Our first rave

So Callie and I purchased tickets to Lady Gaga back before Miles was born and we went to the concert on February 2nd at the Kiel Center.  Miles stayed the night at my parents giving us the whole night to ourselves, which was nice and delightfully restful.  

Bunny Muffins

Well back to the concert for the first pre-Gaga show a lady came out dressed like an old school pre-Twilight vampire with cloak and all and played some keyboard music, not bad but different then put on a darth maul looking mask and did a weird dance while music played, changed and did the dance dressed as a Native American Indian and then finally came out in a wedding dress looking outfit and did some more keyboard work.  All in all it was a bit strange but OK.

After that the rave started and while I listen to loud music and have been to plenty of concerts this is the loudest and bass-iest music I have ever heard. I am not anti-dubstep, I can enjoy some but the guy just had his Macbook up there and jumped around while lights flashed constantly and not really to the beat with a screen behind him that has images just constantly flashing and changing.  The music floated between tolerable and terrible and the loudness and flashing lights did not help.  I presume the only reason to play music that loud with all the lights and screen images is to distract from how terrible the music is or potentially a pre-Gaga seizure test.  I am not a big fan of sun glasses at night in a building but they would have been nice to have.  I am pretty sure at this point I have lost more brain cells and hearing than I had lost cumulative up to that point.

Rave time

Thankfully the earsplitting eventually came to an end which led to the mandatory 30 minute wait for the main act to ensue despite the fact that the main stage is already setup and the only thing they seem to need to do is raise the curtain.  I do expect that they need to do some final checks and replugin a few things but the amount of time required seems high to me and while this may serve as a time to build anticipation, it is not increasing mine, good news it is giving them a chance to run adds on the side screens (Pop water, Virgin mobile and Skype).

Waiting for Gaga

Once all that was done we were finally to who we came to see Lady Gaga.  Unfortunately it was a bit of a disappointment to us.  Below I will just list off our thoughts rather than trying to type it up in paragraph form: 

-She has great backup dancers, but she is not a great dancer and the fact that she does not match he dancers speed or moves can be kind of distracting at times
-She had a backing track, which in and of itself is not bad, but she spent an inordinate amount of time, in our opinion, relying on the backing track and her live vocals did not seem to match the track well enough when she was singing over it
-The show was more art than music, really it felt like a play, which was fun
-She was very very into her message of tolerance and acceptance of everyone, which I am totally onboard with and thought it was great to see people expressing themselves at the concert, but at times she would talk ove nearly an entire song, which detracted from the show
-Her stage setup, costumes and such were absolutely amazing
-However she changed her costume between or during every single song
-Her performance was unnecessarily over the top at times, it seemed to be over the top simply to be over the top

So overall we were disappointed because we really wanted to just hear her sing and do her songs, but it was more art than show and more talking than singing.  As an experience we were glad to see the show, but were disappointed by the music itself.