Spoiled for Choice

I went to a Matisyahu concert tonight. Actually, let me back up a bit. I'd found out who Matisyahu was last month, just days after he'd performed in Montreal. For those of you who don't know, and who are too lazy to click on the link, Matisyahu is a Hasidic Jew who raps and does reggae. I saw a clip of him rapping on College Humor and liked what I saw. It sounds sort of gimmicky (OOOOOOOhhhhhh! A rapping Jew who's not in the Beastie Boys!), but he's amazingly talented. One doesn't need to put any kind of label on him in order to attract the novelty crowd. He's just that good. I liked how he was able to integrate his religious beliefs into his performance without seeming cheesy or disingenuous. I might be slightly biased in this respect, since I actually enjoy religious music of all kinds, but an areligious guy who was with me at the concert agreed. I like listening to people who have a message and who are capable of speaking to experiences other than broken hearts or sexual desire.
The band opening for him, whose name we never did get, were just terrible. The lead singer, an angry-looking man wearing a "Five Dollar Ho" t-shirt, was a fright to behold. He looked as though he didn't like the audience, and I hope that wasn't his best performance because it was totally meh. The good thing about Nameless Intro Band's set was that the music didn't sound bad if you didn't look directly at the lead singer, so I had a lot of time to people-watch. There was a party of about five at the foot of the stage. One girl, wearing a gray workout tank with a wifebeater underneath, was dancing like she didn't care. Except she totally did. She tried to make it look as though her dancing was spontaneous, but the calculation was clear. She had very few moves in her arsenal, and usually ended up repeating herself before the end of a song. She seemed to like to shake her left arm and shoulder spastically. This girl also had the most amazing mullet I've ever seen in person. It was totally a throwback to 1987. As she was dancing, she was shaking her mullet like it was the greatest thing since the Rachel. Awesome.
The most hilarious part was that this girl (Girl #1) had a friend (Girl #2) who was clearly trying to copy Girl #1's moves. Except that Girl #2 obviously hadn't put in the requisite mirror time, so she was just off beat and terrible. She seemed to realize this about five seconds after she started performing any one repetitive motion, and the she'd stop, only to switch to some other repetitive motion and run into the same problem again. She never did seem to learn. Toward the end of Matisyahu's set a guy joined this party, and although he was very attractive, his stupid facial hair bothered me. He didn't have a beard, or even a soul patch (another form of hair that I wholeheartedly detest), he just had a strip of hair about two centimeters in diameter that went from his lower lip to his chin. Time spent keeping that thing so small is obviously time wasted.

posted by Nicole @ 1:35 AM
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