Morning (Waiting for a Sign),” and the second-to-last song, “The Sun Sets in the West,” which create a more obvious daylong framework. This is only to say that there are layers here ready to be peeled away to discover other, deeper meanings.
Musically the album struck me like a wine that presents more than one taste to your palate—like “earthy with a hint of berries and citrus.” I was hearing everything from Jessie Collin Young and the Youngbloods and David La Flamme and It’s a Beautiful Day to King Crimson and XTC: a strikingly varied tonal palate. Although the lyrics and their vocal interpretation are strong, the emotional heavy lifting is most often done by Shapiro’s guitar. His fretwork reflects many of his influences, from rock staples of the 1960s and 1970s and Curtis Mayfield to the Replacements and Hüsker Dü. This long-form piece of music references an era when music was delivered via a physical medium that encouraged listening to the work as a whole. As my twenty- and thirtysomething children remind me, this is not how they experience music. However your generation’s technologies have formed your listening habits, this offering rewards your time.
“Green Light Morning (Waiting for a Sign)” is an upbeat piece filled with optimism, pondering what possibilities the day holds. Shapiro voices the thoughts of a couple heading to the Tree of Life synagogue, reflecting on all the people the meet along the way, including the foreshadowing line “but take a look at the tree, at the tree.” The tone of the album changes with the next track, “The Low Hum,” which is, as advertised, a low hum that transitions into a song about following the crowd, “Little Lambs/Regular Guys.” Shapiro has created an aural and philosophical reflection on our violent and divided world that constantly changes perspectives and invites us to see the familiar in new ways.
In the end, an idea is only as good as its execution; a song cycle (or concept album, rock opera, etc.) is only as good as its songs. On this count I would point to a sequence the begins about a third of the way into Beauty in the Broken Place, which I believe to be the heart of this record. A song juxtaposing the light of the sun with the potential darkness of the human heart (“Walk in the Sun”) is followed by a reflection on relationships, transience, and mortality (“Leaves on the Ground”). The title track completes this sequence and evokes a triad of existential, social, and spiritual reflections on the human condition. This triad is as timely as it is timeless and make one realize the Tree of Life massacre is symptomatic of so much of human history, especially in its more dire moments. Yet hope remains.
And so it goes. It was a year ago that I reflected on the assault on the Tree of Life community and the subsequent shooting at the Borderline Bar in Thousand Oaks, California. A year later we are still confronted with the dis-ease of the human psyche and its potential for violence and with our seeming inability to stop or even inhibit it. Just this past weekend we have had violent attacks at a Hanukkah celebration in New York and a shooting in a church in Texas. I was inspired to write that piece because suddenly national news had become personal in ways it had not before. This year as last, I write at the threshold of a new year, having just gone through the seasons of light and hope as celebrated by Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanza—all of which seek to inspire hope in the literal dark days of December in the northern hemisphere. So we give and celebrate gifts in a selfish world. We celebrate plenty in a world of want.
Light in the darkness.
The funeral gift.
This is what Shapiro has given us: an honest view of our human societies and our humanity in general together with an unflinching belief in the perseverance of hope. Shapiro does not present simple, pat answers; instead he asks poignant questions and offers candid reflections on them. As he sings in “Sunsets in the West”:
When glass breaks it catches the light
And when hearts break
The songs are so sad and so sweet
And when evening turns into night,
What is unleashed when the last light slips from the sea?
So as we bring this holiday season and this year to a close, one of the gifts you should consider giving to yourself or others is the gift of Beauty in the Broken Place. It might be the lens we need to see the beauty and grace in the world that will sustain us through the unknown challenges of the days ahead—even as we grieve the days that have just passed.
Postscript for future historians and documentary film makers: After the article above was posted, Shapiro shared with EPB the identity of the person who sent him video of the ad hoc mourners in New York’s Prospect Park which inspired him to start writing Beauty in the Broken Place. It was Semisonic drummer Jacob Slichter. Shapiro describes it this way:
“Here’s the kicker — it was Jake who sent the video of the spontaneous Kaddish in Brooklyn. This album’s genesis moment was from him, and he was the first I told about what I was attempting. On November 3, a week after the massacre, I wrote to him:
‘Tip of the hat/addendum to your post: I’ve begun writing a suite of music about all of this. It’s a lot to juggle and try to wrangle into decent shape, but it’s apparently how I need to process all of this. I hope I can complete it — it’s well beyond anything I’ve done previously.
Working title: “Beauty in the Broken Place”, the name of the first completed piece.
Something about music…’
And, as a little wink in the lyric, I somewhat quote an old line of his.
So, file under “funny you should mention…”
