Mika at United Palace - Concert Preview

[lollipop_monkey]

Has this been posted yet?

 

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A young hit-maker worships at pop’s altar

By Jay Ruttenberg

 

Mika, the international pop star, slides up to the bar of a posh midtown restaurant. It is the midday gulf between lunch and dinner, leaving the singer and his cranberry juice mainly alone. Mika is exceedingly tall but comfortable in asserting his air rights: A perfectly coiffed wave of hair brings him still closer to the sky. He wears a tight blue vest and suspenders that dangle ornamentally at his waist, and emits the well-scrubbed glow of a man fresh off a television appearance—in this case, a last-minute NBC interview. “I think they booked me when they realized my album was No. 6 on iTunes,” he says. “People are a little confused as to who’s buying my concert tickets in this country—I swear it’s not my family.”

 

The singer, 26, was born in Beirut and grew up in Paris and then London, where he lives now. Like another sartorially loud pianist, Little Richard, he abandoned the surname Penniman upon becoming a recording artist. “You shed things off in order to make your balloon go higher,” Mika reasons. His first album, 2007’s Life in Cartoon Motion, sold 5.5 million copies according to Billboard—only 500,000 of which, Mika notes, were in the United States. He insists that he harbors no grand American desires, but he returns to the subject again and again like an itch he cannot keep from scratching.

 

To shy away from such ambition would be to neglect his position as a consummate pop artist. Although he’s a commanding songwriter and distinctive vocalist, Mika’s allegiance seems to lie with pop first, music second. In conversation, he oscillates breezily between Marilyn Monroe (“I know her as Norma Jeane”) and Winsor McCay (“the ultimate comic-book reference for any true snob”). He refers to himself in the third person, but only once, as if he’s trying on diva shoes. Aptly, the songs on his debut LP and its new follow-up, The Boy Who Knew Too Much, are vibrant, kitschy and colossal—yet also idiosyncratic. “Pop music needs an audience,” he says. “What’s appealing is when it plays with the notion of being popular, but at heart is so unrelentingly individualistic that it exists in a weird territory between being alternative and pop.”

 

The musician, whose records are generally compared to Queen, Elton John and various types of candy, cites David Bowie and Belle and Sebastian, but claims his deeper inspiration lies elsewhere. “The one person who I studied to get closer to the process of writing a song is Nilsson,” he says. “He was a genius.”

 

Mika leans into the bar and clinks the ice in his glass. “But Nilsson was a miserable f*ck!” he continues. “I don’t want to be like him. I started thinking of filmmakers, especially Tim Burton. He’s somebody that plays with the naive, childhood references and color-saturated landscapes—with pop. He’s made many different types of movies that are similar at their core, but are also very different. That’s who I want to be like.”

 

As with Burton’s first feature, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Mika’s debut album was essentially sexless yet mischievous. (“Suckin’ too hard on your lollipop,” the Royal College of Music dropout sang, “Oh love’s gonna let you down.”) The Boy Who Knew Too Much departs from this formula only slightly, trafficking in adolescence rather than childhood.

 

For a musician creating operatic songs of teenage mystery, Mika landed the guru of a thousand dreams: the Who’s Pete Townshend. “I met him at South by Southwest and later went to his house,” Mika says. “He told me something similar to what had been drilled into me by Russian music teachers: Discipline comes first. If you’re lucky, you get to art.” Townshend, for his part, compares Mika’s single “We Are Golden” to a summer hit by ABBA. “It is young and fresh and defiant,” the guitarist writes in an e-mail. “I think modally speaking, Mika and I occupy the same area—we are dedicated to uplift. Like a brassiere.”

 

At the bar, the young musician stares into his cranberry juice with shrewd Bambi eyes. “Look, I don’t know what I’m doing,” he says. “I know what makes a good song—and I won’t stop until I get one. I know this is what I want to do with my life. I know this is all I know how to do with my life. But it’s not some calculation. I’m dancing in the dark.”

 

http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/music/79254/mika-at-united-palace-concert-preview#ixzz0TMMYcDQ8

Edited October 8, 2009 by lollipop_monkey

[Droopsy]

Yes

 

http://www.mikafanclub.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20268

[lollipop_monkey]

Yes

 

http://www.mikafanclub.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20268

 

I thought it must have been posted 'cause it's a couple days old, but couldn't find it.

 

Thanks!