Songs of Career Destruction

Last night Trent invited me to see the Annie Lennox concert at United Palace (formerly United Church) on 175th street, in WasHe. Well, wasn't that an unusual treat? We had fantastic comp seats and the extra low stage made the connection very intimate... she really was touchable. But was it touching? Hardly.
Maybe I'm the wrong kind of audience, because I'm sure if you asked anybody else in the theater they would have said it was an amazing experience. But what do they know? A blistering assortment of boozy soccer moms and their suburban fag pals dresses in the usual garbs: the Leather Car Coat Crowd. Really, nobody was younger than me, as Annie made clear when she rhetorically asked if anybody was born after the Eighties, before attacking a ham-fisted piano version of "Here Comes the Rain Again". Wait, Eurythmics songs too? I thought this was a Lennox night. Pleez, chide: this is a career-covering special event, at 125 bucks a seat I want all the Greatest Hits I can squeeze in. And subtle the set wasn't, in order to match el pueblo's taste. The bleached blonde big-titties aged dwarfs went "raaah" at the mere recognition of the songs they made out to in Senior High and the thirty years after that. The songs from the last album "Songs of Mass Destruction" were kept to a minimum (three?) because, come on, who gives a shit? Instead "Sisters are doin'it for themselves" was given the full-lenght treatment, because we're basically in Harlem and it's fitting. All the solo album classics were faithful and well executed, so "Why," No More I Love You's," and "Walking on Broken Glass" were pitch-perfect jukebox versions, and in case you need an extra kick of nostalgia or memory aid, the correspondent video was playing on the big screen.

Ms. Lennox was gracious, pretty, slender, with a powerful and textured voice and seeming to enjoy the attention. But really, she's Rod Stewart. She has done everything she could to slip into irrelevance, and then invisibility. And that's a long way to go for somebody who used to be such an edgy icon. I was thinking while clutching my hands nervously how she obviously paved the way for my current crush Roisin... just think of Love is a Stranger (not played yesterday) or Beethoven (not played either, duh) both the songs and the videos, how very dared she?

Here's "Beethoven", incidentally one of my favorite videos EVAH!

Really Ginger Annie was the original techno disco diva for the thinking person and the advanced trannie, setting the template for designer darling who also makes a lot of sense on the turntable. Too bad... she never recovered from the Eurythmics demise, whose true genius was the combination of blue-eyed soul and sequencers, with a dash of MTV fashion-forwardness. She inspired generations of Club Kids and she forgot all about it, eventually deluding herself into thinking of her persona as "real". Sweet Dreams were not about "realness" yo! Therefore the guitar solo is completely inappropriate, idiot. And Thorn in My Side was fun as long as the tribute to American middle-of-the-road Bar Rock is tongue in cheek. Once the wink is lost and you're head-banging along with the paunchy homos you're lost too, Annie dear.
The encore was predictably the inept anthem "Sing" preceded by a preachy video about the Aids crisis in Africa that really didn't manage to make a single eye wet. Just mention Nelson Mandela and see people fall asleep, without giving generously.
So yeah, Annie-Rod is honest and with a big heart of gold aching for the diseased chocolate babies, but really, who cares?
Great night though, the glitz factor out of control, the ex-church insanely beautiful and cozy, with every surface inch encrusted with gilded carvings.

Then we went to No-Parking, the faggy bar next door which sucks ass so we promptly left. Been there, check!