Sunday, October 27, 2013
Monae, Monae
So I went to the Janelle Monae concert earlier this week. It was fairly amazing. I'm not sure that I've ever seen any performer of any kind put out that much energy during the course of a performance, not even Shiri Appleby in the classic Lifetime movie unstable. Her sound is pretty difficult to describe since it's so eclectic, but let's call it Outkast meets Prince meets Lauryn Hill before she went crazy. In fact, she even covered Prince's "Let's Go Crazy," which caused me to squeal like a little girl. She also had two backup singers with identical haircuts who did drill-team-like feats of arm waving throughout the concert. And the band was good, too, although the levels were sometimes uneven -- at one point she pretty much got drowned out by a funky Stevie Wonder sounding keyboard line, which I'm pretty sure was not the intended effect.
But of course, I am far too old and crabby to be attending concerts at this point in my life. It was at the Vic, which is small, which meant that I had to stand the whole time, with a lesbian couple engaging in heavy PDA (or, actually, heaving petting) right next to me. They for some reason selected a hilariously mopey local band as the opening act; they were so uninterested in being there that they introduced themselves in a mumble before instructing the audience to not "bother to look us up." Then there was almost half an hour of people moving things around on the stage before the headliner could take the stage. Also, I became very paranoid that a rat was crawling up my leg because I saw one at that theater like five years ago. All legitimate concerns on my part, obviously.
Anyway, I enjoyed it! Anything that keeps me out past eleven on a Monday has to be pretty compelling.
So I went to the Janelle Monae concert earlier this week. It was fairly amazing. I'm not sure that I've ever seen any performer of any kind put out that much energy during the course of a performance, not even Shiri Appleby in the classic Lifetime movie unstable. Her sound is pretty difficult to describe since it's so eclectic, but let's call it Outkast meets Prince meets Lauryn Hill before she went crazy. In fact, she even covered Prince's "Let's Go Crazy," which caused me to squeal like a little girl. She also had two backup singers with identical haircuts who did drill-team-like feats of arm waving throughout the concert. And the band was good, too, although the levels were sometimes uneven -- at one point she pretty much got drowned out by a funky Stevie Wonder sounding keyboard line, which I'm pretty sure was not the intended effect.
But of course, I am far too old and crabby to be attending concerts at this point in my life. It was at the Vic, which is small, which meant that I had to stand the whole time, with a lesbian couple engaging in heavy PDA (or, actually, heaving petting) right next to me. They for some reason selected a hilariously mopey local band as the opening act; they were so uninterested in being there that they introduced themselves in a mumble before instructing the audience to not "bother to look us up." Then there was almost half an hour of people moving things around on the stage before the headliner could take the stage. Also, I became very paranoid that a rat was crawling up my leg because I saw one at that theater like five years ago. All legitimate concerns on my part, obviously.
Anyway, I enjoyed it! Anything that keeps me out past eleven on a Monday has to be pretty compelling.
