thursday is the new friday
Concert Review
John Legend
11-18-05
Milwaukee Riverside Theatre
or, Milwaukee is so Ghetto
Several weeks ago, a friend from up north called and said she would be down in the city in November and that we should go see John Legend at the Riverside. I kinda shrugged in my email and said I wasn't a huge fan and didn't feel like paying for the ticket. {I don't know when I have ever turned down a concert before. This scares me. But I ended up getting there in the end anyway.}
In actuality, I couldn't even remember what John Legend sings. I knew it was some R&B hit. And that's cool. I usually go for more indie rock stuff, but I'm pretty open and I like a lot of R&B too. I was "White Chocolate" when I lived in Chicago. I'm still big into Jill Scott and Erykah Badu. So I decided I needed to check out John Legend's "Get Lifted" CD.
The CD wasn't bad. I wasn't in love or anything. Kanye and Snoop on there. "Ordinary People" was the radio hit I couldn't remember the name of. And besides the CD, I found his Stevie Wonder cover, "Don't You Worry About A Thing" from Hitch which I of course loved, because it's Stevie Wonder. And the Lauryn Hill remix of "So High" isn't bad. That song even got high ratings on Pitchfork so that gives it indie cred.
But I was still sort of "meh" about it all. At least, I still was being cheap and not wanting to shell out for tickets. So I turned my friend down.
Only today, Thursday night, while I'm sitting here in my sweats that I've warn since the day before {one of the perks of a home office}, I get a call from a friend saying he got 2 front row tickets from work to some show called John Legend and he's looking to unload them for free because he can't go. I have to pick up the tickets right now, an hour away, and get to the show which starts in an hour and a half. So I frantically call my friend who wanted to go and leave the vm a sad, but kind of rub-it-in-your-face message. "Yeah, remember that show you were dying to see and I didn't feel like it, so we didn't get tickets and you never came down to the city? Yeah, I got 2 free front row tickets but it's too late for you to get here in time, isn't it? Aww, shucks."
So I call around and no one can meet me there, like this very minute. Which is sad because I hate doing concerts alone, but I've done it before and this is free front row tickets. So I rush to pick up the tix from the friend who is in the middle of a meeting and then I rush to the Milw. Riverside Theatre.
And boy was it ghetto. The theatre, for one, is not our best theatre. It has carpet and chairs and a balcony, but other than that, it's pretty old and still characterless. And in the middle of the set {right before a really cool Animals "Don't let me be misunderstood" cover}, Legend's mike goes dead. It's a full 10 minutes before they get him back online. Meanwhile he and the band vamps to the Jeopardy theme song music and the crowd shouts "we still love you John!" Completely ghetto. Legend was rightly pissed and somebody got fired, I hope.
And the crowd was ghetto too. I'm not making a discriminatory comment. The mix was almost 50-50 white/black. Lots of cute young white girls like John Legend I guess. Lots white couples too, along with black and latino. But they were all ghetto in that they shouted at Legend during soft, heartfelt, solo ballads. There was a constant barrage of women running up to the stage and distracting everybody by taking illegal pictures. When the opening singer, Neo, came down from the stage, they pulled him into stupid posed pictures without regard to where he needed to be at that moment. And so on... I don't want to rant all about it, because I had fun and it was free and front row and everything. I just got the overwhelming impression that touring artists leave Milwaukee thinking we are the most ghetto city in the country. And we might be.
Posted by heydomsar
2005-11-18
go back | random brainstorm | go forth
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