The Spin should have known better. The Spin did know better — even before we arrived at Municipal Auditorium on Sunday night. And yet we made a mistake. A mistake which we will never repeat. From here on out, The Spin will never, ever set foot in a venue again until we know LMFAO — the band, not the acronym — has left the stage and won't be returning. They annoyed the hell out of us when they were just two turds rapping over shitty tracks, but now that they can afford dancers and props and obnoxious eye-burning costumes, they're even worse. We always thought we had a fondness for the lowest common denominator, but then we found out that it's a lot lower than we thought. And it's wearing Hawaiian shirts and carrying inflatable palm trees. That's a bridge too far, motherfuckers.
The reason The Spin showed up early for the Ke$ha show at Municipal was to catch first the first act Spank Rock. SR's debut album, YoYoYoYoYo, was one of our favorite underground hip-hop releases of the Aughts, but we hadn't caught them live yet and were anxious to hear the new material. We probably should have just waited for the album to drop. The artist-audience-venue combo just didn't work — the mix was muddy, the vibe in the crowd was "cool dad reconsiders his coolness," and Spank Rock's show is more late-night Saturday than early-evening Sunday. Also, we're not sure that we dig the new material. It seemed to be grasping at some sort of pop aesthetic, but came across like unenthusiastic hip-house. We weren't impressed and really just wished we had stayed home, knowing full will that we were going to have to sit through the shittiest band on earth. Which we did, and it was awful.
But Ke$ha was great! Or at least her songs were. We could live without the staging — it was a complicated, ugly mess of scaffolding — and the dancing (not her strong suit, fer realz) and by that point the cool-but-not-very-impressive lighting rig was mostly just making our heads hurt. Watching her motorboat a pair of giant foam testicles was good for a laugh, but overall the non-music portions of the show left us, well, nonplussed. It was more spectacle than necessary, but at the same time not enough to really wow us — we would be more than happy to see Ke$ha just rock out with her band as they fly through the stack o' hits she's got under her belt. (And the rumor is that the next album is going to be more '70s-inspired, so maybe there's hope?)
Overall, Ke$ha banged out the hits, gave the glitter-crusted audience exactly what they wanted and put on a pretty good show. But when she got to “We R Who We R” we had to cut out, because deep down, “We R” agoraphobic chain-smokers, and it had been a long, nicotine-less night surrounded by a large group of shrieking people.
