Måneskin!

 

I’m still working on the BFT posts and I’ll get to the end of them at some point soon, if only so I don’t forget the stories. But life continues to happen, often emphatically, and there are other stories to remember as well.

Kim loves Måneskin.

If you’re not familiar with them, they’re the Italian band that won Eurovision in 2021 with their song, Zitti e Buoni, which literally translates as “quiet and good” but more or less means “shut up and behave.” It is, as the kids say, a banger, or at least I think they still say that. I lose track of the lingo pretty easily these days. In any event, it’s a good old fashioned straight ahead pulse-thumping rock song that essentially dares you to sit still and it was the clear and deserving winner that year. They were reasonably big in Italy before that and they’ve since made it big on American radio and other services as well, and now they’re on a world tour that actually does encompass more than just Europe and the US – they’ll be in South America, Asia, and Australia as well. You have to love the thoroughness.

They’re also a lot of fun in interviews, as they have clearly imbibed the No Fucks Given spirit of rock that often gets lost in this corporate world. Their very existence gives heart palpitations to all the people who still think that gender is binary, and for that alone you have to admire them. The fact that they make great music just adds to the appeal, really.

I can’t say I listen to them all that often, to be honest – my tastes tend to run in other directions these days – but I do enjoy them when I run into them.

They came to Chicago on Friday, or at least to near O’Hare International Airport and that was close enough to southern Wisconsin for us to go down for a concert on a weekend night, so six of us – Kim, me, Oliver, Lauren, and Lauren’s friends Anita and Chase – all piled into the van, hit up the local burger joint for a mobile dinner, and headed off into the night in search of music.

The Allstate Arena usually hosts minor league hockey games and the set up for the concert reflected that. They put the stage at one end, let the Standing Room ticketholders hang out on what would have been the ice in front of them (with the sound and light guys set up where the goal would be), and then everyone else sat in the seats. We were way up toward the back, maybe ten rows from the roof, but directly in front of the stage so we had a great view of things.

Other than the photos of us, almost all of the pictures in this post come from Oliver since his phone camera takes pictures that mine can only dream of. I should upgrade my phone. Perhaps I will soon. We’ll see.

There was no opening act. At some point the lights went down and they just started playing behind the red curtain.

Eventually the curtain dropped, and from there it was about an hour and a half of high-intensity music, with interludes of commentary from the lead singer and occasional forays by all of the musicians except the drummer into the crowd in front of them.

Damiano, the lead singer, noted during one bit of commentary that when the band was first forming they’d think about a US tour and they’d end their practice session with “Thank you, Chicago!” for some reason, so they were glad to be there. I don’t know if they say that in other cities too, but the crowd loved it and in fact they did end the show by saying “Thank you, Chicago!” and we all cheered.

There was no intermission, but they did manage to work in little breaks here and there – a necessity given the immense amount of energy that they were expending. The standard of showmanship was extremely high, and you have to remember that for all that it is entertainment it is also hot, sweaty work and you need a break in there somewhere. At one point, for example, Damiano and the guitarist, Thomas, wandered down to the tech area where there was a tiny little stage set up for them and they did a couple of songs from there before heading back up to the main stage, which gave Victoria (the bassist) and Ethan (the drummer) some time off.

Oliver and I spent a lot of time looking at the lights, because that’s what we do. The main lighting rig over the stage was truly impressive and kept moving in and out, up and down, as the cues required. Also, at one point Damiano picked up a pipe with a couple of stage lights on it and waved it around during an extended instrumental section and this is how you know that stage lights are LEDs now. Trying to do that when I was still doing lighting, back in the Jurassic period, when lighting instruments had halogen lamps in them and thus a) extremely hot and b) made of steel that could withstand those temperatures rather than aluminum and thus very heavy on top of it, would not have ended well. We also noted the spotlights, which were in the back corners and not that much higher than the stage. This is what happens when techies go to shows.

Lauren has also ran spotlight and done other tech, but since she was on the other side of Kim (vs Oliver, who was right next to me) I couldn’t really talk with her during the concert about that, or anything else. The concert was EXTREMELY LOUD. SO, SO INCREDIBLY LOUD. We all wore earplugs to dampen it a bit, even sitting as far from the stage as one could get and still be inside the venue. I will admit that I took them out for Zitti e Buone – the one song of theirs that I can identify by title – but that was enough. I’m old. I need to protect my hearing. And so did everyone.

Because it went on without a break for quite a long time.

And we enjoyed it thoroughly.

For their last official song (i.e. before the encores that everyone knows are coming) they actually had members of the audience come up and join them onstage for what looked like a dance party or mosh pit. It was kind of nice, really.

They don’t bother trying to tell people not to record shows anymore. The model for the music industry has changed, and trying to tell people not to pull out their phones – which have more sophisticated cameras and recording equipment built in than you could have gotten in a studio back when I was in college – is a lost cause. Everyone had their phones out, sometimes with the flashlights swaying the way people used to do with lighters, but mostly either taking pictures or recording snippets here and there. At one point I noticed that all of the various screens facing me had turned orange and it took me a second to realize that this was because the stage lighting had turned orange as well, so the whole effect was to reinforce the mood, which was a nice bonus I think.

There were a couple of trips to the merch booth afterward and then we were back on the road, into the night, one concert to the good.

Thank you, Chicago!