Madonna has started her Celebration concert tour and the reviews have been very positive. And so the hype meter has gone up.
As much as I love Madonna and her total badassery over the years. I cannot see myself attending this show. And it is not a price issue. It is a matter of conviction as a music fan and what I expect from a live show.
You see, for this tour she is performing without a band because a band cannot recreate what the original songs sounded like on the record.
Fuck that bullshit. If I want karaoke I’ll spend my money to support a local karaoke bar.
Not having a live band also makes me doubt much of her vocals will be live.
But you go on threads and people give all kinds of excuses for this laziness. And one of the few things I find more angering and disheartening than “live shows” not being live, is music fans lowering their standards and excusing this behavior.
A classic example is: “Dancing and singing at the same time for a whole show is hard”.
Yeah, no kidding, I’ve tried it dancing and singing at the same at karaoke.
So if you can’t do it don’t dance and just sing or, you know, practice until you can. And if you are “too old for this shit” well then sit down like Tina Turner did on her last tour. Nobody minded one bit, possibly because she sang live and had an actual band.
Rick Beato (I LOVE all his musician interviews BTW) had a video on this where he basically says he doesn’t mind backing tracks at live shows because some things can’t be reproduced live.
Also his favorite band is The Beatles.
I mention this because The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was produced deliberately in a way so it could never be performed live. And now people are just pressing play because supposedly fans expect it to sound like the record.
Ironically, I remember The Eagles getting shit for years just “playing the hits”. And in the mid 90s one of the members of The Eagles said their fans just want to hear the songs as they were on the record. So they never fussed around with extended solos and such. Yet on the great live album Hell Freezes Over there is an extended acoustic guitar intro for California Hotel and at the end of the extended intro the crowd goes crazy. At the end of the song the crowd loses their mind.
If you call it a “live show” I expect it to be live. ALL OF IT. Cirque Du Soleil always have a live band amid their circus theatrics. Surely Madonna could do this too.
But Madonna does not solely own the blame here. The lions share goes to the fans for still paying to see this or any other “live show”. More and more videos are popping up on social video of performers getting lyrics wrong or dropping a mic and the vocals continue on like nothing happened. I even saw a video of an EDM festival show where the DJ was so hyped he knocked over the table and all his equipment and yet the music just kept right on bumping and I didn’t see a single person walk out.
Some people laugh or roll their eyes but nobody ever really says, “Fuck this bullshit”.
Getting ripped off by ticketbasterd is one thing.
But then have the mainstream artists also just phone it in and rake in the money… This is why I am pretty done with arena shows. It is a total ripoff as well as often not being very fun.
If my local band working paycheck to paycheck getting paid in tips from the bar can do a live show one of the biggest music acts in the world can pay to hire an actual band.
If Kraftwerk can do their music live, if Bruce Springsteen can have a full band, no costume changes, and no back up dancers and still do a three hour show…
THAT should be the standard for a live show. And if the artist cannot deliver that, refuse to pay for it.
And to those who say it is expected at pop shows to have costume changes and sets and all that and thus backing tracks are a necessity.
I don’t expect that. I expect a person singing live with a live band and great songs I may or may not know making dance like crazy.
More often than not I find the theatrics are there to mask other deficiencies in performance or performer anyway.
And at the end of my day I if it is going to be karaoke I’ll take my dollars and toss it a local drag queen. No, it is not Madonna herself but they do sound just like she did on the record.
