Conquering the Moon

Fleet Street Conquers the Moon. While that is quite a statement, I truly believe Stanford’s funniest all male a cappella group took it on with a large amount of gusto.
The show, for me, began with the tickets. Fleet Street created the tickets to look like airline tickets in keeping with their theme of flying to the moon. In addition to the intricately fashioned tickets, the ushers who tore tickets for the show were dressed as stewards and stewardesses making the flight simulation even more dramatic. I entered, casually took a seat in the back of the packed Dink Auditorium, grabbed the program that looked like a safety manual taped to the back of the seat in front of me, and prepared for lift off.

Lift off…? Lift off? Lift off…oh yes, the show began a few minutes late, a fashionable ten minutes. I chose to think of it as when you’re waiting patiently on an airplane with your seatbelt on, and you’ve already turned off your phone so you feel trapped and you can’t text your friends back home, and the stewardess comes around and gives you one of her looks, and your plane leaves much after boarding time…Fleet Street’s tardiness was much better than this. I also had my phone on.

They began the show with a video made to look like one of the security videos you see on international flights, only it was much, much funnier. In fact, all of Fleet Street’s videos were incredibly amusing. My favorite moment was in a later clip. In security pamphlets it always says that when the oxygen mask drops down, put yours on first before assisting others. Well, Fleet Street simulated this scenario in their video, having one person put on his masks and watch as the “child” next to him gasped for breath. As I write this, I realize that that doesn’t sound funny at all, but it was. I think it had more to do with the fact that I’ve thought that line to be ridiculous before because naturally a mother would help her child before herself, and Fleet Street definitely captured this “ridiculousness” in their video. The videos and skits kept me laughing.

They kept me laughing, but Fleet Street is supposed to be more than just funny actors and video makers, right? They’re supposed to be singers as well. I heard a number of songs, six of them new selections as the publicity fliers boasted and all of them were good, some of them were funny and some of them I wondered about. This isn’t to say that they were bad, it’s just that when a song didn’t make me laugh, I would be outraged. I would think, “what is this?!” but I wasn’t wanting them to entertain me better. I just wanted them to entertain me differently. This made me think about the big question of our course: what is the artist trading on? It occurred to me that Fleet Street trades on making people laugh, and thus, when I buy a funny ticket, from a funny stewardess, in a funn(il)y decorated room, I expect the rest of my experience to be funny. I don’t know if that is fair to the Fleet Street singers because they are singers. They have a great blend and are definitely in keeping with classic a cappella conventions. They write and arrange their own music. They focus on their pitch. They have solid and interesting harmonies but somewhere their music gets lost in the shuffle of their funny. So when I hear a song that has all of these musical components but the topic isn’t designed to make me laugh, I am thrown off balance, at least for a little while. I realize now that Fleet Street deserves to be critiqued as singers too.

Fleet Street gave a fabulous performance. I clapped, and screamed, and laughed…and laughed some more, but I think one of the better things that I got out of that night was rethinking or questioning what I thought I knew about art or the artists. What are they trading on, but also, what do I expect them to be trading on? In the end Fleet Street conquered the moon as well as my assumptions about what it should mean to be a Fleet Street singer.