Has anyone else found themselves adopting strange obsessions during the coronavirus lockdown? Are you fixating on pantry pasta recipes? Going down Greek mythology rabbit holes? Scouring the internet for discontinued Betsey Johnson prom dresses?
One of my oddest fascinations as of late is with barbershop quartets. I told my partner I wanted to write about this and they jokingly suggested I title the piece “The Erotics of Barbershop,” even though it isn’t an erotic thing, not really. Or is it?
A week or so ago, I woke up with a seemingly random song lodged in my head, as I often do (does this happen to you too?). It was, of all things, “Bananaphone,” the classic goofy kids’ tune penned by legendary Canadian children’s performer Raffi. To satisfy the mental itch brought forth by this fruity earworm, I typed the song’s name into YouTube… and that’s when I discovered the Newfangled Four.
This quartet of lads, I realized as I watched their adorable take on Bananaphone, has all the appeal of a boy band like One Direction – except the group most likely to become enthralled by them isn’t teenage girls, but people like me: music nerds who always swooned over class clowns instead of hot jocks. These boys’ videos have racked up literally millions of views, and I have to wonder: how many of their viewers are reacting to these clips the way I am – as if my blazingly talented high school crush just sauntered out of choir practice, winked at me, and invited me over for a two-person Sondheim listening party after school?
I tumbled headfirst into a full-blown barbershop infatuation. I watched the boys sing Hello My Baby and Gaston and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. I drifted over to other quartets’ videos and cultivated favorites: the dadly sophistication of Main Street, the musical fortitude of Vocal Spectrum. I realized that I’d had a certain idea before of what a barbershop quartet was – just a group of guys singing stylized classics in 4-part harmony – but the genre, in fact, contains multitudes. At world-class barbershop competitions, troupes are graded not only on musicality but also on entertainment value. Some quartets stick to smooth crooning, and do it very well, but others incorporate slapstick comedy, choreographed dance, and even high-level inside jokes meant only for the apparently vibrant barbershop community to understand. Like so many other subdivisions of human culture, barbershop is so much more complex, nuanced, and interesting than it initially appears.
If you’re anything like me, you might have noticed yourself grasping desperately at any source of pleasure and amusement you can find in these trying times. Over the past two months, I’ve definitely laughed way too hard at Bon Appetit cooking videos and cried out in aesthetic ecstasy upon finding a particular obscure vintage handbag on eBay; we cope with stress in mysterious and often unpredictable ways. Videos of barbershop quartets have become one of those inexplicable preoccupations for me. A skilful key change makes me gasp; perfectly layered harmonies drop my jaw; a well-executed joke causes me to choke on my coffee. I feel the intensity of these reactions in my body, in a way that is almost (yes) erotic – and I know it’s perhaps an overreaction to what I’m actually watching, but it feels joyful and righteous and important. It feels like the right medicine at the right time.
I wonder how many other people are watching barbershop videos voraciously during lockdown. I wonder how many other weird subcultures I have yet to discover during this unfamiliar era. I wonder how my fave barbershop boys are doing – whether they’ve been practicing over Zoom, whether they’ve been working on new arrangements, whether they can still find the emotional mettle to hope to compete at another convention someday, melding sinewy harmonies together for an enraptured crowd.