JAM’N 94.5 Monster Jam Was No Fun

I got pun­ished as­signed a re­view of the JAM’N 94.5 MON­STER JAM the oth­er night, which is a pop ra­dio sta­tion fes­ti­val over here in Boston.  You can read it here if you’re des­per­ate for…well, just des­per­ate I guess. Nicky Mi­naj, Drake, B.o.B, Shon­telle… It was prob­a­bly the most nor­mal thing I’ve ever done in my life — and I used to hang out every week­end at a Pizze­ria Uno at the mall when I was grow­ing up, and I’ve seen at least two episodes of CSI.

Cou­ple things: first of all, every­one knows live hip hop and r&b pop shows fuck­ing blow. The god-aw­ful bray­ing, the brag­ging, the in­ces­sant hype men- shut the fuck up for five sec­onds dude, I want to hear the song, not have you yell your re­sume at me. Sec­ond­ly, gi­ant shows at places like the TD Gar­den -where this par­ty of 15,000 bridge and tun­nel teenage street-fight­er-wannabees and re­al­i­ty-tv-sluts-in-train­ing took place- are lit­er­al­ly the worst set­ting on earth to see a live mu­sic per­for­mance. The sound sucks, the sight lines suck, the lines are bread famine length, and the over all shit-smeared Amer­i­cana of the whole thing in which you’re ush­ered around hold­ing pens like po­ten­tial crim­i­nals is just a ma­jor bum out. To top that off, they weren’t even serv­ing beer at the show.  Fair enough though, since I was prob­a­bly the on­ly per­son over 21 there. But still, even if I’d on­ly had three beers and a pret­zel they could’ve made at least $400.

An­oth­er weird thing they did: since some of the sets were on­ly sup­posed to be ten or fif­teen min­utes (play your hit, then GT­FO) they’d lit­er­al­ly cut the mic in the mid­dle of a song. NEXT. What is that all about? It was like they were pre­sent­ing the Os­car for best achieve­ment in au­to-tune. Nic­ki Mi­naj, Shon­telle, even head­lin­er B.o.B got the bum­rush off the stage. You’ve got to keep the wheels of the pop star tread­mill run­ning slick, I guess. Be­sides, by the time the seem­ing­ly in­ter­minable con­cert was over, I don’t think some of the acts were even pop­u­lar any­more - not on­ly is your fif­teen minute set up, New Boyz, but your fif­teen min­utes of fame are too. Thanks for com­ing.

I was wan­der­ing the halls of the are­na in be­tween sets like a shell-shocked sur­vivor of the cul­ture wars, try­ing to find some­one to sym­pa­thize with. I saw groups of young girls, all ass and teeth and hair, show­ing off their bod­ies like wa­ter buf­faloes pre­sent­ing their hairy cow vagi­nas in mat­ing sea­son while still man­ag­ing to stuff piz­za in­to their faces, and popped-col­lar hood rat in­terns jock­ey­ing for their spot in the tiny-bon­er awards, and I want­ed to pull some of them aside. Mu­sic doesn’t have to be like this, I want­ed to tell them. There’s a whole oth­er world out there.

I fi­nal­ly de­cid­ed I was go­ing to talk to some kids, to see why they were here and what it was that they were most ex­cit­ed about. I had just or­dered a $17 coke, so I went over to the con­ces­sion area to get a straw. A nice-seem­ing girl came over look­ing for nap­kins to wipe na­cho juice off her paws. All of the nap­kin dis­pensers were emp­ty though, so she did the next log­i­cal thing: grabbed a fist­ful of fifty or so straws and start­ing wip­ing her­self off with the pa­per they were wrapped in.  Then she threw the en­tire dis­pos­able mess all over the counter and the floor and turned away as if noth­ing had hap­pened.

I was think­ing about what a great metaphor that dis­play was for this type of con­cert in gen­er­al on the way out when I saw at least sev­en girl fights, (not the hot kind), three peo­ple be­ing tak­en away on stretch­ers (al­so not hot), and a group of dudes get­ting has­sled by the pigs (kind of hot). Shon­telle sang that one “Im­pos­si­ble” song though, so, you know… good show I guess. Can’t wait till next year.