The Difference is Amazing!
A Recent STP-Convert Finds Her Way to Charlotte
Music review by Anna Fields, Contributing Writer
August 18, 2008
It's amazing how different music sounds in concert versus on the radio.
I know, I know: This seems obvious. I can see the eyes rolling now.
But first consider that I haven't been to a live concert since 1997 when my girlfriend, Sara, and I had my Mom drive us down to Clemson University so we could see U2's PopMart tour. The night was a blast and Rage opened for Bono and his huge lemon-shaped apparatus swinging high above onlookers' heads.
I was sixteen and had never felt the collective energy of a live concert. How songs, singers and bands seem to wholly transform onstage. How the audience and the lead singer speak to one another. How they form a very tangible kind of temporary marriage: You give me your love, he says to them, and I'll love you back.
How, quite frankly, music sounds 1000 times better live than through the filters of mass-media-driven radio.
Case in point, last night, I saw STP play in Charlotte. I'm not really a rock fan. Especially not 90's rock. I'm more of an R&B, Jazz and Soul kinda girl. But, naturally, I've heard STP's music on the radio since I was in middle school, which makes me feel old and which I'll probably never admit again.
Anywho.
Whenever the sounds of an STP song emerge from my car radio, instinct usually takes over: I turn the dial. I change channels. It doesn't really... well, "speak to me," I guess.
But last night?
...It ROARED.
The energy rising from the crowd. The movements, the charisma, the emotions pouring out of people who, just an hour before, had been chomping down chili dogs and honking their horns at traffic in a stress-filled, workingman's rage.
But now?
Everything was copasetic. No more did the driver honk angrily at the pedestrian crossing on green. Everything was bright and beautiful and Scott Wylan made it all. And as my boyfriend snuggled me close to watch one of his all-time favorite leading men twist and rip his way across an amphitheatre full of bleeding hearts, he whispered, "This is one of the last, great rock bands of our generation."
I think I'm now a fan of STP.
If not for pure, simple taste, then for the idea that these four men represent something about the 20th century that we may never get back. The Nirvana's, the Soundgarden's, the Alice In Chains' and OAR's of an earlier time.
It's amazing how differently you look at the world through a concert. And it's amazing how, no matter if you're sixteen or sixty, the living relationship between a band and an open crowd makes your car radio seem like music's ultimate enemy.