In order to protect the dignity of many, I will be
mentioning no specifics in this post
Last
night I saw a very bad show. It wasn’t bad in the way that it wasn’t my taste,
or that there were some technical mishaps due to the incompetence of some
roadie. Actually, at the end of the night I was begging that it had been one of
the above mentioned catastrophes rather than what I witnessed. I fell trap to
the “this friend I know has this student boyfriend playing a gig in the
warehouse district,” and also I was lonely and bored and in theory this felt
like it would have been a good night out. Boy was I wrong. Every note was a
quarter step below where it should have been. The set swayed between covers of melancholic love songs to the
dreadful “I wrote this song myself” Emo power ballad. Let us say that it was so
supremely unbearable to be there that I spent the rest of the evening out on
the curb, bumming a Lucky Strike off of a stranger and trying to make sense of
why this was happening to me in what I thought was the Music Eden of the world.
A seedy, soulful, wonderful Eden for music as it were.
It
was because these were music industry students, none of them from New Orleans…there
is a piece of the soul that will never quite because they aren’t from here. I
am not a local myself, though you have no idea how much I pray that I could
have been. There is a rhythm to this city in everything that is undeniable and
completely mesmerizing. I don’t mean to
be patronizing to those who played, and I do admit that I had a vendetta
against one of the people I was with that night, so nothing COULD have gone
right for me. But as I sat on that curb, their inexperienced, painful, out-of
tune drones in the background, I blew my smoke to the wind, and the patterns it
created in the misty New Orleans evening had a soul of their own. Staring at
this…my night became worth it.
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