You've Got Baggage! (A Rant on "Rent")

By Arielle

* - With contributions from D. Bones

In each of my summers as a camp counselor, I found myself suffering through my campers' musical "tastes." One year it was Britney. Another was boy bands (98 Sync'in Backstreet Degrees or something like that). And one year it was Rent.

Rent troubled me. Here were a bunch of 12-year-old girls singing on about their stashes being pure and dancing at the Catwalk Club, and some sort of goddam candles that would never stay lit. I'm no prude, but it struck me as odd that a group of teenybopper suburbanites would have such a longing for the lives of AIDS-stricken squatters in Alphabet City.

But then I figured, I've never seen the show. Who am I to judge?

Well, now I've seen the movie. Man, that was terrible.

Granted, I've never seen the play, so perhaps I'm not in any real position to judge. But I'll take those odds. I mean, how can you take seriously any work of art that includes this impassioned line, sung at the tail end of one of the key songs: "I've been trying/I'm not lying/No one's perfect/I've got baggage!"

(Answered a few lines later with: "I've got baggage too." And something about an AZT break.)

I figure this is roughly the same as Hamlet saying "I'm going to take some 'me' time, pop some Zoloft and see if we can't just work it out over malteds."

I suppose I could forgive some of the odd lyric choices (is it really fair to include Maya Angelou in the same stanza as mutual masturbation? I mean, really?) if the music seemed to have been written by anyone who could carry a tune. Maybe dissonant tones were in keeping with the squatter lifestyle (oops, sorry - la vie Boheme), but I suspect not. The only thing worse than music that doesn't resonate in any kind of soulful or even melodic way is music that doesn't resonate soufully or melodically, but still gets stuck in your head. Fucking "Seasons of Love."

One of the characters, a budding rocker named Roger, seems hell-bent on writing one good song before he dies. (I don't know about you, but if I were a rock musician and had still not completed an entire song, I might consider other career options.) Sorry for the spoilers, but Roger (singer/perpetrator of the "I've got baggage" line) falls for, but loses, a junkie named Mimi (who has baggage, too). When he finally decides he really needs her, he ends up writing his one great song.

Here are the words:

As We Said Our Goodbyes
Can't Get Them Out Of My Mind
And I Find I Can't Hide (From)
Your Eyes
The Ones That Took Me By Surprise
The Night You Came Into My Life
Where There's Moonlight
I See Your Eyes
How'd I Let You Slip Away
When I'm Longing So To Hold You
Now I'd Die For One More Day
'Cause There's Something I Should
Have Told You
Yes There's Something I ShouldHave
Told You

When I Looked Into Your Eyes
Why Does Distance Make Us Wise?
You Were The Song All Along
And Before The Song Dies
I Should Tell You I Should Tell You
I Have Always Loved You
You Can See It In My Eyes

If this were my one great song, I'd kill myself.

Perhaps this was an intentional choice by songwriter Jonathan Larson, to make his plot-hanging, poignant song (sung to a dying, though not really dying, Mimi) a really bad song. After all, it was Larson who penned this, not Roger the unsuccessful rocker. Surely he could have written this dude a quality rock song if he wanted him to have one.

Then I considered the rest of the soundtrack. Maybe not.

Granted, there were a couple good songs. And I was excited to see it, having lived on Avenue C for a year or so (though it was in 2004). I figured I'd at least see some images of the old neighborhood, and, heck, maybe even end up finding this to be something of a guilty pleasure. But for this once, my curmudgeonly self was proven right.

Even if you find some appeal in the music, there's the whole concept of the play/movie, the idealization of life in Alphabet City, circa 1989. I've never understood why it held any kind of allure for the people I assume went to see Rent (or even the main characters of the film, the suburbanite kids from Scarsdale and Miss Porter's who ended up living there).

Ok, maybe I can sort of understand that as a form of rejection of the oppressive confines of suburbia. What I can't understand is anyone wanting to pay money and spend a couple hours of their lives watching it.

What are these characters fighting for, exactly? What sort of noble battles are they waging? The right to continue squatting, shooting up heroin and creating bad performance art in abandoned buildings on the Lower East Side? They didn't seem to be contributing much, culturally, to anything. (One character seems to be an ousted professor with a theory of "actual reality" that no one endorses, but the rest don't seem to be doing much intellectual heavy-lifting.) I'm all for art, and I'm all for affordable rent (an oxymoron now in most of the East Village/Alphabet City). But are we supposed to feel bad for these kids from Scarsdale who were apparently driven to destitution out of a desire not to spend Hannukah with a loving, though perhaps overbearing, family?

Aside from having AIDS, these were not the people who were actually suffering during the 1980s or on the Lower East Side, as made perfectly clear by a homeless woman who gets captured on camera by Mark, the budding filmmaker from Scarsdale who believes that ever having his work circulated in the media is tantamount to selling out. The homeless woman becomes enraged when she sees Mark filming her, saying she doesn't want to be part of his movement. And she asks him for money -- which he either doesn't have or doesn't want to give her -- before she knowingly moves on.

Having grown up in a city, I would have found it much more entertaining to have someone set up a camera at one of those suburban high school drinking-in-the-woods shindigs, and watched that. It's the same thing, essentially, just with rhyming music.

Maybe I'm not giving enough creedance to a meditation on life with AIDS. (I was born the same year AIDS was discovered, so I can't say I have much memory of those days.) It did have a couple of moving scenes dealing with the idea of an impending death and potentially being alone for it. But if you're looking for that topic, why not stick with Angels in America?

Of course, seeing Rent made me glad for one thing: the ability to more thoroughly enjoy Team America's parody of it (Lease) and the genius song, "Everyone's got AIDS!"