FORT MINOR LIVE















Fort Minor was fun, I guess.

Well i didnt turned up for the concert.But my cousin did. U noe why??? cos i gave him the tickets.gah!!.shud have gone instead.I've got the tickets from my uncle who'd won them as part of some Motorola promotion, which meant we got entry to the Motorola sponsored pre-party.

Here's an account of what he told me. Argh..hes just rubbing it on to me.Oh well i'll just post this for yall fort minor wannabes.

Aniway, it was kind of lame, since they are suspecting that the Motorola organisers were expecting a lot more people and basically it was a bunch of people standing around the bar getting drinks. The backing band (whom I'll talk more about later) came around first, but my cousin felt a little uncomfortable taking pictures with people he didn't know.

They were nice and hugely obliging though, taking photos with anybody who wanted them. Mike Shinoda and Styles of Beyond showed up later, but Shinoda only stayed for a few minutes before leaving. Tak from SOB however, was very obliging, signing and taking photos with concertgoers at the pre-party and even after the show he stayed behind the longest to sign autographs (on everything from concert tickets to shoes to water bottles). So much for being a "crew full of assholes" huh?

My cousin was a little disappointed though, because he'd listened to shit off the first Styles album, and the stuff they did with Divine Styler and all that and he didn't come around to sign the stuff my cousin had for him. My cousin did get to shake his hand though. (gah!!..jealous jealous)

Big up though, to the DJ at the Motorola pre-party who had an extensive hip-hop collection, old school and new, and had on a t-shirt with the graphics from A Tribe Called Quest's Midnight Marauders album.The concert was pretty good actually. Choy and May from MTV were in the crowd, and I'm dissappointed my cousin did not take photos with them, but at least ,hey,this way he didn't run the risk of having today's New Paper headline be "MTV VJs groped at concert".

They have sweet asses. You know, for Chinese girls. :)

Anyway. Styles' DJ Cheapshot came on about fifteen minutes before the show proper started to rock the house (and no doubt to allow the soundcheck people to do their thing at the same time), closing his set with Men Without Hats' Safety Dance (I kid you not).

The sound at the Indoor Stadium is as terrible as ever though, everybody's known this for years, and there was even a piece in the papers about how terrible the sound there is. Singapore most definitely needs a better venue for rock concerts. At least for the first time my cousin got bring his camera to a concert at the Indoor Stadium.

The show was fun.

Or so he said.(wadeva la ok.lol)

Interestingly, my cousin actually don't really like Linkin Park, in some part at least because he feel they'd be a much better band if they just dropped the hard rock angle. But i guess Fort Minor goes some way towards achieving that.

Mike Shinoda and crew did songs from the FM album, from Linkin Park, the X-ecutioner's collaboration "It's Goin' Down" and even stuff off their Green Lantern mixtape(which they encouraged people to download).

Sadly, the only real special guest they had was Singapore Idol contestant Jessea Thyidor to stand in for Machine Shop signee Holly Brook on "Where'd You Go". I guess Singapore lacks any really big name female singers, unless they were to rope in Stefanie Sun or somebody.

But yeah, they had a good rapport with the crowd, with banter and call and response routines, which was surprising because I'd heard the Linkin Park show was limited to "I love Singapore" type of platitudes. It seemed like they were having fun too.

Fort Minor's string session I have to make note of, they were called Black Violin and considering the ubiquitous use of strings in hip-hop sometimes it's nice to see people do this shit live. They even did renditions of Usher's Yeah, 50 Cent's A Li'l Bit, Ludacris' Pimping All Over the World, etc, which was definitely cool.

We had fun.

My cousin had a point when he posited that in any other occasion, Tak would suffer from the "Mr Nigger" syndrome (see the Mos Def song of the same name). He gets props because he's rolling with a big name band, but if he were just some black dude, people would run the f*** away from him and look at him with suspicion.

Oh, and my hearing is going. While getting something to eat after the show I overheard a teenage girl's conversation on her mobile phone talking about Tak at the concert saying that "Dia sign tetek I". I was a little weirded out, but then I realised that "Dia sign tiket I" made a lot more sense.*

*The first means, "He signed my breast" whereas the second means "He signed my ticket".