Monday, August 22, 2011
The Spin Katy Perry w/Skeet Skeet and Janelle Monae at Bridgestone Arena, 8/19/11
Posted by The Spin on Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 9:16 AM
Oh man, Friday night The Spin went to Bridgestone, and we didn't do any shots. Or dance on tabletops. And the pictures from that night ended up online, but that was sort of the point. We did wake up with a pounding in our head — those big beers get us every time — but we woke up with the same person that's usually in our bed, so in terms of living out the proverbial “Teenage Dream,” we were kinda off point. But we tried! And regardless of our debauchery's inexactitude, we had an amazing time at Katy Perry's sorta-homecoming show at the Enormodome. Seriously, this has been The Spin's Summer of Pop Whorishness, and we were so glad to cap it off with possibly the best arena-pop show we've ever seen — it totally makes up for all the other glitter-crusted garbage we caught this summer.
The only bummer about it was that we received some faulty info and missed almost all of Janelle Monae. But what we caught was incredible! We've said before that Ms. Monae's android-themed prog-soul is totally arena ready — we said it when she opened up Bonnaroo in '09 and when she destroyed Cannery last year — and hellfire if we weren't right. We got there in time for her 10-minute rave-up of “Tightrope" — which was awesome as per usual — but it was even more awesome to see a relatively full room getting really, really into it. Considering the half-hearted responses we've seen in response to some of the more knuckle-dragging openers lately, it was really satisfying to see people get excited for intelligent, innovative pop music. We've been on Team Android for a long time, and we feel pretty confident that once Monae drops her second record, she's gonna be headlining Bridgestone herself.
Skeet Skeet — who we thought was going on first, 'cuz c'mon, he's a DJ — was in the second slot. Which was actually a pretty cool way of handling the changeover. He definitely played to the crowd with some cheesy pop-house, but whatever. We know the dude kills it at his real gigs, so we won't begrudge him a little filthy lucre and the chance to get out in front of an audience that wouldn't see him otherwise. Plus, it gave us extra time to smoke cigarettes and drink beer, which are two things we love to do!
And then it was the fabulous Ms. Perry! While we've been ardent buyers of the fantasy that KP is selling for a while now, you can never really be sure how that's gonna translate to the stage. Perry's show managed to exceed our expectations in so many ways. The set design was really cool in a Candyland-on-Acid sorta way, and the storyline (!) of the interstitial videos was pretty cool in an Alice-meets-The Wizard of Oz sorta way, rife with double entendres about sex and drugs but never really garish or tacky. Well, it was all kind of garish and tacky, but that was sort of the point, and definitely why it was so fun.
Perry's show, for all its polish and production, is really unpretentious, which might have been amplified by the fact that she kept going off script to talk about her time in Nashville and how excited she was to be here. (The Spin has a sneaking suspicion that the phrase “Brentwood is real nice” doesn't show up in her usual stage banter.) And the crowd was just as excited to have her as she was to be there — it was a total artist-audience love fest, and one of the better vibes we've had the pleasure of riding on this summer. The costume changes were abundant — we counted seven or eight during “Hot and Cold” alone — the band sounded great, and the dancers were a really fun addition rather than a distraction. Also, Perry doesn't really dance — at least not in the choreography sense, which honestly is a nice change. Singers are supposed to sing, which is an axiom that tends to be forgotten in a lot of pop shows.
Tune-wise, Perry covered all the bases, playing all of her hits — “U R So Gay," “I Kissed A Girl," “Fireworks," “E.T.” — plus an entire mini-set of acoustic covers like “Big Pimpin' ” and Rebecca Black's “Friday” that were really more of an opportunity to ham it up than anything else. And hey, we're not going to complain if Perry wants to ham it up — she's a funny fucking lady. And so while we might not have gotten as debauched as we would have liked to — The Spin's salary doesn't leave room for liquor at Bridgestone — we definitely left the arena in the best damn mood we've been in in a long damn time. It was almost like living a teenage dream, except we're old enough to buy our own booze now.
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