two americas

no no, i'm not blogging about having grown up the son of a millworker. i'll leave it to c4ts to wax poetic about that.

in a simpsons episode a while back, bart ridicules homer for his love for grand funk railroad. long story short, to show bart he is still relevant, homer gets tickets to lollapalooza and ends up traveling with the festival as a cannonball catching freak. the important lesson of this show was at the end credits, which showed a bunch of disaffected, expressionless youths barely swaying to sonic youth's version of the simpsons theme.

that is what i'm used to when i attend concerts. the wan-complected, greasy-haired audience and the performers holding each other in thinly-veiled near-contempt, despite the fact that the audience cared enough to purchase tickets and show up.

so imagine my surprise at the beirut concert. first of all, the guy is like 10 years old. at one point he was holding a beer and someone screamed, "hey, is that legal?" and he proudly replied, "uh, no." [ed note: this was a pretty good audience retort, but none tops the one from circa-soft bulletin when someone screamed at the flaming lips, "hey! steve sanders loves you guys!"].

i mean, this entire concert was unnerving: the repartee between the audience and the musicians, all these healthy-looking youths sunnily clapping along to the band of thousands on stage...what is going on? a recent new yorker review of feist fretted over the migration of indie rock from its "punk roots" to something resembling lite rock. my worry is simply, when did everyone become so happy? when did everyone learn to play the ukelele?

anyway, thought i'd close this post with the following conversation i overheard between one rosy-cheeked young lass and her friend:

ingenue 1: oh my god, i was at the arcade fire show last night and the audience was SO lame.
ingenue 2: [inaudible]
ingenue 1: i mean, they totally weren't even into it. so many people were, like, sitting down.