Grand National Road Trip
Merry Christmas to The Pip
For a few years now, we’ve been focusing our family Christmas gifts on experiences rather than physical items we need to store. The two years before this, The Pip’s big Christmas gifts were both Milwaukee Bucks games so he could see Giannis Antetokounmpo play— at MSG the first year, and last year a weekend in Philadelphia. This year I offered to take him to Milwaukee to see the Bucks on their home floor (during the school break when SteelyKid was on an exchange trip to Germany), but he said “You know, Kendrick Lamar is going on tour next year, could we do that instead?”
So I found myself spending last Friday driving a couple of eighth-grade boys down the rainy NY Thruway to go to a football stadium and watch a diminutive man shout into a microphone:
The show was at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, where the Giants play, which is a bit less than three hours’ drive in normal conditions. The Friday forecast called for monsoon rains, though, so we got on the road at about 2pm for a show that would nominally start at 7. I fully expected to spend an extra hour sitting in stop-and-go traffic in north Jersey because some idiot hydroplaned their way into the wrong lane causing a 57-car pileup.
So, of course, we rolled into the parking lot at 5:15.
Happily, the seats I bought (one for The Pip, one for me, and one for one of his buddies) were on the 200 level on the side, which means they were accessed via a concourse level that I believe was technically the “Corona(tm) Beach Club” or some such; at any rate, we had to scan the tickets a second time to get through a set of glass doors, and then there was a big glassed-in area with a good variety of food options— the boys got pizza, I got an Italian chicken cutlet sandwich that was surprisingly good for stadium food— a couple of bars, and a dedicated merch table with no lines. The staff were relaxed enough to let the kids check out different sizes of the shirts, and offer suggestions, which you basically never get at a show.
(I got myself a shirt as well, but as a core Gen-X-er, I went for the plausibly ironic one that’s done like an ad for a car repair shop on the front, so you have to look closely to see it’s a rap tour…)
The actual seats were uncovered, but we were able to hang out in the concourse where it was nice and dry, and it stopped really raining before the music started. It was drizzling during the opening DJ set by Mustard (which was mildly amusing to me as just two weekends earlier he played the annual SpringFest outdoor concert at Union, where it also rained), but dried up completely by the time the headliners started.
(The charms of a DJ set are almost completely lost on me. If I like a song, I want to hear that whole song, not thirty second chunks of the song I like mixed with fifteen others that I may or may not like, punctuated by some dude in a poncho yelling “YEAH!” and “C’MON C’MON!” and “5, 4, 5, 4, 3-2-1!” It would maybe help if I liked to dance, but I don’t.)
The main tour is actually a co-headlining gig for Kendrick Lamar and SZA (if you’re old like me you might need to be told that this is pronounced like “scissor” said by someone with a non-rhotic accent); I’m moderately familiar with his work, and know essentially none of hers beyond the duets they have on Kendrick’s most recent album. The set is a big stage with giant video screens and a couple of ramps extending out onto the stadium floor for the occasional trip into the crowd for them and/or their background dancers. The two of them basically traded off mini-sets, closing with their two big duets to end the show.
The “Grand National” of the tour title refers to the car on the cover of Kendrick’s most recent album, and that was a recurring motif— he entered via the car rising up from the stage, and they exited together via the car sinking back down. In between it popped up at least once more, draped in vines to fit in with SZA’s Batman villain aesthetic. She also did a couple of songs perched on a great big sculpture of an ant, for some reason:
It’s an awful lot to ask for a single performer to hold the attention of a football stadium, so they both had extensive troupes of dancers backing them up. Pretty much everything was elaborately choreographed, though there should maybe be an asterisk on that because Kendrick doesn’t really dance. He does, however, stalk around the stage in a manner that’s coordinated with the movement of the dancers, so I guess that counts.
There’s also quite a bit of pyrotechnic work, and various elements playing on the big video screens. SZA’s video screens seemed to be mostly just her, because she had showier choreography and costumes; Kendrick’s video boards often showed him in black-and-white or night-vision footage, but were also fairly likely to be selected scenes of other things—basically, the two snapshots I included above are pretty representative of their sets.
So, what about the music? As noted above, I own a couple Kendrick Lamar albums, and spent the week leading up to the show streaming him on shuffle play in my office. And, look, it’s just not really my thing.
I have two big issues that keep me from liking Kendrick more, the first of which is that the man has a voice that sounds to me like an irate Muppet. Musically, his stuff is great— terrific beats, interesting samples, a much broader sonic palette than a lot of rap— but when his voice kicks in, I’m picturing this dude:
The second problem I have is a little more substantive, which is that he’s built a career around having it both ways: he gets a lot of critical acclaim for being thoughtful and sensitive about Big Issues, but also rose to stadium-headlining status via a song where he calls a business rival a pedophile. The cover image for the stream I was listening to (on YouTube Music) is a photo of him sprawled on a couch with a crown of thorns on his head, and, you know, I get a little eye-rolly when I’m looking at Jesus imagery and being served songs whose lyrics are mostly tough-guy posturing. It’s been a minute since I was a church-goer, but I don’t remember the Gospel verse that goes “You’re a [gender slur] [gender slur] [racial slur] and I’m gonna kick your ass.”
And you know, cultural context, language differences, yadda yadda yadda. I understand all the rationales and retcons, even if I don’t necessarily agree with them, but it pushes me away. I can recognize that the man is very good at what he does, but what he does is not a thing I especially want.
(If you want reviews from people who like the music more than I do, try Pitchfork and the NYT; both of those are reviewing the Thursday night show, while we went to the Friday show.)
But, you know, it plays really well with my kid, so I now have some brief video clips of him lip-synching along with a small man yelling slurs, shot during the first two mini-sets. For the most part, though, I tried to give him and his friend space well clear of my eye-rolling. For a bit this involved standing at the back of the section, but the usher told me that was forbidden by the fire code. There was another stretch where the seats behind ours were unoccupied, so I spent a while sitting on those, but when the rightful owners showed up, my choice was either standing at a seat in the middle of a section, or giving up and going to the concourse area. Since I’m really uncomfortable in dense crowds (as a very large man I’m acutely aware of how much space I take up), I bowed out.
Which leads us to the bad part of the indoor concourse, namely that they didn’t pipe in the sound, and didn’t have video screens showing the stage. The latter was particularly surprising, since the stadium normally hosts football games— I would’ve expected monitors in the concourse playing the show for those waiting to buy beer, but there was nothing. And of course, everyone in the crowd was standing through the whole show, so the view out the windows was just the asses of people in the back row. So I listened to a very muffled version of the show and played word games on my phone. When I recognized a song I would sometimes go over to the door where there was a bit of a view of the stage. But mostly, I tried to rest up for the drive home.
This was a down-and-back trip because it’s baseball season and The Pip was scheduled to have a game on Saturday morning (last year, there weren’t any Saturday games, so I thought we’d be safe to go on a Friday). The rain up here has been sufficiently apocalyptic that we got a text on the ride down telling us the game had been cancelled, so I briefly toyed with trying to find a Motel 6 for the night, but decided to just power through. We got home around 2am, and yesterday was a little rocky, but things are more or less normal this morning.
And The Pip got his big Christmas gift experience (plus a concert tee he can wear to rub it in the faces of the rest of the eighth grade). Which was, really, the main point of the whole business…
There’s your regular dose of Old Man Yells At Cloud. If you like this and want more, well, it’s going to be a good while before we do anything in this vein again, but here’s a button:
And if you’d like to either try to talk me into liking the music more or call me a [gender slur] [gender slur] [racial slur], the comments will be open:
I saw Kendrick Lamar at the Barclays center during his “damn” tour. What I found fascinating about the experience is that his audience was predominantly white “frat boys”. And the only people of color who were there were the people the people who worked at Barclays center. The person sitting next to me at the concert was wearing a “university of Virginia lacrosse t-shirt” this is going to sound hypocritical of me (I am also a upper middle class white guy) but how can a “jock” relate to Kendrick Lamar lyrics? (I know I must come off uncharitable I’m sorry)