Ok - so my SO and I went to see GYBE yesterday. For those who have never heard of GYBE, I suggest you check them at allmusic.com (search for GodSpeedYouBlackEmeperor).
I’ve been looking forward to seeing them live for roughly the last 3 years of my life. Finally they came to DC so I got tickets and went.
Well here’s to these sobs that have trouble understanding the premise of going to a concert - if you don’t care, leave or at least shut your face. I do realize that tickets were cheap (12 bucks) and you probably had nothing better to do last night with your sad life…but that doesn’t give a reason to be a total jerk/bitch and think you’re at a bar instead of a concert. If you don’t like the music at least have the decency to shut your face and let others enjoy the music…
Next time I see your sorry ass around during a concert, I’ll seriously kick your butt
And on the alternate rant… I went to see Brendan Benson and Ben Kweller last week. You’re at a concert, dipshits. Don’t just stand there like you smoked just a weeee too much. And? If you do jump around? Have the decency not to spill your beer on my, you underaged twit!
In college, a friend of mine booked concerts for a small “jazz” type club in the college union. Her last semester, she pulled out the stops, getting the bands she wanted to see, regardless of format. Things came to a head when she booked the Melvins. This was, I think 91? Anyway. They brought their own sound system. Skipped the club’s altogether and used theirs. And it was loud. LOUD. LLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUDDDDDDD. Going outside this building with three-foot-thick walls to get some relief and you could still understand the lyrics. Painfully, wonderfully loud. And getting louder with every song.
The manager (not my friend) becomes increasingly annoyed, and walks up on stage, mid song, and whispers, no, SHOUTS, in the bassist’s ear. The bass player walks over to Buzz and shouts in his ear. He cuts the song short, and annouces “We’ve just been informed that if we don’t turn it down, we’re not getting paid. And man, I can’t afford not to get paid. So…(to the other two)…quieter! Quieter! No, quieter!” They keep turning their instruments down. The drummer keeps playing softer. It’s not enough “Goddamn it! Quiet! Quieter!” The drummer is barely tapping, the bass is almost completely off. Buzz whispers the lyrics. The audience chatters.
The song ends, and Buzz starts on the crowd “Goddamn it people! I heard you talking through that whole song! Now shut the helll up!”. Since they were only twenty minutes into their set, most assumed it was a short term joke. It wasn’t. They played the rest of their set at a volume just below quiet conversation. Half the crowd was supremely pissed, the other half (me included) thought it was the funniest thing we’d ever paid five bucks to see, and loved it. We clapped and cheered quietly between songs.
I like music that is meant to be loud as fuck. If it’s not loud as fuck, then I don’t want to go to the show. I want to scream, yell, get drunk, take drugs, jump around, and have my ears blown out.
Great story, *Ich Bins. It reminded me of the time my friend and I went to see Dave Frischberg at Trapper’s in Honolulu. Not a whole lot of people in the club, but one of the tables had a couple of snotty assholes yammering away, complaining that Frischberg’s piano playing wasn’t exactly up to Art Tatum standards. Frischberg played through that crap for about twenty minutes, then he did Can’t Take You Nowhere, and closed out the set.
I’m gonna have to jump in on the side of the people who say that in most cases a crowd should be rowdy and loud and inconsiderate and the band should have no trouble topping them. I have been at good concerts where this does not apply (Cat Power, Duncan Sheik and Aimee Mann all come to mind), but for the most part, deal with it. And come to think of it, people were highly obnoxious at those shows, too. People go out to have a good time and hear a band, and they will not necessarily have the reverence that you do for this particular group. Such is the nature of these things.
Well GYBE is hard to explain if you are not familiar with them…all I can say is that, like Sigur Ros, if you ‘get in’ the music it completely transcends the experience (boy - that sounded so new-agey crappy but I have no better way of explaining it)
I think a lot of people here are unfamiliar with GY!BE. It’s an experimental post-rock act based around long, droning segments, odd spoken word samples of street preachers and other wackjobs, and minimalistic, repetitive string arrangements that go on for minutes before exploding into insane guitar explosions. (The GYBE concert I went to was, at times, the loudest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.) If you think that sounds pretentious and boring and you just want to have a fun night out, then don’t go to the show. And if you somehow end up there without knowing what it is, then show some fucking respect for the other people there who’ve paid for the tickets.
The crowd should not be rowdy and loud and inconsiderate at a GY!BE concert. Different rules for different genres.
The reason I am a live music fanatic is something I call energy, and it’s what a good performer delivers to the audience. I saw Phish and Tori Amos last week, and both delivered energy in their own way. (Indeed, this is Phish’s primary stock in trade.) In my experience, some people get this and some do not. (My wife, unfortunately, does not, and she feels the same way you do.)
Talking during the show depends a lot on the show. The Asylum Street Spankers, for instance, play entirely without benefit of electricity, and signs on the door implore people to shut the hell up during the show; violators get shouted down by both band and audience. Conversely, the people next to me at the Phish show could have been chattering through the entirety of both sets, and I would have neither noticed nor cared. Tori was mixed; chatter while she was doing “Baker Baker” at the piano would have been (and, in fact, was) distracting, but it wouldn’t have mattered while she and her band were belting out “Cornflake Girl”.
GY!BE (who I really want to go see down in Chapel Hill tomorrow night) is best described as “rock and roll chamber music”. It is not party or background music; it is music that is best served by paying attention to it. Those who chatter through the show are not only disturbing the other audience members at times, they are also IMO missing the point. Is that pretentious? Yeah, but there’s plenty of room in my CD collection for three-minute puff pop songs and 20-minute art-fuck excursions.
Dr. J
PS: After a jump to the Cat’s Cradle web site…Dammit! It’s sold out! Anyone have a ticket? Anyone want to catch Yo La Tengo on Monday night?
fizgig, how was Ben Kweller live? He’s touring Australia with Ben Folds and Ben Lee this month (I have tickets!), but he’s a bit of an unknown, at least down here.
feh. Ain’t no CD going to give me the feeling of pogoing along with 80,000 people while waving my t-shirt around my head as the Red Hot Chili Peppers play Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground”.
