Aaron Lewis Acoustic at The Venue at The Horseshoe Casino

On 02.28.10, In Music, By AC Slater

For by birthday this year one of my friends got me a couple tickets to see Aaron Lewis at The Venue at The Horseshoe Casino in Hammond, IN. We’re both big Staind fans and have seen Aaron Lewis acoustic a couple years ago when he was at the House of Blues in Chicago so we were looking forward to the show. So last Thursday rolled around, 2/25/10, and we made our way out to the casino. I’ve never been there before and after my experience there on Thursday I don’t think I will ever return, whether to gamble or see a concert.

Aaron himself was amazing, the show was great, the sound was great, everything about the performance was great, it was the crowd and the lack of management/security intervention that ruined it for almost everyone in the back 1/4 of the venue. There were even points when Aaron stopped the show to address the issue stating the he gets paid either way, but other people in the room paid good money and he was getting kind of pissed that there were some people that were ruining it for others.

Basically what went down was this… It’s a very intimate show when Lewis plays by himself, it’s just him and a few guitars on stage. This is apparently an open invitation to rudely yell out song requests and talk the entire time. I get that if it’s a loud rock concert you can get away with talking, even yelling, at your friends that are standing right next to you, but this wasn’t a loud fucking rock show. The request yelling was ok at first, but really started to get out of hand, but I understand that security and the management can’t go around and confront every person that yells a request, but what they could have done was confronted the jackasses in the skyboxes at the back of the venue.

We had seats that were closer to the back, which didn’t really matter as it’s a small place so we could still see everything and the sound was actually really good in the back, so no complaints there, but we were about 4 rows from a skybox full of ignorant assholes who obviously had no clue what show they were seeing and must have either been friends of people that got the box or VIP gamblers of the casino who were comped the box. In all honestly I’m not sure where they came from or why they were there but they sure as fuck weren’t there to enjoy an Aaron Lewis acoustic show. So throughout the entire show these people were constantly talking and yelling at each other, which then lead to people near us yelling back at them, which was no better. And despite many people leaving their seats to walk down and talk to security/management, they just stood there and shook their heads like there was nothing they could do. Well they did accomplish one thing, not that it will really affect them, but I will never see another show at The Venue and I’ll probably never go to that casino again.

So long story short, if you’re a fan of Staind and Aaron Lewis I would highly recommend checking him out on his solo acoustic tour, it truly is a great show. But if your only chance to see him is at The Venue at The Horseshoe Casino in Hammond Indiana I would advise against it. Obviously it could have been a fluke and we just got a bad crowd, but when the performer stops mid song to tell the people in the back to fuck off, you know something’s not right. He even dedicated the entire last song to the back of the venue, a song that prominently featured the lyrics “FUCK YOU” which he directed straight to the back.  So thanks, Aaron, for trying to let those of us that paid good money, enjoy the show.

For those wondering, the video above is from the actual show and it’s a new song (one of 2 new ones that he played). And if the guy that was sitting in front of me, who recorded the audio for the entire show on his iPhone, happens to read this… get in touch with me, I’d love a copy of that.

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52nd Annual Music Industry Stroke Fest, aka The Grammys

On 02.01.10, In Celebs, Music, TV, By AC Slater

The night when the hottest names in music get together in a big room and stroke each others’ ego for 3 hours. I will say that I am glad that in the past few years or so The Grammys have moved away from the actual awards and been more of a concert showcase. Seeing musicians and celebrities give other musicians awards all night is boring as hell so at least they’ve realized that and made it a little more exciting…

The show opened with Lady Gaga performing her slow version of Poker Face that seems to make at least a cameo in every one of her awards show performances. While I really don’t care for that version of the song, or even the original to be honest… and actually I don’t really care for Lady Gaga, but this performance wasn’t as over the top ridiculous as some of her past ones and Elton John performed with her for the 2nd half of the performance and it was actually really good. So not a bad opening to the show and while I may not like her, she is one of the top artists of the moment so good for her.

After that performance Stephen Colbert came out and opened the show with a few jokes, some funnier than others, and then it went straight into a few awards. I’m going to be honest here, I watched the awards presentations, but I could have cared less. I was mainly in it to watch the performances and see if Kanye West made a fool out of himself, but since it appeared that Kanye may have not been invited, I was only watching for the performances. I did hear on the radio this morning that Beyonce won the most Grammys in a single night of any woman in history, 6 (only 1 during the actual broadcast). If we’re going by big winner during the actual show, Taylor Swift took home at least 2, Best Country Album and Album of the Year. I still don’t get what constitutes “country” these days when people like Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift are winning big country awards, they seem more pop to me. And while many people probably think that Beyonce should have won album of the year, Taylor Swift was the best selling female artist of the year and since the music industry is all about how many units you can move, it should be no surprise that she won. And with that, the rest of this article will be about the performances (after the jump). If you want to find a list of winners from last night I’m sure it won’t be too hard.

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Travis Barker FOREVER (remix)

On 01.06.10, In Music, Video Clips, By AC Slater

That is all…

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Adam Lambert and Lady Gaga at the AMA’s

On 11.23.09, In Celebs, Music, By AC Slater

I’ll admit, I watch these award shows no matter how stupid or pointless they are, but I will say that the AMA’s last night were not terrible apart from a few performances, mainly Lady Gaga and Adam Lambert. The whole show was basically performances from a variety of artists like Carrie Underwood, Eminem, Alicia Keys, Keith Urban and even Whitney Houston, just to name a few. And while most of the performances were actually good, I don’t understand how anyone could possibly be a fan of Adam Lambert after that god awful display.

Lets start with the good performances, Carrie Underwood looked hot as usual and her voice was on point. I don’t listen to much country or much pop music but I didn’t mind the song she sung and she looked good doing it. Shakira, on the other hand, looked amazing while singing, but the song was a little weird and her voice just doesn’t do it for me, I don’t know what it is. On the other end of the spectrum, Kelly Clarkson. She sounded amazing as usual, but she looked pretty terrible. I know she’s put on a few pounds in the last few years and there’s nothing wrong with that, but she just did not look good last night. Now someone that is hit or miss, Fergie, she looked amazing last night. Sometimes her face kind of resembles hatchet face from Cry-Baby, while other times she looks incredible, and last night was no hatchet face. I didn’t really care for the Black Eyed Peas performance mainly for the way the guys deliver their verses (Fergie sounded alright). Keith Urban was decent, don’t listen to country so I kinda skipped it same with Whitney Houston, just had no interest. I thought the Eminem/50 Cent performance was pretty good, but I would have liked to see them do a different song, it seems like “Crack a Bottle” is their go-to awards show song. I did like the fact that Eminem did his verse from Drake’s song “Forever”, but how come Drake didn’t actually sing his part? He was obviously there as he presented an award (or announced a performance, I can’t remember). And of course Jay-Z and Alicia Keys brought the house down with Empire State of Mind, which I think is a great song even though I’m not from New York. Janet did well opening the show, was expecting a little more to it, but it was good… I’m sure I missed someone, but I can’t think of them all right now.

Let’s start with Lady Gaga. I can’t say that I hate her music, I think some of the more up beat songs like Poker Face are decent and people seem to enjoy them. I thought Paparazzi was an interesting song, not terrible, but not something I’d put on my iPod. With that said, the songs she sung last night were terrible and she looked and sounded just as bad. I don’t know if it’s just me or what, but Lady Gaga is not an attractive woman. All the weird shit aside, she’s just not attractive and while I think she sounds good on her CD’s, her voice was not that impressive last night. I even thought Whitney Houston sounded better… which she should have, but lately Whitney has fallen off so that was a nice surprise. So yeah, Gaga’s performance started with her wearing some skeleton costume that looked like something out of the Halloween bargain bin and some terrible outfit that looked like it was held together by brown packing tape, it was seriously falling off and very unflattering. And for the 2nd part of the performance she climbed inside a large, clear cube and played the piano… lame.

Everything about the performance was terrible, at least at the VMA performance, she made it interesting y hanging herself at the end and covering herself in blood. This one was just ugly and boring. NEXT!

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Facebook, Twitter and Last.FM on Xbox 360 – Why?

On 11.19.09, In Music, Technology, Video Games, By AC Slater

Microsoft rolled out the latest little update to the Xbox 360/Xbox Live service this week in the form of a couple applications. You can now access your Facebook, Twitter and Last.FM accounts via the Xbox 360 dashboard. Now I understand that Microsoft is trying to bring all aspects of social media onto their platform and make them easily accessible by it’s users, but why? The only one that makes any sense to have the Xbox 360 is last.FM and I think it’s great that they’ve added support for it, but what am I going to do with Facebook and Twitter on my Xbox?

To be perfectly honest I have not tried out the Last.FM application yet, but just in theory alone it sounds like a perfect match for the 360. It gives you the ability to stream all sorts of music through your TV. Last.FM is a great service that I use on my computer all the time and I think people will use it quite a bit when entertaining guests, etc. However, Facebook and Twitter seem absolutely pointless to use on the 360. Both applications are extremely basic and I can’t see myself ever using them again. I installed them the other day just to test out and see what sort of features they were offering, maybe Twitter would tweet out what game I was playing or what achievement I just received or maybe Facebook would update my status with the same information, but as far as I can tell they don’t do anything really.

The Twitter application is about as basic as you can get, picture what the Twitter.com homepage was when it first started out. It’s basically the updates from all of the people you are following and then a box where you can enter what you are doing, oh and you can access the Twitter trends. That’s it. I don’t know about most people, but I follow a lot of random people that I don’t always want to read about which is why I like TweetDeck and it’s ability to separate people into different groups for easier reading, not so much here. It’s just one long list of updates from all of the people you follow and it only fits about 10 updates per screen. I don’t know, maybe there was a demand for this, but I personally think it’s pointless and will never take the time to log back into it ever again.

Now let’s talk about Facebook. Again, why on the Xbox 360? It makes no sense! The interface is clumsy, it uses the same tile structure that the dashboard itself uses and it barely displays anything on the screen at one time. Maybe I didn’t dive into it enough, but from what I gathered in the few minutes I played around with it, I will never be logging in to it again unless it can do something like show me my Facebook friends that also have Xbox Live and what their gamertag is or something. I know it asked me when I logged in for the first time if I wanted to display my gamertag somewhere within Facebook, I said yes, but I have no idea where it’s displaying it. Maybe this is a feature and I just didn’t take the time to find it, or maybe my friends have the same feelings as me and find Facebook on the Xbox pointless and didn’t even bother logging in.

So are people actually using the Xbox 360 for Facebook and Twitter? I don’t know how many people have a keyboard or the chatpad hooked up to their 360 (not me), but it takes a damn long time to type anything using the on screen keyboard even if it is only 140 characters. So I don’t know, are you guys using this? Did you try it out at least? Am I missing the point of all this? Do the apps have the ability to update my Twitter with games I’m playing? Someone please tell me what I’m missing here, why would Microsoft waste their time doing this?

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