 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| I review a Steven Seagal Blues Band Concert by Zsenicorpse 05/29/2006, 12:55pm PDT | ||||
 |
 |
|||
| Here is my review of the Steven Seagal Blues Band concert I went to last night:
People like to make fun of Steven Seagal. They laugh at him easily, like he was a clown, but the laughter must always be tinged with either profound and puerile shallowness or, and this is very common among the people I personally know, a kind of purposeful contempt mingled with respect. They'll start in on stories pretty quickly "...but he was awesome in Out for Justice..." or "...I knew a guy at work that studied with him..." or "...I knew a cameraman that kicked his ass." It always gets personal. Because it's hard to laugh at a guy with so much obvious ability and hard not to laugh at such a huge asshole who never seems to go away. You have to excuse your mockery or redeem it with context or something. My misfortune at the concert was to be behind a clutch of mockers of the profoundly puerile variety, guaranteeing that Steven Seagal, who is very sensitive, would never look past them and see me unironically clapping and hollering and jumping up and down with glee. I was totally giddy seeing him. I was shocked and awed. I never imagined I would be seven feet away from a real live guitar-playing breathing bad hair plugs cheap dye job robustly-gutted Steven Seagal and all these little personal flaws are precisely what made it real to me. I felt within the space of a song that I wasn't stargazing but watching some kind of uncle or distant cousin. So I was happy for him when he played well, embarrassed for him when he did something awkward (and he did so frequently), and filled with the completely familial desire to let him know that I was rooting for him down there on the floor. Mothers and fathers - imagine how you feel rooting for your kids at their sports and recitals! That's how I felt rooting for Steven Seagal. I had to root extra hard to make up for the dongs in front of me. I hope it worked. I have a lot more to say about Steven Seagalism than I do about the concert. The blues does not particularly interest me as a form and the concert overall compared badly with the only other two concerts I've ever been to - both of which were David Bowie's, that consummate professional showman. Shockingly enough Steven Seagal was wearing almost the same shirt David Bowie was at the last Bowie concert I went to - a mustard-colored sleeveless thing inspired by cheongsams. But I digress: the opening act was an appalling loser. He could not stop talking about being from Scotland and also about all the women who leave him. Dear sir, I wished to write to him, women leave you because you're a one-note loser. Work on that and wash your hair! Sincerely, A Woman. His music was exactly the sort of thing which irritates me the most: jangly guitar-driven mid-tempo yelping about his wounded pride, failed relationships, and insignificant politics. Get off the stage, you bum! Towards the end of his interminable set I was sent on the drinks mission and, requesting two dark beers (for my indulgent companions Joe and Paul) and a double gin and tonic, received two piss sodas and a pint of acetone on the rocks. A bad start! But finally it was THE TIME. STEVEN SEAGAL WAS COMING. His backup band, Thunderbox, started to play thunderously. They were extremely good. They were incredibly good. I can't dig up a link on them but, as Steven Seagal would later inform us, they were from Memphis and they were just unimaginably tight, elastic, virile, immense. I have delicate sensitive little ears and the volume was very very very loud, so it was often difficult for me to figure out who was rockin' the hardest at any particular point, but I will say that next to them Steven Seagal was kind of more of a backup dude, maybe a sound technician. Maybe a roadie. There were two backup singers who were, respectively, the hottest black woman and the hottest black man I have ever seen. They had considerably more fun dancing with each other than, I think, anyone else had at all during the concert. Joe sported a gargantuan boner for that woman. It lasted for the entire set. I didn't blame him at all. To say Steven Seagal was even a backup dude to these dudes is a huge compliment because this was a band that really had its stuff together. And Steven Seagal deserves that compliment - he was, let's be honest, a pretty good fingerpicker. He had huge powerful hands and a progression of excellent guitars but that wouldn't have meant anything without talent. When all's said and done he could actually play well enough to keep up with his dominatingly awesome backup band. Barely keep up! But keep up all the same. He played without a pick and wore the guitar high to cover his gut. He had on a pair of extremely good looking Levis and his hair was pulled back in an awkward puff of a ponytail. I wished he would have set it free and let it swing a bit in the fan breeze. Well, what can I say. I had really seen all I needed to see by the end of the second song. It was worth staying, don't get me wrong, Thunderbox was effin' awesome, but I wish I hadn't worn high heels. I jumped and screamed and clapped and boogied the whole show and I really paid for it afterward. The blues doesn't really interest me as a form. I understand it a little better after seeing Thunderbox, and it rocks my stuff a little harder now that I've heard it turned up to eleven, but I think my naive impressions of it are more useful when discussing Steven Seagal in context of the blues: precisely that it is a well-worn trope of the wannabe alpha male, that it is macho or better than macho (because macho requires a degree of flamboyance.) The blues is a manly art and bluesmen are manly stoic weathered men. That is the important stereotype to keep in mind. Here is my Grand Unified Theory Of Steven Seagal: it's said that he was a nice guy before he got famous. Something about getting into movies turned him into an asshole. I think I know exactly what that something was: validation, to the point that he no longer felt like he had to eat the humiliation that he had been handed freely for his entire life. I don't have to know about a specific historical incident of humiliation; they describe themselves in their aftereffects on him. A guy like Steven Seagal is willful, dominating, insecure, sensitive... constantly trying to measure up. He latched onto Akido and became one of the foremost practicioners in the world - for real, for genuine real, in the process learning the speak Japanese fluently and live in Japan as a permanent assult on their national self-esteem - and let me tell you something: that process does not happen without a lot of shit getting eaten. There are a million billion pitfalls into which a guy like Steven Seagal could lurch into. He probably hit every last one - every inadverent fumble of a precious family heirloom, every misplaced word which costs him the respect of an entire room, every crushing defeat to a guy playing dirty or even just to a guy who was better than him, in front of an audience which would hate him only slightly less if he had won. Even when he was still Stateside you can tell - you can just tell - this is a guy who had his foot in his mouth all the fucking time. He had been humiliated all his life and he had taken it to heart all his life, and being too willful to just accept his place in the world and shut the fuck up already, he was busy desiring to be the most irreproachable things that a man could be. Let's see, what would the short list of those things look like to a wannabe alpha male in the 60's and 70's? Who doesn't get laughed at? CIA? Mafia? Yakuza? Martial Arts? Special Ops? Bluesman? Acting was best of all: he could be everything and everyone would see it. This time there would be no laughter: he would finally be a badass in all the world's eyes. Having conquered the world of Akido, and by extension Japan, he enjoyed the acclaim of Hollywood and by extension America. And yet it was never enough. He had to go and get himself declared a tulka - a move straight out of Showdown In Little Tokyo, practically - and start himself a blues band big enough to bury all the Bruce Willis-y pretenders to the throne. This is the natural result of being cut loose from the idea that other people aren't important enough to be right when they tell you that you're nuts, but they're still important enough to be right when they tell you what's manly and cool: the end of humiliation. He is a fucking racist, a condescending prick, and a desperate sad little shell of a man, but there is no way to write off his enormous drive and talent. There is no way to wipe out or get around his ability or, really, fundamentally, the unhinged and fighty part of ourselves that we see in him. Seeing him up there on stage, fatly fingerpicking and pronouncing his hot backup singer chick as "fine milk chocolate", I felt very keenly that I would give anything to cheer up Uncle Steven, and that I would give anything to be Uncle Steven. But above all I refuse to treat him as an object of ironic analysis and sarcastic commentary. He has already accomplished inhuman feat after inhuman feat and he just refuses to slow down - this volcano, this firebrand, this human storm, this quintessence of masculine achievement... laughing at him only excuses the laugher from ever trying anything great and desperate. Laughing at him is the act of writing yourself a blank check for permanent safety in mediocrity. Shoutouts to: the dude in front of me and a little to my left who farted constant noxious farts throughout the concert. Jesus fucking Christ that guy was so fucking full of stink bombs that he just kept fucking dropping. The smell of them hung in my nose for an hour after we left. The Portland Mercury, for just not fucking getting it. Thanks for a whole fucking issue of retarded look-at-me-I'm-so-cool-and-smug Steven Seagal commentary. We already know you hate and fear sincerity, but I seriously expected you could coax at least a single worthwhile blurb out of the sprawling tapestry of failure, accomplishment, and desire that is Steven Seagal. You fumbled the fucking ball. Given a guy whose life and mind could fill a library, you stuck to the safe path of snorting at his movie titles and hoping that everyone else would assume some really funny joke had already been made. Fucking rookies. The audience at the show: man, you guys were a weird crowd. All ages, all colors: except no Asian men, only Asian women. I couldn't figure out why half of them were there. There were a lot of short fat women for a reason which completely escapes me. How did I manage to get stuck with the one clique of obviously choadheaded boobs? One choad in particular with huge liquid eyes and Jim Carrey's face jumped up on stage after the band had already left (the safest possible time) and acting like anyone in the crowd would give any kind of shit about him. What a dick. |
||||
 |
 |
|||
|
