By Jason Dickson
Definition of the Mockropera: 1) The cumulative and exaggerated musical exposition resulting from a ridiculous love of standard and hackneyed Pop sounds. 2) A supreme music for the over-stimulated and under-Popped, given to one willing receptacle by a master of indulgence and melodrama, meant to broth the Heart of said receptacle into a wily mess of hyper-action, the intense yet ridiculously transcendent practice of the Experience. 3) While others break guitars, performers of mock rock opera must break themselves.
I have recently had the pleasure of seeing three performances that completely rearranged my understanding of the Pop Experience. These shows were part of an inexplicable genre known as the “mock rock opera”–or, as I like to call it, the Mockropera.
Mockropera is an extraordinary beast that could never be tamed by my pen, but I will try nonetheless. Here goes:
It is overwhelming and bewildering. It is absurd and indulgently sentimental. It reaches toward the misshapen and refined and the sublimely ridiculous, and hits that sensational threshold where the tension of irony and rocking is delicately balanced on the brink of folly.
Mockropra is an indulgent opera, as much about music as the staging of music. It is theatre, belted, sung, exaggerated gesture. The performers don the ill-fitted costuming of Pop and parade their sound awkwardly and anxiously before an audience. They play desperately ridiculous songs bent way out of proportion, yet somehow right and appropriate.
Most rock stars try to establish their credibility through a display of rock emotion (light dancing, scrunched faces, whimsy). If our performer does not visibly FEEL the music, belting out to the heavens and showing his status as an artist-god, then he has not suitably “rocked the house.” Mockroperatic performers start here, and then take rock hyperbole to an entirely new level. They indulge in an outlandish carrying-on of feeling, pushed well past parody. They achieve in their audience a gracious and bewildering appreciation of the ridiculousness of Pop Music.
The three Mockropera stars that recently rocked my house were Waxmannequin, Mayor McCa, and Friendly Rich.
Waxmannequin is, according to my humble pen, the best example of the rock-theatre mania that is Mockropera. I saw him at the gloriously seedy Richmond Tavern in London, Ontario, and was initiated, that night, into his cruel and beautiful club. His songs embrace the theatrical exhilaration that was played up in the days of rock yore, and peddled so productively by badasses Def Leppard and Queen. But unlike his predecessors, Waxmannequin is not contented with simple exaggeration and pomp. His concert was a public annihilation of Rock that was both painful and exhilarating to watch. Costumed in an ill-fitting suit, Mr. Mannequin serenaded an incredulous audience for an hour with what sounded, at first, like the most obtuse music in pop history. Many of us stared in wonder, while others laughed out loud. Uninhibited, he played on, and his music somehow, suddenly, began to make a sort of hilarious esoteric sense. Finally, he meowed. To me, this was the clarion call. “This is my music,” his meowing seemed to say. “Heed the Mockropera.”
I saw Mayor McCa play in London as well. I was again filled with thrill at an inflated, almost painful display of pop savvy. He attached tambourines to his feet, played three instruments at once, and tap danced. His songs, built from the ground up like a rickety shack, were banged from instruments held together on his thin frame with shimmering duct tape and thick wooden boards. Each assembled instrument clanged in its own disconcerted purpose, and I threw myself about my chair like a doll possessed.
Friendly Rich, opening for the Nihilist Spasm Band in Toronto, rounded out the trinity. Accompanied by a full band that played under his direction like alarmed barn animals, Rich screamed and paraded his Night-at-the-Klezmer-Circus music on the stage, swaggering like a drunken opera singer on the last night of his life. With songs taken from his many self-described “operas,” Rich howled into the microphone a shrill wail that nearly made me weep with fear.
On his horror album Brampton, Friendly Rich subverts the tender conventions of pop by breaking the chaste and earnest necks of folk music and gypsy orchestras. He uses the Mockropra as a weapon against his audience, to frighten and pervert their romantic notions of Pop. At his concert in Toronto, Friendly Rich strutted about the stage with his hirsute belly displayed, a horny wolf penned in the club.
Waxmannequin, Mayor McCa, and Friendly Rich want to make their audiences feel uncomfortable. Frightened, confused, overwhelmed, and, finally, initiated.
It has been suggested that the music of Mockropera is related to progressive pop –to novelty bands such as the Darkness–and the more musical and immoderate interpreters of performance art. But Mockropera is not so much parody as a ludicrously earnest love/hate for the conventions of conventional pop.
Centred proudly and firmly in the company of pop, but unable to rest in a costume made of pop’s clean cloth, these performers refuse to attend the musical masquerade with the standard reverent imitation. Their desire is to blast our willing hearts into the deferential amazement of the Mockropera. And we are taken, via the blistering sounds of the Mockropera, into the dark and restive soul of our conjoined and freakish love of pop music.
Jason Dickson lives and works in London, Ontario.
Three melodrama kings rip the heart right out of Rock Opera and show it to us