21 posts tagged “concert”
Taking a vacation day + round trip flight to LA + two tickets for the MUCC show at House of Blues = TOTALLY WORTH IT.
Bonus: I think they got some new fans out of my friends!
I got a hair cut.
And maybe a color too.
My eyebrows look hella black now. I'm still in debate over if this is okay or a "Oh no she di'n't!" move.
I saw Stevie Wonder in concert last night, managed to sit something like 8 rows from the front and it was AMAZING. I love you, Stevie! I can officially die musically happy now that I've seen you live.
Miyavi's pretty damn entertaining! He completely took me by surprise. I want to take his tap dancer (yes, he had a tap dancer on stage) home in my pocket.
Perhaps I'll write "The long of it." re: the show tomorrow.
Jigga!
Tonight's Jay-Z/Mary J. Blige show was, in short, OFF THE HOOK. And this is coming from neither a hardcore fan of Jay-Z nor Mary. Jay-Z could've easily gone on to perform another hour and Mary sang with so much more emotion than what you get out of her recorded works.
It was also a very Barack-ing night. Spotted a few Barack t-shirt clad folks in the audience and there was even a guy standing with the regular bootlegged concert t-shirt sellers in the parking lot selling, you guessed it, bootlegged Barack shirts (I wonder if the guy was going to give any of the profits to the campaign... probably not). At one point during the show, with a large picture of George Bush projected behind him, Jay-Z started calling out, "Are you ready for change? Are you ready for change, Yay Area??" The picture switched to one of Barack and the crowd went up in an uproar with Jay saying, "This tour isn't sponsored by Barack Obama but it's supported by a free man who's ready for change." The crowd went nuts.
Excellent show... HOVA!
I try to make it a point to not be that guy at concerts. You know, the guy (or girl) that shows up at shows that only knows the one radio hit of the headliner, looks bored during 95% of the show until that one song comes on and they go ape shit? Yeah, that guy.
To prevent that at this Sunday's Jay-Z/Mary J. Blige show I'm going to listen to nothing but Jay-Z non-stop till showtime. With Mary I go way back, she's been singing about the oppression of my heartbroken soul since I was a teenager. But I have a surface appreciation of Jay-Z, so it's time for me to do my homework. Hova!
That area is right above a major freeway overpass, so I like to think that late one night a young couple was driving over on their way home from a bar with the windows rolled down. The woman, possibly drunk off her ass, can't contain how much fun she just had and literally kicks up her feet in excitement. (This story works better in my head if they're driving a convertible and the woman is also trying to get at her boyfriend while he's trying to drive... but we'll just leave that part out.) Of course, her too-big Candies heel decides it can't take the abuse anymore after a long night of off-beat dancing and getting alcohol spilled on it, so it decides to liberate itself from her right foot and bounce it's way over the overpass.
That Monday morning, a construction worker spies the shoe and, aware that picking it up and taking it home would signal "Very Weird Shoe Fetish" to his coworkers, hooks the heel onto the fence so that it could greet him every morning before heading off into the trenches.
Thursday night I was at The Fillmore for the VH1 Hip Hop Honors Tour starring Big Daddy Kane, MC Lyte and The Roots. The Roots backed Kane and Lyte during their performance and started off the show with Skills and Black Thought doing covers of classic Hip Hop tracks, everything from N.W.A.'s "Gangster Gangster" to Eric B. & Rakim's "Microphone Fiend." The entire night was amazing. MC Lyte looked like she just stepped out of one of her videos, Kane worked the crowd well and Thought sang some Luther Vandross! I love The Roots.
While hanging out at my brother and sister-in-law's house tonight in celebration of my nephew's 5th birthday I was helping his older sister out with her homework. Task? Think of three words that have the short "a" sound (apple, bat, swam, etc.). Trying to be the helpful auntie rather than the usual tired and grumpy post-commute auntie I gave my 7-year-old niece, Zoe, this hint:
"I'm thinking of an animal with big teeth and a big mouth that swims in the swamp," while making big chomping motions with my hands.
Zoe looked at me intently till her face brightened up, "Platypus?!!"
Me: "No... alliga--wait! That's a short "a" too!"
Then I helped her spell out "platypus." My niece = genius. Just let me believe it.
Earlier, during dinner at Mel's (the nephew's favorite spot after a hard day of pre-school), I got treated to an almost entire recitation of Transformers: The Movie (animated, natch) by the Dynamic Duo of Zoe and Ethan complete with Soundwave-like voice acting and my nephew trying to sound like Starscream. Level of awesomeness? IMMEASUREABLE. Then I remembered how I was Zoe's age when my older brother and I watched the very same movie at an old theater in the hometown. We snuck in after a arriving late and seeing that no one was at the ticket booth anymore.
After that, though, Common at Mezzanine!
I'm going to start practicing my Zen mentality so that if he performs "The Light" I can tune all the other girls screaming for his babies in the audience and just pretend that he's rhyming only to me. Awww yeah.
I woke up at 7am thanks to an awesome charley horse that hit my right calf. As a matter of fact, my neck, lower back, abs, arms and left calf (apparently the charley horse in the right calf this morning meant that it would be fine for the rest of the day) are all sore.
I wish I could tell you that the reason for this was because I did an epic workout at the gym yesterday, burned 5,000 calories and can see the beginnings of a six-pack. Nope. It's because of the crowd at Rock The Bells, man.
Thanks to the 45,000 people around me I managed to get pushed about 3-4 people from the front barricade. During the groups leading up to Rage (Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, Wu-Tang Clan) it wasn't too bad. Once Wu-Tang finished their set and they started resetting the stage for Rage, though, all craziness broke loose.
I've figured out that I need to be at least 4" taller and probably 30lbs heavier if I ever want to brave the pit area of a Rage show again. Being a guy might help too. The surge of the crowd behind me trying to get to the front meant that at one point I was almost 45º to the ground, feet off the floor being held up by all the guys being squished with me. It was simultaneously really fun and really scary. Being one of the last girls in my immediate area that tried to stick it out, there were a couple cool guys next to me that constantly asked if I was all right and, at one point, grabbed my arm and pulled me to him so I wouldn't fall and get trampled by the guys around me.
Around 10 minutes before Rage even got on, though, another big surge came and I was basically enveloped by two bigger guys surrounding me. It was like a fucked up cave made up of body heat and limbs and yelling and... fleeting thoughts of this being one of the worst ways to die.
That's when I knew I had to get out.
So, 10 minutes before they even took the stage, the guys around me lifted me up above the crowd and the security guy at the barricade pulled me out. So much for trying to be hardcore!
As I was walking past the stage, I realized I felt a little "freer" than usual... turns out my bra had gotten unhooked while I was battling with the crowd. Awesome!
Do I even need to tell you how dope this show was after that whole story, though? I hope not.
I miss L-Boogie. Can someone please tell Miss Hill that there are many folks out there that would like to hear L-Boogie back on the mic? Better yet, can you just get The Fugees back together for real this time?
Came into the Lauryn Hill show tonight at the Paramount Theater in Oakland with lower than low expectations after hearing about her "Miss Hill" issues, sound troubles during her previous shows, and general outlook on life (see: Lauryn Hill Unplugged). Unfortunately, rather than being pseudo-pleased with the outcome because of said low expectations, it was... well... just as I expected.
A good chunk of the people sitting around me left the show 20 minutes in with half of the upstairs balcony gone before she left the stage for the encore. At one point someone screamed, "Play something we wanna hear!" and there were a few times when booing was heard. My friends and I stuck it out to the end and were slightly pleased with the inclusion of old Fugees favorites into the set, but the energy was too little too late to save the performance. Miss Hill's voice sounded like she had just come off a bad chest cold, her pacing of songs included epically-long new stuff (including her first song that had a chorus that repeated something about heathens over and over and over) and crowd favorites so drowned out by the awesome, yet huge 11-piece band (3 guys on percussion, 2 guys on keys, 3 guys on strings, 2 guys on horns, 1 DJ plus 4 back-up singers) that you could barely make out Miss Hill's vocals.
Now, I'm all for artists expanding their horizons and trying new things, so don't think I only want Miseducation/Fugees Lauryn Hill. I didn't mind her Unplugged stuff, but when she started going off about being "caricatured" by the industry and then getting her being "crystalized" (whatever the hell that meant) midpoint of the show I really felt like just telling her to stop the yapping and get on with it. I mean, girl made one major album that she said she was proud of, won a ton of recognition for, gets cheated on by her baby daddy and suddenly she's "caricatured" and "crystalized?" You made one album! One! And it's been almost ten years since it happened!
Can someone get L-Boogie back?
...
...
28 on the 28th... holy moly.
My only complaint about JRock Revolution and the Saturday show was that the set times for each of the four bands were ridiculously short. Consider this: the show started promptly at 7pm and ended almost on the dot at 10:30pm. That's four bands, plus breaking down/setting up between acts, plus Yoshiki coming out before MUCC to say some words (he's going to Japan Expo in France), plus MUCC's brief video introduction.
Three and a half hours for all that.
When the house lights hit in the Wiltern and signaled that yes, the show was really over, I looked at my phone and went, "What the fuck 10:30?!?!"
Friends said that the Friday show ended at 11:30pm, which means that JRR had at least another hour they could've divided up between the four bands they had on Saturday. 11:30pm is still really early in my eyes for the ending of a show, but maybe the Wiltern has to make special permissions for the all age crowd. Either way, 10:30pm was freakin' ridiculous. Besides that, though, girugamesh and MUCC were my definite highlights.
I skipped out on most of Merry's set to buy merchandise for myself and a friend but came back with enough time to see their vocalist unzip his fly, thread the microphone through it and sing with the cord running through his pants. At the end of their set he did a series of yoga-esque headstands on his riser and on stage. Musically, I couldn't tell you a thing about them!
Incidentally, my friends and I ran into Merry at a Japanese shopping plaza not too far from the hotels where the bands were staying. Upon seeing them, my J-dar told me that these weren't the typical Japanese folks that are either tourists or students studying abroad and had them pegged as either D'espairsRay or Merry. When Merry got on stage the next night, my friend and I instantly recognized the drummer and we both went, "Hey! We saw them!"
Next came girugamesh, which I was really excited for. Satoshi flexed his vocal chops with all the singing and growling and the band gave off the impression that they had been around much longer than the three years they've been together. Although they didn't play "Kaisen Sengen" (my favorite song of theirs), hearing "Deceived Mad Pain" live was sweet! I look forward to seeing them perform live again and think that if this performance is any indication of what they have in store that there will be big things for them as they continue to develop their sound.
D'espairsRay came on next. I really tried to get into the hype the first time I saw them perform in 2005 and tried again this time around, but just couldn't do it. Their vocalist tried to lead a sing-a-long during one of their songs, but the lyrics being in Japanese and the fact that with a multi-act show the likelyhood that you'll have a high enough concentration of fans that know your lyrics in a crowd is pretty slim, the attempt came out pretty flat. I'll give him an E for Effort, though.
And then MUCC! Before the curtain rose, a series of live images of each of the band members was projected on the screen in front of the curtain. Cheers and screams erupted from the crowd as each name was shown. The lights dimmed, "Rave Circus" played and the members of MUCC came out on stage. In signature MUCC form, Yukke, Miya and Tatsurou all were barefoot and the entire band was decked in all black. Yukke rocked the capri pants, Miya had on an Avenged Sevenfold shirt and Tatsurou was wearing what only could be described as Arabian Nights/80s throwback Aladdin/MC Hammer parachute pants. Please, Tatsurou, don't hurt 'em.
With all the previous artists, camera crews stationed around the venue fed live imagery to a large screen behind the drummer, but with MUCC it was noticeably absent. Instead, during "Gokusai," the familiar image of MUCC's band logo rose in supersize form behind Satochi on drums. That stayed up for the duration of a couple songs then we were back to the live camera feed projected on screen.
The set-list:
Rave Circus
Gokusai
Rojiura Boku to Kimi e
D.O.G
Kuukyo na Heya
Saishuu Ressha
25ji no Yuutsu
Libra
Ryuusei
(By the way, you can purchase all of these songs and more through iTunes now!)
Tatsurou spoke in English a few times to the audience thanking us for coming, saying how happy they were to be here and how they will be back, the usual fare. He also lead a much more successful sing-a-long during "D.O.G" where he and the crowd tag-teamed various sounding "Yeah yeah yeaaaah's" to the music. As a self-described "huge MUCC fan" I would much rather parrot a series of "yeah's" than be encouraged to try to remember Japanese lyrics to sing to. Trust me, mistaking English lyrics is funny enough, don't even get me started on trying to fake Japanese ones.
During "25ji no Yuutsu," Yukke broke out the big guns and was handed a standing bass... you know the kind you see being played in symphonies? Yukke literally rocked out with that. I'd say it was "sweet," but that's a gross understatement. The dramatic lighting of the song, Tatsurou's haunting voice and seeing Yukke dip and move with an instrument that was several inches taller than him was one of the best parts of the show, hands down.
Before I knew it, Tatsurou yelled out, "Last song!" and launched into "Ryuusei," and left the crowd (well, me at least) wanting more.
Throughout the entire set, Tatsurou's voice matched or exceeded his recorded self, but there were a few times during the higher-pitched areas where he would pull the mic away from his mouth because it seemed like he couldn't hit the note. Overall, though, his voice was amazing and he projects so much feeling with it that you feel like you could understand the lyrics beyond the language barrier.
MUCC's celebrating their ten year anniversary this year and you could tell that their time together has made them a cohesive unit. Miya threw in some Tom Morello-esque (sorry, still on that Rage Against The Machine kick) guitar effects into one of the songs, Satochi's arms were a whirlwind of drumming action and Yukke... well, Yukke was just awesome (he's my favorite, if you couldn't tell).
Overall, I'd say JRR was successful in bringing about a show that highlighted some of the biggest and up-and-coming acts around the Visual scene in Japan. Whether they were able to shed light on the scene to a audience beyond the typical hardcore fanbase is up for debate (everyone that I saw looked like they were familiar with at least one band on the line-up), but hopefully this year is just a sign of bigger and better things to come. I imagine they'll announce a DVD soon enough, the amount of camera coverage they had couldn't have just been for the benefit of the fans that weren't close to the stage. So, those of you who were unable to make it can see all the goodness yourself soon I hope.
