Last night at our weekly electronic music gig (the appliance of science) in Cambridge, we featured guests Keith Fullerton Whitman (aka Hrvatski) and Greg Davis in duo form, just back from an extended US tour. They played a set of positively nerve-racking noise, full of baby giggles and monstorous groans (someone likened them to Legend). Since the last time I had seen them together, they had somehow lost all interest in melody, song and structure. At the same time, something more striking: they had both grown bushy, unkempt beards.
So I posed the question: is there an inverse correlation between the length of a man’s beard and his melodiousness? To which I received the quick retort: “Dude, Jerry Garcia had one mother of a beard, and all he did was spew melody.” But this only adds to my nascent theory: after years of melodic oppression at medium beard length, it makes sense that one reaches a certain threshold, and it starts to pour from every part of your body. There’s no way to know really, except through experimentation. Tomorrow, I stop shaving.
overstated 