The Offspring

Dearest BK4,

Anish recently brought it to my attention that the blog has not been posted to in quite a long time. I decided to do something about it. However, since none of you probably check it anymore, this may be just for fun/anish.

The 0nly thing I could think to blog about would be the Offspring concert that I went to last night at Summerfest (The World's Largest Music Festival). Ok, honestly, summerfest is a big music festival that we have in milwaukee every year, and it really is big, as in big enough for most headliner bands to include it on their summer tours year after year, and big enough that the Offspring, Modest Mouse, OAR, and Counting Crows are all on side stages that are free after admission to the event ($15), but I seriously don't know where they get off calling themselves "the world's largest"... Maybe it's geographic area (pretty stretched out along the lake)? Maybe it's length of time (11 days), maybe it's number of stages (a shit ton), or maybe it's the size of the people at it... :(

EDIT: I looked it up, and apparently like 1,000,000 people go each year and it is verified by Guinness book of records to be the largest physical music venue. We also made number 5 on this list, and ladies/Alex: Justin Beiber was here.

So on to the review:

Overall: It was actually a pretty sweet concert. Very fun, very enjoyable.

Details: Ok, let's start with the crowd, which was first of all THE biggest crowd I've ever seen at a summerfest side stage, which was a frickin' nightmare when we had to leave. My friends and I kept noticing the huuge variety of people there. You had everything from your obligatory trailer trashers to your bikers, from your 12 year old awkward middle schooler who totally relates to the angst, to your loser 40 year old who still totally gets it. Then of course you had all the super mainstream regular old college/high school people. It was cool.

Also, the crowd was surprisingly non-rowdy (things steve values at a concert...) everyone was cheering and standing the whole time (obviously) and it was cool except for random pockets of assholes, i mean slamdancers... no wait, assholes was definitely right. My sister and friend basically got decimated by this 200lb idiot who thought it would be awesome to take a running start and run into other like-minded idiots, but missed, and ended up just tackling her (100ish lbs). Dumbasses. Plus this one guy kept like going to the edge of the circle making his serious face and shaking to loosen up all intense like, and then he would pick his next slammer, make eye-contact, and the contract was made. He probably had a concussion.

The band itself came out and it was one of those moments where seeing that the offspring is like 40 years old after always picturing like 24 year old punk kids (even though you always knew deep down that they were old because they've been around so long...) totally ruins your image of the band. Luckily that lasted about 10 seconds until they started singing and I accepted it and moved on. He may be old, but he sounds the same and has good enough energy and nobody can stay disappointed while they're rockin out "You're gonna go far kid" (The opener). They played out a solid string of hits that everone knew, and then pulled out their two slow songs "christie are you doing ok" and "other song whose name I can't remember right now". Then they played a song that obviously nobody in the audience knew (awkward crowd silence), but when that was out of their system they only did it a few more times.

I dunno about you guys, but i feel like bands should mostly, if not exclusively, play hits at a concert. I realize like 30% of BK4 is hipsters and/or music snobs (I mean connoisseurs) who will probably be mad at me for that, but really, we go to concerts to sing along and enjoy songs we love live with thousands of other people who love them. Let's face it, the song really won't sound better live than when it's recorded and re-recorded and edited in studio (at least not with this kind of band), so if you can't sing along or at least enjoy it anyway because you know what it SHOULD sound like, then what's the point? New music at concerts should be limited to like 1 song if they have a new album coming out, and maybe like 5% obscure songs from albums that they personally like for some reason.

Anyway, they got through most of their greatest hits CD, and it was all awesome and sounded great and the audience had a great energy the whole time (some legit chicks right in front of me knew every word to every song ever and whenever I knew part of a verse I'd sing it and they'd notice and then be all like "you're awesome too!" --- well at least they said it with their approving glances...)

They did do awkward pauses with the lights off and nothing going on between like every single song, which was weird, and there was almost no crowd interaction (except for the obligatory "look how many people there are" "I love MILWAUKEE!!!!" and "BEEERRRR"), but whatever, that's cool.

They did a three song encore, which was nice of them (obviously planned, but who doesn't plan their encores these days), and then everybody tried to leave and not die at the same time.

Well that's that, I know you guys are all going to concerts this summer, let's have some thoughts?

Other ideas for blog posts
1. How your job is going
2. What you did so far this summer (or summer wrap up blogs later)
3. Any time you visit with other bk4 people (I know those of you still in cali have been hella active lately - maybe I'll post about k-factor even though she left, and when Pheep comes later this summer, we shall blog about that, and MIDWEST REUNION Sonal and Will, let's make this happen)