Ba Ba Ba Ba 9 June 2000

8:25 PM: Oh. My. God.

The opening bands, Gossip and Bratmobile, were OK. The lead singer of Gossip had a good voice, and they were certainly energetic and all, but she spent too much time "working the crowd", scare quotes intentional to indicate how creaky the machinery was in the routine. Plus the music was basically rockabilly (what you get with one drummer and one guitar player, I guess), which I don't find all that interesting. Bratmobile's singer was funny when she talked (a lot), and unintelligible when she, er, sang. Talked while the music played, technically. Chanted?

Point being, bla bla, attention wandering, tall people getting in the way, time going on, got cute t-shirts - orange with a kitty, aww - but mostly just standing around.

Until about, oh, 10 seconds into the very first song that Sleater-Kinney played. "Ballad of a Ladyman" if I recall aright. Then the Slackjawed in Dumbstruck Awe part of the evening began.

No part of listening to the recordings of these songs compares to standing there and feeling in your chest the whump! of every beat of the drum. Janet absolutely makes those songs. On the older stuff, from before she joined, the songs are still great but they're more toward the interesting end of experience. (Toward, I said toward.) On newer stuff where she's a much bigger part of the song, we are definitely in Rock Deity land. The songs jump off the stage and slap you around. I don't know a good way to describe it, it just kicks butt.

Carrie has the cutest little voice! My God, who knew? She moves around on stage like somebody who spent a lot of time watch Keith Richards, swaggering rock star, and then up to the mike and it's "Thank You!"... hee. And Corin's singing, of course, everything about that has already been said a zillion times. What I hadn't heard nearly as much about was how sexy she could be - and pretty clearly doing it on purpose too, a smart bomb.

It was great when they came out for their encore at The Fillmore and did "White Rabbit". A sense of history is so uncommon.

Today, I spent mostly yelling at an extremely rude and ignorant person at my DSL provider, who can't even correctly pronounce her own name. I thought all that "it's-pronounced-ja-NEE-fa" crap was over with the 80s? God, this has been such a stupid nightmare. Maybe they'll get it working sometime this century.

Willfully blind self-indulgent nebbish or amusingly quirky old coot? And how bout that local sports team? Discuss among yourselves.

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All names are fake, most places are real, the author is definitely unreliable but it's all in good fun. Yep. © 1998-1999 Lighthouse for the Deaf. All rights reserved and stuff. The motto at the top of the page is a graffito I saw on Brunswick Street in Melbourne.