Last weekend I went to see The Cure on Friday and ASAP Twelvyy and Flatbush Zombies on Saturday.
The Cure was here for the first time in an odd two decades and they were performing at the only venue in town that's able to host more than a handful of people, the hockey arena ( more on that later ). I quite like Cure: the early output until Pornography is fantastic, I enjoy Disintegration and an assorted ensemble of hits from their catalogue. The newer stuff is admittedly bollocks and I have a natural aversion to seeing old men play music whence it goes against its intrinsic character, let me explain: I think rock music is a young man's game that lives and dies largely with the ability of the musicians to maintain an erection and enjoy an unstable alternative kind of living. Whenever a rock band approaches the arena rock stage of their career, their creative energies are exhausted and they fall out of favor with the zeitgeist. In all fairness I'm of the opinion that playing music with guitars is passe so they wouldn't be able to please me today anyhow; but how this does play into what I'm saying is however, that whatever The Cure was 1981 is not here neither in form nor spirit. So it's an old The Cure bordering on senility after a slew of horrid albums caricaturing their brand, playing for middle aged people with workplace comp tickets at a sports arena ill suited for the occasion. Uh oh, what'll transpire?
The night starts out by the realisation that there'll be a seemingly thorough pat-down security check at the gate, so your boi has to make a slight detour by running into the nearby woods to hide his bottle of vodka. Naturally the junior pig at the gate laxes the second I've disposed my contraband and I get through without even a pat on the back. After that's done I scour through the arena to capture the general vibe of things. The attendance was rather diverse, but middle aged men and women are definitely a sizeable portion of the demographic. It is maybe due to the contribution of their presence that the smoking quarters had the felt like the deck of a Helsinki-Stockholm cruise ship carnival frozen in time, which would have shocked and appalled the narrator had he not been fully prepared for it. I knew that there'd be quite bit of people who got on board with Friday I'm In Love and all that, but I had to wonder what albums they've heard, which is their favorite and what's their relationship with music in general anyway.
A special shoutout to the exceptionally ugly merch that one could have mistaken for a Vietnamese bootleg had it not been for the very western pricetag of a humble 35 euros. The numerous selection of shirts was a cavalcade in kitsch of various stylings and I kid you not that one shirt looked like it could have been on sold on a promotional tour for Slipknot's first album, in 1999 or whatever, like almost two decades ago.
The pricing trend at the venue was scaled toward to the more affluent customer in other areas as well. The 7.40 euro beer made this is an exceptionally dry evening until I got back to the woods for my bottle.
Eventually we do get to our seats on the very uppermost compartment at the other end of the arena, which while not optimal for experiencing the concert, does give a breathtaking visual of the audience and scale of the structure. The ill-fit of the seating and the venue becomes strikingly apparent once the show kicks off with Disintegration's opener Plainsong. The sound is pretty rubbish and the visual of the band is largely stickfigures emoting on a distant stage, save for the dimensions of Robert Smith's rotund stomach whenever he turns sideways. The shite hockey arena is obviously not designed for listening to music and the acoustics left much to be desired, and while the sound did progressively get better throughout the gargantuan 35 song setlist that span three hours, I had the feeling that I was watching a film at home rather than being immersed in sound and energy. It was left to one's imagination to let the big songs sound as big as they should.
The good moments were excellent though, especially with the aforementioned Plainsong making a profound impression on me with its synth that just overwhelmed everything underneath its loom. The live setting brought out the sheer size and scale of the soundscape of the best songs from Disintegration, and I must admit a newfound admiration for the album, although I still feel the poppier numbers keep down from being what it could be. The undisputed highlight however was One Hundred Years from Pornography and Forest from Seventeen Seconds that are fantastic songs from fantastic albums that really encompass everything that was good about this band. The solo on Forest especially crawls and wraps itself around the spine of the song allowing it to retain its murky sound and the mood of impenetrable fog. While perhaps never a subtle band, this kind of unstated dramatic nature of their early output is not present on the newer shit that just goes all out with a vestige of stale gimmickry set to the beat of sordid arena rock drumming and Van Halen shred, or just downright shit as the byproduct of an ill-advised sense of humor. This kind of division is apt in describing the later Cure output, because one half is while yet knees deep in the concept of "Cureness", they betray their true nature by parading around like peacocks in heat, while the other half is goofball hits like Hot, Hot, Hot and Lovecats that are if not the bane of my existence, then certainly in the running for it. Somewhere in between resides the song "Wrong Number" that is so dated in 2016 it has to be heard to be believed in 2016, because any sensible musical troupe would have stopped playing it after the Y2K apocalypse didn't pan out.
All in all I found it very satisfactory. I'm easy to please and the good stuff was good and the bad shit pretty bad. I've been listening to a lot of Cure since, especially Disintegration which I previously wasn't so fond of, so it's hard to not to count is as a success. As a sidenote I dropped by the after party that did everything I wish they wouldn't have: they played only the hits and when the mixtape ran out, they just appeared to have repeated it. Fucking dadrock.
Saturday I went sojourning into the urban environs and saw ASAP Twelvyy and Flatbush Zombies. I was too hungover to function until 7pm and I just barely managed to feed myself before transporting my prison of flesh into the venue. This time it was small, compact and comfortable with perfectly acceptable sound system to boot. This time I felt a better fit within the swaths of youths, although it appears that the hip hops shows are definitely attended more by people dedicated to art, and the amount of hipster tourists like myself was only a handful. The beer was once again stupid expense, but I did my best rectifying it by having a couple beer cans as shots before I did my entrance.
It started with ASAP Twelvyy whom I was only passingly familiar with. My impression was that he was rather generic without anything being outright distasteful yet teetering on the verge of the very unremarkable: and this was pretty much what it was live too. What did make this memorable was his commendable energy, and the vocal contingent of ASAP partisans in the audience which was quite a sight. He was having fun out there and I was as well. It's very unlikely that he'll be setting the world on fire thou'.
When Flatbush Zombies got on stage I was reminded with the stark difference of witnessing something that's current and something that has completely blown its wad on its way to the old folks home to be unceremoniously put down. The energy was incredible and the audience participation is on another level when it's a genuine sentiment of the music grabbing the experiencer's intuition instead of complimentary clapping and old rheumatic bodies attempting to emote by swinging from left to right in the beat of music from two generations ago. Whenever the audience stood still, pints were flung from the opposite ends of the crowd, piercing the numerous clouds of weed smoke on the trajectory. This kind of youthful vigour and immediacy happens only in real appreciation of something that's happening now, without nostalgia's intellectual laziness. Being not that familiar with their songs I was more immersed into the good vibes in buildings, and just by looking at it I managed to shave off the ten years I gained by watching The Cure just 24 hours ago.
The setlist span their entire discography and I think they were disbanding after this tour? Idk, I hope not, because Flatbush Zombies occupy a place of being distinctly old school in character while not sounding no less contemporary than many of their contemporaries. They actually rap over their beats without being reactionary, their themes are not condescending while neither going into any embarrassingly popular forays into dumb politics or the real hip hop trope. Their style is very unique and personal, but it doesn't remind me of fedoras and white boys. I don't think they're in the trailblazing upper echelon of the music of today, but a definitely a footnote worth looking at despite not being musically progressive.
The night was capped off the proper way when they exited the venue with a bunch of tiny white girls decked in merch. God bless these guys and anyone who gets to live the musician's life.
A good weekend of doing stuff instead of being on the computer refreshing twitter.
