natepatrin asked: 17, 20.
17: a song i dislike from my favourite band.
My favorite band is Pink Floyd, for a host of reasons—it’s funny, even across all their eras, they made very little music I dislike. I think the best answer to this is a toss-up between “Not Now John” and “The Dogs of War.” Not to say that the band had a light touch with social commentary, but these two are the most bludgeoning songs in their whole discography, and bludgeoning is not the band’s strength.
Even so, I don’t hate either song. I just think they pale next to the rest of the band’s output. “Not Now John” particularly loses points for using f-bombs in a wan attempt to sound more… I’m not sure what they’re trying to accomplish, actually. The song is too strident to sound like it doesn’t care. Not a good look for Pink Floyd.
20: favourite concert ever.
Not being a huge concertgoer, I tend to remember most of them pretty well. The best show I’ve ever seen was Godspeed You Black Emperor! with Bonnie Prince Billie and the Marquis de Tren at the Somerville Theater in Somerville, Massachusetts on December 1st, 2000.
The band’s name still had the exclamation point in the right place, and they were at the peak of their powers. I expected something good, but not as I good as I got.
My friend Craig and I found out about the show the day of, and originally weren’t going to go. But we got to talking about it and the band with our friends at lunch (we were in college at the time), and they, who had never heard GYBE! but listened to a lot of darkwave, industrial and other intense music, sounded intrigued.
So all four of us went ahead and took the Red Line up to Somerville to see if we could get in. It was sold out, and a long line of people was wrapped around the building waiting to get in. The guy who sold us our tickets didn’t even mark them up from the face value—they were ten dollars, and his friends couldn’t make it down from New Hampshire, so he let us have them for the actual price. It was that kind of crowd.
So there we were, in the balcony of the Somerville Theater, which is a beautifully decorated old place with a vaguely crumbling vibe, just a perfect match for the music. The audience was rapt and silent for Bonnie Prince Billie, and you could hear Jim White hitting his lap with his brushes all the way up where we were seated.
GYBE!’s set was the most intense live music I’ve ever experienced. “Moya” opened their set, and I have never seen a band do anything to an audience like this again—as they rose along the song’s big crescendo, the whole crowd moved to the front of its seats, and when they finally hit the big release, everybody sat back at once. People had tears streaming down their faces.
Like I said, intense. And impossible to beat. My friends had never heard of the band that morning. They bought every release they could at the merch table after the show.
