This sec­ond episode of Treme felt like a bit of a let down from the open­ing one, for one spe­cific rea­son, the appear­ance of the street musi­cians Sonny and Annie.  Their two scenes were odd and seemed mis­placed and even super­flu­ous.  There may be a rea­son for them, yet unclear, but they seem point­less.  Sonny comes off as a com­plete prick, which I don’t think is inten­tional, I think he’s meant to be jus­ti­fi­able aggrieved, but the con­text in which he is a prick is a com­bi­na­tion of music and authen­tic New Orleans–ness.  The prob­lem is that the scenes are over­played, and the music the two play is frankly mediocre.

Being a prick is per­fectly fine for a char­ac­ter, but an inter­est­ing thing con­trasts Sonny and Davis; the same group of naive young tourists Sonny insults are then directed by Davis, with total sin­cer­ity, towards what Sonny would con­sider an authen­tic New Orleans expe­ri­ence.  They have a great time and come off as attrac­tive char­ac­ters.  The con­nec­tion also demon­strates that Davis, despite being a fuck-up and a jack­ass, has bet­ter taste in music.  The sec­ond scene, plac­ing Sonny and Annie in a dull and aim­less con­ver­sa­tion in a bar, is a cipher, and ends up with the atten­tion lit­er­ally drift­ing to the New Orleans Jazz Vipers, who are won­der­ful in every way that the younger pair are not.  It is the street musi­cians, placed in the con­text of a show that begins with Coco Robicheaux, who are musi­cal misfits.

The rest of the episode is very strong, weav­ing the real­ity of soci­ety together through details, how peo­ple work, play, bar­gain and fight with each other, how they build their own sys­tems and sub­cul­tures, inde­pen­dent of the estab­lish­ment that exists to pro­tect a few and dis­ap­point the many.  This may be the fun­da­men­tal idea in the show, and of course the sub­cul­tures are cre­ated via music.  It’s not shal­low soci­ol­ogy or hip­ster­ism, again it goes back to the ori­gins of soci­ety.  The erup­tion of brief vio­lence is sur­pris­ing, but not gra­tu­itous.  There’s no apol­ogy for it, but the rea­son for it is clear, and it has to do with oppos­ing forces of destruc­tion and con­struc­tion, the lat­ter end­ing the show in a truly incred­i­ble moment when Chief Lam­breaux and the one mem­ber of his tribe he has found start rebuild­ing their rit­ual with two tam­bourines and ‘Shal­low Water.’  It’s like the last scene in Nights of Cabiria, the one where the frag­ments come together into some­thing inde­scrib­ably beautiful.