The Chexican

Tag: Concerts

  • mode of VULGAR

    mode of VULGAR

    This Friday, I went to go see Dir en grey perform for the first time since 2011 at the House of Blues in Anaheim. I was originally supposed to go with the same person I’d gone with last time I saw the band live, but they ended up not going. All of my subsequent efforts to find someone else to go—and eventually, resell the ticket—failed to materialize. However, I’ve never been one to be held back by the prospect of going alone to a concert. Rather than wearing one of my old Japanese rock band/concert tees, I decided I was going to attend repping my present-day musical apex, Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE, so I threw on a tour tee and my silver sparkling high tops and made the drive up to Anaheim in the early evening little after 5PM.

    Background

    I have a long running history with this band, being a first-wave fan back in the early 2000s when information and even their music itself was both scarcely available and heavily gated by language barriers and regional music industry practices. I had found I liked hard rock and many of its sub-genres at the time and was a fan of plenty of domestic acts, but Dir en grey was my first love in music. From their instrumentation to their aesthetic, they seemed to be executing all the best parts of the different American bands I liked on another level. Before Dir en grey, rock music was a single dissonant harmony to me, but at first listen, terms like “lead guitar”, “rhythm guitar”, and “bass line” immediately made sense to me.

    In those early days of 2002, with only a single English website that covered a few visual kei bands and only around 3 barebones Japanese language fansites, the only option back then was to pay importers or Japan-based individual eBay/Yahoo Auctions sellers $60+ for CDs albums and small fortunes for official merch. To this day, one of my greatest personal treasures remains that used first-press slipcase edition of GAUZE I spent little over $150 on.

    But things also moved quick in those early 2000s when high-speed home internet became widely available, especially after the 2001 shutdown of Napster gave rise to so many alternative P2P clients. It was through Audiogalaxy that I finally managed to piece together their GAUZE album in full and a few of the tracks off of MACABRE, but it was really Soulseek that ended up being the ultimate portal to Japanese music, a P2P network with users serving up a wide array of Jpop and Jrock.

    Through the 00s and early 2010s, Dir en grey remained my favorite band despite intense competition from their contemporaries, truly rivaled only by LUNA SEA*—at least up until that adage of “never meet your heroes” proved true and SUGIZO turned out to be a total dick and killed my vibe for Japanese Rock in general, but that’s multiple stories for possibly another time. In turn, I hadn’t bothered to catch a Dir en grey concert since 2011’s AGE QUOD AGIS US Tour.

    *Kagrra deserves a special mention here, since they are technically competition for position of personal favorite but at the same time in an unimpeachable class of their own beyond compare.

    VULGAR, my favorite Dir en grey album, remains to this day the most excruciating wait for any media release in my life, announced and preordered months in advance of its drop date in 2003. Its release was four years and two more full length albums before their first limited U.S. tour in 2007. When I happened to find out about their limited U.S. tour this year featuring “mode of” shows for both VULGAR and Withering to death, both shows in Los Angeles were already sold out, and the scheduling for them didn’t work with my academics to make it worth trying to score resale tickets. Thankfully the additional VULGAR show in Anaheim on a Friday was announced soon after, and I got my tickets for it the moment they went on sale.

    The Show

    I arrived at the Anaheim GardenWalk where the venue is located, and was pleasantly surprised by the turnout. Finding the end of the line required walking to almost the entire opposite end of the mall, and the crowd was made up of more youthful fresh faces than grizzled band veterans like myself. I briefly spoke with one girl in line behind me with her boyfriend, so elated at seeing them for the first time after being a fan since 9th grade. I told her the same went for me, only my 9th grade was over 20 years ago.

    Upon entering the venue, I immediately went to go scope out the merch offerings. As soon as I spotted the table and saw the hanging shirts on display, on of them featuring the VULGAR album artwork, I knew I had to get one before they sold out. Past me definitely had it easier when I was an XL/L, the M lifestyle is a lot more competitive. By the time I made it to the front of the line, the show had already started and the first couple of songs observed through the TV screens in the lobby.

    Once I had my merch purchased and stashed in my mini-backpack, I headed into the performance hall and started looking for a place to post up and watch the show. I lasted another couple songs on the upper edge of the floor level before realizing that standing still and head bobbing wasn’t going to cut it—despite my age, I still felt the urge/need to be jostled about in a sea of people, sweating and screaming my head off. I needed the pit.

    So I squeezed myself through the loose groups of people in front of the short set of steps leading down to the floor level, and was very pleasantly surprised by what I found.

    The Crowd

    In hindsight, the fanbase was one of the things that took the piss out of going to see Dir en grey live. In the early aughts, the band was still largely unknown. They were only a few years into their career in homeland, and Japan’s culture isn’t exactly conducive to the loud rebellious nature of rock music; every Japanese exchange student or foreign visitor I spoke to back then professed to me knowing more about their rock music scene than they did. Here in the United States, the Japanese Rock fanbases was basically a perfect overlap with the anime fanbase. Prior to the exposure they got in 2006 from going on the Family Values tour, I’m pretty sure I was the only person in America that felt so passionately about the music while having absolutely no interest in anime.

    What this translated to in person were crowds that were overwhelmingly 5’2”–5’6” Asian and white females with petite builds in their finest gothic lolita duds—and A LOT of whining to “stop pushing” and not being able to see in the mosh pits of rock concerts. Those memories of times past, combined with the current generation’s inclination to stand in place recording on their phones over living the moment, had me going in expecting a disappointing crowd. Instead, it ended up being the best one I’ve been in.

    There seemed to be an implicit understanding, a large circle in the middle of the floor reserved for the rowdiest boys, no longer limited to the slim anime club stereotype and now an eclectic mix of true metalheads in American band tees (Metallica, Slayer, Pantera, etc.). The perimeter was maintained by those thrashing in the pit cycling in and out, and other guys with stocky/muscular builds there to get jostled and rocked about (myself included). People outside the edge buffer understood where they were, and would look over in amusement whenever they got knocked forwards or sideways by the pit activity—there were even multiple crowd surfs pulled off. And anytime anyone stumbled or fell, multiple hands would fly out and often beat me to pulling that person back up on their feet.

    Before I knew it, I found myself in my traditional spot: dead center and just a few rows of people away from the front of the stage.

    The Set

    Where my past self would have done some research on Setlist.fm on the prior shows, I went in blind. For a “mode of VULGAR” show, I’d hoped for more of the bespoke album—I would lost my shit over a live rendition of Amber. But in the end, I still got most of the Vulgarity I wanted out of the night: DRAIN AWAY, audience KILLER LOOP, a really amusing CHILD PREY, OBSCURE, Kasumi, and THE IIID EMPIRE. Bonus points with Vinushka and Utafumi also being in the mix.

    This perhaps would be my only criticism of the crowd: when the band retook the stage for the encore to G.D.S, there were only about 10 people dispersed about doing the rhythmic fist-pump callback. That performance hall should have been thundering with shouts and a shaking floor. The kids these days are behind on their homework.

    The Surprise

    After the last song was done, we got the usual sign-off—them graciously parading the stage, emptying water bottles over the crowd and launching picks out into the crowd. I didn’t really care to try to get one, since that’s a very been-there-done-that affair for me. Twice: one I can’t remember, and a Toshiya pick from their 2007 show at the Viejas Arena. At one point, I decided I’d get a last set of photos and try to snap a selfie with the band on the lit stage in the background. I pulled my phone out of my right front pocket, and stared down at the screen to FaceID authenticate. As I was swiping up to unlock, something fell in my hand in the small gap between the phone and base of my thumb. In a split-second, I had the reflexive animal instinct to shake it off like it were a spider and the overriding human curiosity to identify what it was: Die’s guitar pick.

    It would have made for an awesome photograph, but since it was impossible to take a photo of the pick as it landed tucked between by phone and hand, I simply quietly pocketed it and watched in amusement as everyone around me frantically searched the floor trying to find it.

    The Swag

    I came home from the show with the VULGAR shirt I desperately wanted, which was thankfully still available in my size unlike the dual skeleton WtD tees.

    Since the other tee wasn’t available, I went ahead and got a tote bag, along with some $15 charm the merch attendant didn’t really do a good job of explaining, only that it had a small probability of having something autographed inside. At $15, I expected the bag to contain an actual charm, something along the lines of the dog tags they had on previous tours. Apparently, they were just a show-specific charm bag containing a paper insert that had a small probability of being “autographed”.

    Mine wasn’t one of the autographed ones, but that was of no consequence to me since that’s also a been-there-done-that affair, being the winner/owner of Die’s band-autographed guitar from the 2007 Nokia Theater show given away through a Hot Topic sweepstakes way back when year.

    In another timeline, I would have felt ripped off over having forked over $15 for a piece of paper in a miniature bag with no functional purpose. Instead, it’s a perfect store for that serendipitous guitar pick.

    For Me

    In the end, the concert ended up being a validating spiritual and existential boot to the ass I needed in this current sociopolitical climate. Although I don’t feel as ardent about the band and their music as I once used to, that long running artist-fan bond stretching back to my teenage years remains very much alive and well. It was an opportunity to travel through time and not just catch a variant of the VULGAR-centric shows I never had the chance to go to back in high school upon its release, but to also revisit and embody my younger self once more. I went alone, handled the pit crowd just as capably as my teenage self, and had a fantastic time.

    So to answer the question of “WHO IS THIS HELL FOR?”: for me, even after all this time.

  • RENAISSANCE: My Beyoncé Experience

    RENAISSANCE: My Beyoncé Experience

    I started drafting this after I’d attended the show in Inglewood, CA on 09/02/23 at SoFI Stadium, but between other responsibilities and time constraints, along with the developments detailed below, I hadn’t been able to get it to a “finished” state until today.

    Beyoncé & Me, a Brief History

    A member of the Beyhive I am not. For the majority of her career, I’d been ambivalent about the Destiny’s Child singer gone solo. In my high school days of the 2000’s, my tribalistic association of music with personal identity had me turning my nose up at music artists whose style didn’t require them to actually play live instruments. Pop and R&B were trite manufactured genres for competent singers without the actual musical talent to not need to rely on teams of songwriters to do their work for them. As I aged into and through my 20’s—and my sexuality as a gay male—my musical palette expanded. Real-world experience allowed me to start being able to better recognize the amount of time, energy, and labor that actually goes into things, doing away with that snobby simplistic delineation between “real” and “trash” music and assessing more on merit as best as I can gauge it without having any formal education in music theory myself.

    And throughout the 2000s, I liked Beyoncé well enough. Her voice was undeniably great, but her output was wildly hit-or-miss for me. I liked 3 or 4 songs off B-Day; I yawned at all the alter-ego nonsense popular at the time including I Am Sasha Fierce & “Single Ladies”; 4 had me back to liking a few songs and entirely disinterested in the rest.

    And then Beyoncé happened. I’d experienced “visual albums” before from Japanese musicians I followed long before 2013, but seeing it done domestically with such unrivaled production value was impressive. As for the music itself, it lyrically and sonically offered a balanced mix of rawness and refinement that felt different from her prior output. The comparatively tinny youthful voice got replaced with that of a grown woman’s delivering her most polished poetry yet, no longer bound by the rulebook of optimization for top radio airplay. It was as thrilling as it was mind-boggling that only a year after becoming a mother would find Beyoncé at her boldest, embracing sexuality and expletives with elegance. As much as I appreciated it, it still wasn’t something I actively listened to on my own. It was my best friend/roommate that was truly captivated by the spectacle, yet no matter how many times I got dragged along for the ride, I never got tired of it.

    I didn’t become a fan of Beyoncé until 2016. That year when she unexpectedly dropped “Formation” on the Super Bowl Halftime show, I didn’t care enough to bother watching. It was in the coverage/outrage following the performance I learned that the highly curated and uncontroversial pop songstress had presented Black figures and history with music that eschewed mainstream accessibility in favor of message and meaning. This admiration would only grow when the music video for the song was released, reinforcing the unapologetic Blackness that had been served in the middle of America’s most-watched televised sporting event. It wasn’t the superficial girl-power feminism of “Single Ladies” or “Run the World (Girls)”, but the urban edginess of “***Flawless” dialed all the way up to Black power anthem. That was not the direction I would have expected her to go in immediately after earning all the accolades and prestige from her self-titled digital drop. To establish herself so forcefully as one of the best creator-performers in the world then pivot to ambassador for Black excellence was inspiring; she could have just as easily stayed apolitical and private, continuing to chase an AOTY Grammy by catering to broad mainstream and white audiences.

    In the time since then, through Lemonade, Homecoming, and Black is King, I’ve admired the astonishing amount of merit behind those works on multiple levels, all the while aware that it’s not going to resonate as completely as it will for the intended recipients of the message. If we were able to step sideways into a parallel universe where Selena lived and had a 2018 Coachella headlining show giving her best performance to date and serving the finest representation of Mexican-American culture to the masses while being widely recognized as one of the greatest talents in the industry, my veins and arteries would be bursting with cultural pride. Not being Black myself, I recognize that it’s a level of personal resonance that lies outside my capability to experience…until Renaissance. In essence, her latest work is another love letter to the Black experience, this time around to its queer community. Yet, because Black queer culture so strongly informs the general LGBTQ+ culture—which itself champions acceptance and inclusivity—or that the New York ballroom scene & house music being paid homage to are history joint creations of both Black and Latino queer communities, I finally qualify to be a part of group that can really get that “this was meant for me & us” feeling.

    The Concert

    We had tried getting tickets when they first went on sale, but never got an invite code from the Ticketmaster lottery registration to buy one. At some point, my roommate had logged into his workplace employee benefits portal looking for discounted prices on movie tickets, and noticed they were featuring tickets to Beyonce’s show. Being able to buy tickets at face value months after we’d given up on the possibility on attending the original more limited tour schedule was thrilling, and made this the first time I found myself eagerly counting down the days to a concert event since my early 20’s. However, that face value ticket cost translated to our seats being up in the bloodiest of the nosebleeds, literally the highest and final row in the venue. Visually, it wasn’t much of an issue, given the nature of stadium seating and the set design. Sonically, however, it left something to be desired. The venue isn’t completely closed, but it is covered by a large arching ceiling, which caused a considerable amount of reverb that made it near impossible to discern any talking, such as the calling of categories in the closing ballroom sequence.

    https://youtube.com/shorts/S2YoOJQsVl4

    Despite the issues with sound quality and being in the highest seats possible, it was still the best show I’ve ever been to. Renaissance is already an unimpeachably brilliant album musically, but the additional elements of the live show were just as awe inspiring to experience unawares, me not having bothered to keep up with the updates from each show along the tour and thus having no idea what to expect. Everything across the board so top notch it felt like I was watching the unreleased visual album performed as a stage production. I feel like I have to be the only Renaissance fan that has been so blown away by the music that I have no hunger for the music videos, which I’m glad were not released before the tour. Without all those videos for people to dissect, analyze, compare, and otherwise post online, all discussion on Renaissance has stayed focused on the music and the collective experience. And the fashion, of course.

    It was the first time I’d taken myself out to go see Beyoncé live in concert, and I enjoyed it as much as I expected I was going to. The one part that got my hyped beyond expectations was the on-stage performance of Blu Ivy. I didn’t even bother listening to Beyoncé’s music back when that kid was born and was totally unconcerned with the surprise pregnancy announcement leading up to it. However, having that child that’s been kept out of the public eye as much as possible suddenly shared with the world as an 11 year old pull off the job of performing in front of massive stadium audiences to the most stringent standards in the business felt special. So did being able to reciprocate the tremendous love Beyoncé has extended LGBTQ+ PoC and women with this latest work by adding to the cheering putting expressions of happiness and pride on both their faces. The lyrics and subject matter of Renaissance are adult in nature, but having Blu Ivy dancing on that track from The Lion King movie companion album was a nice way to include children as part of the grand LGBTQ+ PoC celebration we were all there to have, since many of us were kids who were not given the support and acceptance to express ourselves freely.

    The Aftermath

    The week following the concert, I kept thinking about it: how much I enjoyed it, how much of a cultural statement it is, etc. the more I kept reflecting, the more I found myself curious about how much it would cost to experience it again. By week’s end, that curiosity turned into a fully fledged effort to price shop the remaining the stops in the tour to find out which would yield the best seats at the lowest total travel cost, leading to the decision to take a solo trip to catch the tour finale in Kansas City, MO. Even after I had identified the optimal show to attend, I had my reservations as I’m not a long-time super fan that would make that investment without a second thought. I had already gone to the concert, and would be better off saving the ~$1.5K I was staring at and hewig to my budgets & savings timelines. Despite my best efforts to talk myself into abandoning the idea as a passing fantasy, everyone around me—including people I didn’t expect to encourage spending so much money on a concert—told me that I should do it.

    Looking at it under a larger lens and not just the Beyoncé concert, it started to feel more and more like something I needed to do. I’m as old as I am, and I haven’t really done much traveling, and never on my own. My limited travel history amounts to:

    • A winter break spent in Mascota, Jalisco, deep in the heart of Mexico as a teenager
    • Two week long trips to Tokyo back in the mid 2000’s that were phenomenal life-changing experiences
    • Volunteering as a travel buddy for a friend visiting family for a weekend in the middle of Arizona
    • San Francisco and Las Vegas with friends, a few times each

    Along with the allure of being the final show in the tour, the Kansas City show had the unique feature of being somewhere I would otherwise have never expect to have a reason to visit, compared to Houston or New Orleans. All of this, and the disastrous state of the world—fires concurrently ravaging more places than ever, hurricanes battering and flooding both sides of the US, the tragic earthquake in Morocco—convinced me to take the approach that tomorrows aren’t guaranteed, and to chase after an experience that has already been so personally fulfilling for me and take it to the next level by turning it into a 4-day adventure of my own.