my thoughts on the Darren Criss concert
2013-06-24
so now that the migration is over and i don’t have to worry about loosing posts (I, um, somewhat foolishly transferred the content over way before the actual move, which is why i haven’t posted in a week or so, since i didn’t want to have to copy and paste an individual post).
anyway. Darren Criss. Listen up tour. Toronto.
I was there. Really. I didn’t take any pics ‘cause i wasn’t close enough to the stage for me to be able to take any nice ones. best thing about being an adult at a show where most of the audience is teen girls, is the fact that the 19+ drinking area was pretty empty. got to watch the concert with relative comfort of not being pressed up against a bunch of people.
the opening guy, can’t remember his name, sucked. Like, just truly awful. Also awful was his innuendo to an audience of mostly teen girls… just a little gross. Like, I get that you are probably going for a heart throb sort of thing… but, no. Oh! And he tried scatting at one point and it made me so sad… just like he tried to do ‘rock’. which he couldn’t because, well, he sucks.
Darren was, of course, great. I enjoyed the show. And he definitely puts on a good one. His songs from the Human EP sound about 10x better with a band than they do solo. I find it kind of interesting that he repeatedly points out that he wrote those songs when he was 15. Because, they sound like they were written by a teen. A talented teen, to be sure, but still a teen. Musically, they are pretty… uninteresting. And the lyrics are, for lack of a better word, childish. His newer songs are somewhat better… but still, on the whole, not very interesting (which is why it is a great thing that he has so much charisma). The music for his newer songs is better, even if the lyrics leave a great deal to be desired.
It is easy to see the conflicts in his current branding vs. where he might hope to end up. Like, definitely playing up the teenage heart throb thing (with songs targeted to that audience). But… perhaps some desire to make different, more interesting music. I’m sort of hoping that he is simply trying to leverage the sort of unique space that he occupies (there has never been a teenage heart throb who built his reputation on playing a gay character). Because…while glee has been renewed for another two seasons, I’ve my doubts that it’ll go much further than that. And if Darren stays on, he’ll be getting to his late 20s and he’ll have to start doing something else, if he wants to have a long career, rather than a flash-in-the-pan sort of thing.
I guess, all of this to say, is that I enjoyed the concert, but I’m still looking forward to the music he might make in 5 years.
(and, yeah, that might be because I’ll definitely tire of his ‘peter pan’ image quicker than most. but. more importantly, he’ll need to grow at about the same pace as his current teen audience, because in about 5 years he’ll likely be too old and have been around too long to appeal to the teens, because things in that set quickly become uncool – especially if they older kids/adults like it.)