to make you cry

I’m reading Lynn Hirschberg’s long profile of music producer Rick Rubin. I like Rick Rubin — who doesn’t like Rick Rubin? — and I am surprised to learn that he’s crossing to the other side of the desk and becoming a record-company executive. No, not a record-company executive, the record-company executive, co-president of Columbia Records. Columbia Records! Jiminy!

Anyway, the article is a great read and a fascinating glimpse into the mind, or the acts anyway, of a true weird genius. Rubin going from LL Cool J to Def Jam to the Geto Boys to Johnny Cash and on and on is a pretty staggering story, and I’m always interested to know what he’s going to do next. Him getting a boat as big as Columbia Records to steer is a big story indeed.

And he says one of the first acts he will sign is this guy he saw on the UK’s version of American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent! (which is a wonderful, self-conscious, defensive title if I ever heard one). The guy’s name is Paul Potts, and Rubin says his appearance on Britian’s Got Talent! makes him cry every time he watches it.

Well, I think, Rubin’s a sensitive soul, isn’t he? But I’m curious, so I bop on over to YouTube and check the guy out.

Oh. My. God.

After recovering my wits, I show this to my wife, to see if I’ve been genuinely moved or have merely been set up for a sucker-punch. She tries to remain calm, says that she doesn’t know anything about opera, has no idea if the guy’s “any good” or not, doesn’t know if she’s reacting to the quality of the guy’s voice or the situation he’s been placed into. But yeah, she’s floored too.

Me, I say it’s only partly his voice and it’s only partly the situation. For me it’s his face. Look at his face before he goes on, and as he stands there before his judges. “Judges” being a loaded word here — he looks like he’s facing his executioners.  He looks like a beaten man. He looks like a man who’s had every ounce of hope beaten out of his soul by life, by Britain, by whatever dead-end grind he’s required to endure in order to make ends meet. He looks like he doesn’t even want to be there. Hell, if I had music like that going around in my head, Britain’s Got Talent! is probably the last place I’d want to be. Who with music like that going around in his head would choose to seek the approval of Simon Cowell? And yet here he is.

Then he starts singing, and his face completely changes. First it gains a sense of power, something he controls. My guess (projecting here, obviously) is that he feels very little control over anything in his life, but God Damn It, he knows how to singthis goddamn aria. Then, as the tune builds to its climax, something else  comes into his features. It’s not just power, or control, or happiness — it’s defiance. Paul Potts has looked at the dawn of the 21st century and said “You know what? Not everything has to be crappy and ugly and shiny and cheap and brutal. People don’t know that beauty and truth are still possible in this world, and damn it all, I’m going to do something about it.

When he takes the stage he looks like the cell-phone salesman I would cross the store to avoid, but the look on his face as he sings the climax of this aria is one of a general leading his troops into battle. This is madness? THIS! IS! OP-ERA!!  Then he finishes and becomes that shy young man again.  Incredible.

The fact that he chose a venue like Britain’s Got Talent!, a show dedicated to the idea that art is a competition to be “won” or “lost,” to launch his tiny cultural offensive, makes him a kind of cultural suicide-bomber. Into the temple of the cheap and shiny he has smuggled his brave message of defiance and hope.