The "Justify Your Existence" Tours – Britney and Charlie, on the Road.

The live concert. It’s where you make your connection with the artist, where you, for one brief shining moment, share the same space with your heroes and become a part of one another’s world. Then, afterwards, you drunkenly limp around Lot F all night looking for your car which six hours and nine, $15 beers ago you parked in Lot B, while Ricky Rockstar is back in his bus being blown by the twelve least repulsive of your town’s well worn groupie brigade with a gravity feed coke dispenser gently filling each precious, million dollar nostril. Basically what I’m saying is that tours are fun for everybody.

Some "musician" musicing. Yawn!
Some “musician” musicing. Yawn!

Sure, there are hundreds, you know what, I like you so I’ll give you thousands, of acts on the road right now, as we speak. “Popular”, “successful”, “relevant” performers busting ass night in and night out entertaining people who have come out to be entertained by entertainers who can entertain. But who wants to see that? Because while those suckers are out there relying on their “talent” to “put on a good, worthwhile show, memorable for the quality of the performance and the soul enriching feeling of seeing someone gifted with talents beyond reason sharing them with an appreciative world” there are two others hitting the road soon that are easily the most anticipated upcoming tours of the year. And they’re not letting any of that “having nothing to contribute to anything” keep them from selling tickets and renting expensive equipments and what not.

Britney Spears and Charlie Sheen. They’re coming to your town, they’ll help you party down. They’re an American train wreck.

Now naturally, critics are already trying to convince us, the unwashed masses who prefer their entertainment tragic, that we shouldn’t see these shows. They say that Britney’s show lacks what one might call a “live performance element”. Her moves are half-hearted and dead eyed, her vocals are canned. To that I say, “uh-huh”.

And as for Mr. Sheen, they point out that his record sell out shows are in fact not sold out, or records, or shows. They openly question what his performance will entail, since Charlie hasn’t really made it clear himself what he’ll be doing live in front of thousands of screaming on lookers. I expect he’ll do what he does best. Porn stars.

But it’s clear to me that the people deriding these shows don’t fully understand exactly why we would want to see these two “performers” live in concert in the first damned place. If we wanted to see people singing and dancing with feeling and love for the arts, we would go to some bullshit ballet or opera or what ever other cultural nonsense exhibition is going on at the local community center. If we wanted to see someone tell us something coherent and well thought out, with a “point” or “vague understanding of the string of words desperately escaping their face”, we’d go watch a street corner apocalypse crier.

The pageantry.
The pageantry.

NASCAR is the most popular spectator sport in the world. And while some people do honestly come out to the tracks week in and week out to witness the majesty of counter-clockwise vroom vrooms, there’s a certain percentage of motor sports fans (that percentage being as near to 100ish as is statistically allowable) who watch these events hoping beyond hope, that they’ll finally get to see their favorite brightly colored star’s vehicle explode while simultaneously, praying they’re not inadvertently murdered by the spectacular showers of debris. But that’s the chance you take when you’re rooting for something horrible to happen during something you supposedly love not specifically for the potential horrible that could occur.

What was I saying?

Oh, yeah, people want to see Charlie Sheen explode in a fiery ball of green flame. Not literally of course, but wouldn’t that be fucking awesome!? You go to work the next day and people are talking about Charlie Sheen’s spectacular immolation, asking you if you saw it and you can just point to the festering wound on your arm and tell them, “See it!? I’ve been infected with a Sheen shard which is slowly dissolving my mind!” then you would fall over and scream in agony as the self replicating nano-Sheen slowly ate away at your being, replacing your very cells with his extra dimensional laser Samurai essence.

You see, people aren’t snapping up tickets to these events to see an unparallelled talent deliver the performance of a lifetime, they’re going in the hopes that something fucking crazy will happen at the one show that they get to be at. And it’s a crap shoot. You’re buying a ticket hoping that you get to be at the show that turns out to be the unscheduled last of the tour, so you want to be to one of the earlier performances. If your town is on the latter half of the itinerary, you might as well not bother. I’m laying 3 1/2 to 2 that neither of these tours ends when scheduled. Lay your money down if you’re tired of it cluttering up your pocket.

And keep your judgements of the over all worth of these shows to yourself, those of us hoping to be splattered with Brit juice don’t give a damn.

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