Welcome to the cruel world

"Welcome to the cruel world." Following a richly toned opening instrumental ("Strut") on his signature Weissenborn lap steel, Ben Harper set the stage for the three-hour-plus epic evening that was to come with a piercing rendition of the title track to his 1994 debut album. Seeing and hearing Ben Harper live is about as close to understanding and feeling the connections between art, emotion, and life as one can get. Less than ten minutes into the show, when Harper asks "Don't know how / We've lasted here so long?" and responds "There must be more good than bad / Or we'd already be gone", one cannot help but think -- and know -- that this, "the genius of the moment" as Michael Stipe has called it, is as important a part of that good as one can be a part of. Proust saw humans as jealous children who lavish, misspend, squander, and waste, with art as our only possible salvation. I felt closer to that promised redemption on Saturday than at many other times in my life. I believe that all of us at the Gran Teatro Geox must have.

I am a fan of Ben Harper's songs and his musical style. Our politics tend to agree and I've always enjoyed in an aesthetic sense his blend of reggae, folk, blues, and funk. He is technically proficient in a number of instruments including his trademark Weissenborn lap steel, and his laid-back voice -- like any professional musician -- does not fail to hit all the notes. His lyrics resonate with my generation. And though at the aesthetic level you can do a lot worse than throwing on a Ben Harper record -- start with his first to see where he's coming from -- to concentrate solely on how objectively good the music is -- and it is indeed good -- is to miss the depth, and probably most of the point entirely, of what it means to experience one of his shows, particularly this past weekend's in Padova.

Tolstoy argued that "[i]n order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life". He meant that art goes beyond enjoyment to a level that it is used to communicate more deeply than we are generally used to. While the Padova show was as pleasurable an experience as a concert tends to get (confining the definition to the concert itself, that is), it was pure and unadulterated art both in the Tolstoy and the Proust sense because it evoked life and meaning and all that comes with it through Harper's honesty, sincerity, and pure emotion.

Following Welcome to the Cruel World, Harper kept the intensity strong by going into an extended version of another instrumental, Number Three, from his 1997 album The Will to Live. Taking advantage of his now-full catalogue, Ben continued to stick to hits and crowd-favourites including the "politically-charged" (Wikipedia's words) Excuse Me Mister from his second album and Music for our Mother Ocean compilation which resonated this weekend as strongly as it did when we first began to understand what Ben was all about in the mid to late nineties. This song displays both Ben Harper's "tiresome penchant for soapbox sloganeering" (as Rolling Stone complained) but also his "righteous moral compass" (as RS praised), but most importantly gave us a view to the true Ben Harper. Seeing and feeling sentiment behind the lyrics affords us all the ability to feel the vehemence that he felt when he wrote those words and as he sang them Saturday night on stage in Italy.

The second set consisted of three songs performed together by Ben Harper and his mother, Ellen Harper, from their recently released album "Childhood Home". The 2002 documentary "Pleasure and Pain" by Danny Clinch showed us that Ben Harper was raised by his mother and his maternal grandparents at home, where his Mom taught guitar, piano, and singing lessons, and at his grandparents' music shop, where he learned diverse musical techniques on eclectic instruments and that clearly formed his path towards his unique slide-guitar technique. In short, Ben Harper grew up in a musical environment shaped by his mother's family and let's just say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. The songs bordered on the over-sentimental and the technical aspects of the music are far from noteworthy. The emotion stayed true, however. In "Born to Love You", the last song of this set, Ben and Ellen sappily sing "some born to lose / some born to win / they say we're all born into sin / that's a hard way to begin / but i was born to love you". Look at Ben when he sings these simple words, though. Close your eyes and feel the passion in his voice and you really get it: this man is honest. His art is full of integrity. And well, ya, he loves his Mom.

Ben Harper tackles complex themes in most of his songs that include, most predominantly, racism. When he moved away from his activist-cenetered roots in Childhood Home, however, he vastly simplified the messages he was addressing. Ben Harper is still there though in an absolutely important way: he sings what he knows. In The Sun Also Rises, Harvey Stone disparages H.L. Mencken to Jake Barnes when he says "He's through now," ... "He's written about all the things he knows, and now he's on all the things he doesn't know". Hemingway himself was successful by writing exclusively about what he knew: "Fucking and fighting and eating and drinking and begging and stealing and living and dying", as he told Ezra Pound. Ben Harper can transcend the traditional singing act to another level through his sincerity. He sings what he knows and that affords him the ability to be his honest self, and to bring the natural meaning and urgency that already exists within his subjects. Without having to waste artistic energy on acting, all of his energy goes into the art, and we all gain from that.

In his third set, Harper continued to hit the classics with what I felt was a bend towards his more hurtful songs. One of the more painful, "Walk Away", another track from his debut album, was especially powerful: "And it's so hard to do / And so easy to say / But sometimes / Sometimes you just have to walk away / Walk away". This isn't heady stuff. Yet... A traditional performer -- an actor, a gladiator, a professional hockey player -- learns to consciously swallow and hide his emotions. A great performer leaves his true life aside to play a role on a stage. The magic of Ben Harper is that in his performances, he does none of this. His true life and true pain is shining through as clear as the sun. Tacking along his songs dealing with emotional hurt, there was no question that his life has recently experienced some upheaval. I would put money on it.

Following Walk Away, and then the beautiful Forever, Harper gave us a tender version of The Verge's "The Drugs Don't Work": "And I hope you're thinking of me / As you lay down on your side / Now the drugs don't work / They just make you worse / But I know I'll see your face again". Yup; poor old Benny is hurting. But to finish off the show, for his final -- and fourth! -- set, Ben also expressed hope. "I Shall Not Walk Alone", where he explicitly states "Hope is Alive", followed by "Learn it All Again Tomorrow" performed with his Mom, and then finishing with the sanguinely hopeful "Better Way": "take your face out of your hands / and clear your eyes / you have a right to your dreams / and don't be denied / i believe in a better way".

Harper's mix of pleasure and pain in his songs address the truth of life and his ability to bring it before our eyes in his shows. In a 1925 letter to his father, Hemingway tried to explain to his father -- who was extremely religious and conservative and felt embarrassed about his son's books -- why his writing had to contain things that some might find repugnant:

"I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way."

They sure aren't.