Encore: It's become a silly contrivance that must be stopped
In 2001, near the end of her two-hour extravaganza at the FleetCenter, Janet Jackson left the stage for five unforgivable minutes before returning to perform an encore. Was she having zipper trouble? Was she topping off her chakra with fan love as required by her life coach or choreographer? A novice concertgoer would have been led to believe that if only the fans clapped loudly enough, if the urgent desire for a few more sublime notes were made plain, the pop star would be compelled to reward the impassioned throngs with the spontaneous gift of extra song.
Of course, there isn't a soul on earth with even a passing connection to the popular culture who isn't familiar with the faux art of the encore. Jackson's divalicious milking of the audience was an especially unsavory example, but the fact is that, by and large, most encores are simply the final two or three songs of a show preceded by a built-in adulation break. They're not only prescribed, they're scripted. Typed on the set list. Preprogrammed by the lighting technician. Complete with pyro, videos, and confetti-strewn finales.
We live in the auto-encore age, and we jump through the hoops like trained animals. In the interest of full disclosure, I have recently been horrified to find myself clapping at the end of a ''main" set out of sheer habit. Even when I'm not particularly interested in hearing more. Even though I know there's a better chance of Osama turning himself in than this band -- whose tour manager is at that very moment checking his watch to make sure that the duration of time in the wings is proportional to the capacity of the venue and chart position of the single -- not coming back out onstage to play its hit song.
Performance is all about artifice, but there's something terribly manipulative about encores these days. Tacked on at the end of virtually every show, no matter how poorly attended, modestly performed, or tepidly received, the default encore implies a relationship between performer and audience that often doesn't exist. There have been countless occasions when a band finishes its set and leaves the stage, waits perhaps 10 seconds (so the smattering of applause hasn't completely faded), and trudges back dutifully for another dull number. Why bother?
Because the encore has become mandatory, a gesture as requisite as the rock guitarist's sneer, and entirely antithetical to the original spirit of the thing. Here's what Richard Steele wrote in the London periodical ''The Spectator" in 1712, in the first recorded use of the word: ''Whenever any Gentlemen are particularly pleased with a Song, at their crying out Encore . . . the Performer is so obliging as to sing it over again." Today we've got it backward. The Gentlemen are obliged to sit through an Encore by the Performer (who is, no doubt, particularly pleased with himself) whether the Gentlemen are particularly pleased or not.
There are exceptions -- rare occasions when an encore is called for, literally and figuratively, but the artist doesn't put out. Al Green left the stage after a dazzling but disappointingly brief hourlong set last month at the Orpheum and didn't come back. It felt vaguely criminal. And there are times when artists make creative use of the encore, surprising the fans with an odd cover tune or a rarity, something entirely different than what was offered during the bulk of the show. This can be wonderfully gratifying -- it would be hard to overestimate the audience's gratitude when Neil Young reappeared after performing his 95-minute theatrical opus ''Greendale" for an uncorked encore of ''Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)," ''Like a Hurricane," ''Powderfinger," and ''Rockin' in the Free World." It can also be excruciatingly novel, as witnesses of Lisa Loeb's note-for-note cover of ''Stairway to Heaven" at the close of her Paradise gig in February will attest.
A few new bands are taking a stand. The Icelandic ensemble Sigur Ros simply bows at the close of each show, avoiding both pretense and expectation. At a recent concert, the popular emo band Brand New announced that it normally avoids encores but that it was willing to make an exception if demand was high, which is cheesy, but at least they're participating (albeit out of both sides of their mouth) in the dialogue.
The solution is simple. An encore should be earned, and it should be special. Otherwise it's just another case of mock spontaneity, knee-jerk hero worship, and stolen victory laps.
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.
