"Peace, Togetherness, and Revolution" - Public Enemy at SXSW

Tonight, I went with B to see Public Enemy at Auditorium Shores, an amphitheater on the shore of Town Lake, which is known as the Colorado River elsewhere.

It's a beautiful location with downtown as the backdrop:

There were tens of thousands of people there. I am terrible at estimating crowd size, but it was a remarkable number of people. We were nowhere near the stage and there were 2 or 3 hundred feet worth of people behind us.

The show was decent. Chuck D, Flava Flav, Professor Griff were all there, and they had a live band. The sound was not great. We were over past the speakers, but it just wasn't very loud.

The set didn't last more than 90 minutes. They jumped around a bit, mostly old stuff, a couple of new songs. Everything hung together well. There was a little too much Flava Flav for my taste. It was his birthday, so there were at least three separate mentions of it. There was some great political stuff.

Overall, it wasn't great. It wasn't the group though. It was the audience. The audience sucked. Hard. We have a problem of bad audiences here in town. People go to shows and stand in front of the band and talk. It's incredibly rude and infuriating.

There were plenty of people talking throughout the entire show. Not, "I love this song!" and then shutting up, but "I loved Flavor of Love!" "My camera's not working" "Where are we going when this is done." The whining! I was absolutely appalled.

I wanted to punch them very hard. I moved as far away as I could, but it was dark and packed and there was only so far I could wander from B to get away from the talking.

How people can be so rude is just beyond me. It's disrespectful to the audience and it's disrespectful to everyone around them who are trying to enjoy the show.