Some Gig!

Wow!  That was some great gig this past weekend.  The musicians, techies, dancers, and teachers who put the production together deserve credit for staging a polished and imaginative rendition of the album.  A huge undertaking: a massive payoff.  And thanks to Great Gig’s phenomenal version of “Tusk,” I can finally think of that song without hearing the original version’s funky elephants.

The program’s adaptation of the album cover was funny.  Who doesn’t love to see teachers doing the unexpected?  That picture got me thinking, though.  I had forgotten about the two spheres hanging from Mick Fleetwood’s belt on the original album cover.  Apparently they were something of a trademark of his.

When I saw the cover again after so many years, I thought, “What a brazen picture that is.”  But then I wasn’t sure.  Fleetwood and Nicks are fully clothed and dancing; the sexual overtones are merely implied.  Today we see a lot more bare skin in public pictures: Abercrombie and Fitch catalogues, bus-side advertisements, magazine covers at the supermarket checkout.  And couples do a lot more than dance on TV, let alone on cable TV.

So what took me aback?  Maybe it is the representation of male parts.  Advertisers and artists seem much more ready to show female body parts than male–or perhaps I should say that our society at large is more willing to circulate images of female parts than male.  It isn’t as if we pretend men don’t have parts.  How often do we see a singer grabbing his crotch or hear Colbert referring to his manliness with jokes about balls?  But a graphic visual is more rare in the case of men than of women.  This album cover, even though only suggesting male anatomy, feels a little odd, whether in an unsettling way or just a silly way.  Maybe it is that oddness–the way it pushes our assumptions about how men and women should be seen–that makes the picture feel a bit brazen even a generation later.