‘Once’ and the Art of Busking

Congratulations to Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, winners of the Oscar for best original song earlier this week for Falling Slowly from Once. It’s an excellent song from an excellent movie, but for me, the best performance comes toward the beginning, when Hansard, playing a busker, belts out “Say It To Me Now” on a near-empty Grafton Street in Dublin:

In part, I like it because I’m a sucker for listening to buskers when I travel—I can still see and hear the ragged guitar player out in front of the Pompidou Center playing “Redemption Song” during my first backpacking trip through Paris. More so, though, Hansard just gives a soulful, convincing performance.

He’s convincing, in part, because, as he told the Onion’s Tasha Robinson in a recent interview, he’s got a lot of experience as a busker to draw from. And busking, as he sees it, sounds to me like a form of immersion travel:

Busking, you learn people, you learn about reading people. You learn about reading the atmosphere of the street. If you stand still in any city long enough, you see everyone pass you by. So you’re in Chicago. If you stand on the corner of Belmont and Clark, and you do that for three years, you’ll pretty much have seen everybody in Chicago pass that junction. As a busker, it’s like you’re like a lamppost, you’re part of the architecture. And so you see everybody, you get to read how people are. You get to know who the pickpockets are, you get to know who the whores are, you get to know the drug squad, the undercover cops. You suss it all out. You just develop this radar for how things are gonna be—you know the person who is going to give you money, and you know the person who isn’t, and you know the person who’d never give you a fucking penny if you were dying. It’s almost like you get to know personality types, just by watching people walk past. You get a sense for things.

Later in the interview, he adds, “it’s not like it’s a high-art job. And people who do it as a high-art job make very little money.”

That was famously put to a test last year here in Washington D.C., where, in an experiment facilitated by the Washington Post, “internationally acclaimed virtuoso” Joshua Bell set up at the L’Enfant metro station:

His take for 43 minutes of playing: $32.17.

As for the high art/low art distinction, busking can be both. Some evidence: My favorite busking video, Bruce Springsteen playing “The River” on the street in Copenhagen:

Brings back some great memories.

 

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