clevermanka (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
clevermanka) wrote2013-02-05 10:49 am
clevermanka) wrote2013-02-05 10:49 am
Entry tags:
Have my lipstick all over your face
So, this happened.
Yesterday afternoon I took my 2pm nap like usual. I always unhook my office phone so it doesn't wake me up, even though I get, like, two phone calls a week on that thing. KU is very email-oriented. Thankfully. But yesterday, when I put it back in the cradle, my message light was blinking. Unusual. Unusual enough that I checked my voice mail immediately (something I usually don't do). It was Theresa, a friend of mine from her patronage at KCRF and long-ago attendance at ConQuesT (which is where we met). The message was kind of garbled--bad connection--but I could make out the words "Ticket" and "Lady Gaga."
I called her back immediately, found out she and her wife Danielle had an extra ticket to Gaga due to a friend's cancellation (death in the family--sucks for her) and could I go with them?
So that's the explanation of how I wound up going to see Lady Gaga's Born This Way Ball last night at the Sprint center with less than three hour's notice.
It. Was. Amazing.
The opening opening act (there were two) was unbelievably awful. As I texted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tessagratton and nataliesee during the performance (I use the term loosely): "I am witnessing the most bizarre and yet uninteresting opening act in the history of arena concerts." and "It's like she won a contest to perform that didn't have a talent screening." I know I can be judgmental about stuff, but this wasn't just me. Nobody was clapping. I turned around in my seat (we had fucking amazing seats, btw) and everyone was wearing a look of confused discomfort. When it (thankfully) ended, I looked around and asked "Did that just happen?" Lots of people looked at me, but nobody had an answer. I can't even describe it. It was like performance art, minus the performance. And the art.
The second opening act was a DJ called "madeon" and he was really good. He's apparently a child genius because his Wikipedia page says he was born in 1994. o_O His remixes were great, and kept the crowd on the floor hopping for nearly an hour. Hell, it kept me entertained in my seat. Yes, anything would've been an improvement over whatever-the-hell-that-first-thing-was, but honestly. He was Really Good. If I'd been able to bear the idea of spending time in the swag lines again, I'dve bought one of his tee shirts.
But then. Gaga.
Let me repeat the mention of our amazing seats. So here is the Sprint Center seating chart for this show:
We were in the middle of row 2, section 105. Not only were we very close to the stage, but there was a U-shaped bridge that came nearly halfway to the middle of the floor that she and the dancers used pretty frequently. There were times that she was so close I could see her face. Amazing.
To start things off, she came out on a horse. A real horse. A horse with a unicorn horn strapped to its face armor that walked around the platform bridge cutting through the center of the Sprint Center floor bobbing its head in time to the music. The concert pretty much maintained that level of spectacle through the whole thing.
I lost count of the costume changes (in general, I liked them better than the Monster's Ball costumes) and I was particularly impressed that a few of them were riffs on some of the things she's worn for non-performance public appearances (the meat dress in particular), and others were variations of things worn in videos or other performances. I liked the self-references. Obviously someone was wanting to play with themes, and they succeeded there. I didn't think the symbolism of the sets worked as well with some of of the songs. Honestly, I wasn't quite sure what she was trying to convey sometimes, but it was never uninteresting to look at.
The set itself was a huge castle that had multiple floors (and windows for those floors) as well as wings that opened and closed and had their own platforms for performing on. Oh, there was also, at the beginning, a giant pregnant belly and splayed legs with a zipper over the vulva out of which Lady Gaga crawled for the first song after she made her jaunt around the stage and bridge on the horse.
She didn't sing as much as she did during the Monster's Ball tour. Anyone who's been to a recent arena concert or watched a music awards show knows that the current thing is to play a song, vocals and all, and have the singer sing over the tracks. I'm fine with that, honestly, whatever. For that sort of show, I'm not there for a heartfelt rendition of every song in the artist's catalog. I'm there for the fucking SHOW. But anyway, she let the pre-recorded tracks cover more of her singing while she encouraged the crowd and danced (or went through costume changes). The times she did sing, she was in gorgeous form. Haters can go fuck themselves. The woman has amazing pipes.
Songs that I thought played the best (musically, thematically, and performance-wise) were Bad Romance, Hair, Judas, Bad Kids, and Paparazzi. One of the best costume/performances was when she came out as the motorcycle from this image. In order to fit more songs in an already-long show (she performed for nearly three hours), she cut short a lot of songs, eliminating the musical bridge sections, etc. I was fine with that artistic decision. I'd rather hear her sing a verse and chorus of a favorite song during the concert than not hear it at all.
One of my favorite parts of the show was when she pulled people out of the audience to join her on stage, who then got ushered backstage for after-show. She did this twice, pulling four people on stage each time. The first time was right before her traditional call to someone in the audience. You text her before the show, giving your number and a randomly chosen (?) person gets a phone call from her during the performance. It's pretty awesome, really. The last time was during the encore. I loved seeing the transitions of the people pulled up on stage. At first they were, frankly, terrified and awkward (who wouldn't be?), but then with her encouragement they got happy and dancey. It was charming.
The phone call, though. You guys, the phone call. At The Monster's Ball tour, the person she called was a girl who seemed really out of it, or overly scared, or something. This time, she called a teenage boy and they somehow got him spotlighted up in his seat and projected him onto the big screens at the front of the arena. He was so excited. They had a fairly long conversation about how he used her as motivation to keep his head up when the kids at his school called him faggot and made fun of him. She told him that he was an inspiration to her and kids like him were the reason she made music, and as a special thanks, she re-sang Born This Way with just her and the piano. The kid kept his phone up to his face and was singing along (all the time projected onto the big screen) and you could barely make out his voice, but you could tell he was singing along with her. He was just so beautiful, you guys, with his crazy eyeliner and red lipstick and SO SO YOUNG and full of hope and courage.
I now have a better tolerance (if not a better love) for the song Born This Way because of that moment. Because I will forever picture that perfect kid singing with her and not giving a fuck about looking cool or being teenage-boy-aloof because he was on the phone with his idol and she was singing for him and he was unabashedly loving every moment of it.
Overall, I have to say this was a better show than Monster's Ball. The production values were higher, the sound was better, the costume changes were faster and more fluid, and Gaga seemed to be overall enjoying herself more. A few times, she honest-to-god skipped around the stage in her giant platform heels. It was adorable.
So many thank yous to Danielle and Theresa for offering me their extra ticket. As I told them last night, as long as I'm working at KCRF, they will never pay to get in the gate, ever again. You are the bomb, ladies. Thank you, thank you.
Okay, I just found this.
YOU GUIZ. She really really loves her fans.
Yesterday afternoon I took my 2pm nap like usual. I always unhook my office phone so it doesn't wake me up, even though I get, like, two phone calls a week on that thing. KU is very email-oriented. Thankfully. But yesterday, when I put it back in the cradle, my message light was blinking. Unusual. Unusual enough that I checked my voice mail immediately (something I usually don't do). It was Theresa, a friend of mine from her patronage at KCRF and long-ago attendance at ConQuesT (which is where we met). The message was kind of garbled--bad connection--but I could make out the words "Ticket" and "Lady Gaga."
I called her back immediately, found out she and her wife Danielle had an extra ticket to Gaga due to a friend's cancellation (death in the family--sucks for her) and could I go with them?
So that's the explanation of how I wound up going to see Lady Gaga's Born This Way Ball last night at the Sprint center with less than three hour's notice.
It. Was. Amazing.
The opening opening act (there were two) was unbelievably awful. As I texted to
tessagratton and nataliesee during the performance (I use the term loosely): "I am witnessing the most bizarre and yet uninteresting opening act in the history of arena concerts." and "It's like she won a contest to perform that didn't have a talent screening." I know I can be judgmental about stuff, but this wasn't just me. Nobody was clapping. I turned around in my seat (we had fucking amazing seats, btw) and everyone was wearing a look of confused discomfort. When it (thankfully) ended, I looked around and asked "Did that just happen?" Lots of people looked at me, but nobody had an answer. I can't even describe it. It was like performance art, minus the performance. And the art. The second opening act was a DJ called "madeon" and he was really good. He's apparently a child genius because his Wikipedia page says he was born in 1994. o_O His remixes were great, and kept the crowd on the floor hopping for nearly an hour. Hell, it kept me entertained in my seat. Yes, anything would've been an improvement over whatever-the-hell-that-first-thing-was, but honestly. He was Really Good. If I'd been able to bear the idea of spending time in the swag lines again, I'dve bought one of his tee shirts.
But then. Gaga.
Let me repeat the mention of our amazing seats. So here is the Sprint Center seating chart for this show:
We were in the middle of row 2, section 105. Not only were we very close to the stage, but there was a U-shaped bridge that came nearly halfway to the middle of the floor that she and the dancers used pretty frequently. There were times that she was so close I could see her face. Amazing.
To start things off, she came out on a horse. A real horse. A horse with a unicorn horn strapped to its face armor that walked around the platform bridge cutting through the center of the Sprint Center floor bobbing its head in time to the music. The concert pretty much maintained that level of spectacle through the whole thing.
I lost count of the costume changes (in general, I liked them better than the Monster's Ball costumes) and I was particularly impressed that a few of them were riffs on some of the things she's worn for non-performance public appearances (the meat dress in particular), and others were variations of things worn in videos or other performances. I liked the self-references. Obviously someone was wanting to play with themes, and they succeeded there. I didn't think the symbolism of the sets worked as well with some of of the songs. Honestly, I wasn't quite sure what she was trying to convey sometimes, but it was never uninteresting to look at.
The set itself was a huge castle that had multiple floors (and windows for those floors) as well as wings that opened and closed and had their own platforms for performing on. Oh, there was also, at the beginning, a giant pregnant belly and splayed legs with a zipper over the vulva out of which Lady Gaga crawled for the first song after she made her jaunt around the stage and bridge on the horse.
She didn't sing as much as she did during the Monster's Ball tour. Anyone who's been to a recent arena concert or watched a music awards show knows that the current thing is to play a song, vocals and all, and have the singer sing over the tracks. I'm fine with that, honestly, whatever. For that sort of show, I'm not there for a heartfelt rendition of every song in the artist's catalog. I'm there for the fucking SHOW. But anyway, she let the pre-recorded tracks cover more of her singing while she encouraged the crowd and danced (or went through costume changes). The times she did sing, she was in gorgeous form. Haters can go fuck themselves. The woman has amazing pipes.
Songs that I thought played the best (musically, thematically, and performance-wise) were Bad Romance, Hair, Judas, Bad Kids, and Paparazzi. One of the best costume/performances was when she came out as the motorcycle from this image. In order to fit more songs in an already-long show (she performed for nearly three hours), she cut short a lot of songs, eliminating the musical bridge sections, etc. I was fine with that artistic decision. I'd rather hear her sing a verse and chorus of a favorite song during the concert than not hear it at all.
One of my favorite parts of the show was when she pulled people out of the audience to join her on stage, who then got ushered backstage for after-show. She did this twice, pulling four people on stage each time. The first time was right before her traditional call to someone in the audience. You text her before the show, giving your number and a randomly chosen (?) person gets a phone call from her during the performance. It's pretty awesome, really. The last time was during the encore. I loved seeing the transitions of the people pulled up on stage. At first they were, frankly, terrified and awkward (who wouldn't be?), but then with her encouragement they got happy and dancey. It was charming.
The phone call, though. You guys, the phone call. At The Monster's Ball tour, the person she called was a girl who seemed really out of it, or overly scared, or something. This time, she called a teenage boy and they somehow got him spotlighted up in his seat and projected him onto the big screens at the front of the arena. He was so excited. They had a fairly long conversation about how he used her as motivation to keep his head up when the kids at his school called him faggot and made fun of him. She told him that he was an inspiration to her and kids like him were the reason she made music, and as a special thanks, she re-sang Born This Way with just her and the piano. The kid kept his phone up to his face and was singing along (all the time projected onto the big screen) and you could barely make out his voice, but you could tell he was singing along with her. He was just so beautiful, you guys, with his crazy eyeliner and red lipstick and SO SO YOUNG and full of hope and courage.
I now have a better tolerance (if not a better love) for the song Born This Way because of that moment. Because I will forever picture that perfect kid singing with her and not giving a fuck about looking cool or being teenage-boy-aloof because he was on the phone with his idol and she was singing for him and he was unabashedly loving every moment of it.
Overall, I have to say this was a better show than Monster's Ball. The production values were higher, the sound was better, the costume changes were faster and more fluid, and Gaga seemed to be overall enjoying herself more. A few times, she honest-to-god skipped around the stage in her giant platform heels. It was adorable.
So many thank yous to Danielle and Theresa for offering me their extra ticket. As I told them last night, as long as I'm working at KCRF, they will never pay to get in the gate, ever again. You are the bomb, ladies. Thank you, thank you.
Okay, I just found this.
YOU GUIZ. She really really loves her fans.
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