Flo Rida's bizarre Brooks visit

The beginning of every new year presents a time for us to sit down, take stock of our current life situation, and think about how we can turn past mistakes (such as making a New Year’s Resolution to lose more weight) into present successes (such as making a New Year’s Resolution to eat more pie). Being an overexcited fan of junk culture, I have long wished to have more ridiculous experiences. These are the kind of things that make life worth living. So in looking back on 2009, one event occurred for me that was so cosmically, inanely silly that I felt that it was a good jumping off point for a long, rambling, meandering blog about cultural detritus of the sort that typically either makes me shake my head nauseously or fills me with so very much glee.

But to start, I have a confession to make that isn’t at all surprising for anyone who knows me: I secretly enjoy hip-hop and rap. Or rather, I secretly enjoy bad hip-hop and rap. I enjoy it very, very much, even though I’m generally pretty ignorant of the genre. Now, you may ask me, “If you’re so totally ignorant about hip-hop, how can you tell what is bad?” Oh, trust me, you can. Like scotch, hip-hop is the one thing that you can immediately tell is smooth or rotgut, and if it was either concocted in the finest Scottish barrels or made by a toothless rube riding the rails. There’s a lot of good rap and hip-hop out there, and I’ve always believed that every genre has its Mozarts, but when hip-hop is bad, it’s laughably bad—yet enjoyable all the same and for all the wrong reasons. Ever since I was introduced to Chingy’s Hoodstar, I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for the awkward hooks, criminally poor spelling, and cartoonish macho posturing. They almost can’t be satirized; they represent the gross excess of modern mainstream hip-hop more astutely than any SNL or Colbert parody ever could. When Chingy sang “Right Thurr” and put his own mark on the evolution of English grammar, can anyone honestly say they didn’t enjoy at least a brief giggle, a feeling of intellectual superiority, and a moment of ensuing sadness?

This deep love of hip-hop faux-pas is why, when A&E Editor Sarah Stead emailed me a press release back in the summer telling me that none other than Flo Rida was coming to Alberta and he was coming to my hometown of Brooks, Alberta, I was pathologically fascinated.

It may not be easy to understand how surreal this was, so I’ll break it down for you: Flo Rida, the man responsible for “Low,” (which was on the top of the charts for ten weeks in 2008) was coming to play in my town of 13 000 people. The rapper and fan of awkwardly geometrical Ken-Doll-like facial hair who sings “Right Round,” which set the record for most digital downloads in one week, would be singing and dancing in the same arena that I played pee wee hockey in. This was happening in reality and not part of some twisted hallucination induced by huffing glue. This man is acquaintances with T-Pain and Rick Ross. He has sang for Step Up 2 Tha Streets and performed on So You Think You Can Dance. He gets shit done, in the half-assed, ripping-off-Eiffel-65 manner that amuses me so. And he was coming to my town. The statistically probability of this happening is almost astronomically small. Earth is probably more likely to be hit by a comet in our lifetime than for Flo Rida to play a show in the rec centre of a town (okay, technically now a city) best known for smelling funny due to the gigantic meat packing plant. This is why I was intrigued to the point where I would have moved Heaven and Earth to get in.

So I drove the lonely, boring drive of five hours back to home to see the show (and of course, to spend quality time with my beloved family). Tickets were $40 in advance and $50 at the door — an exorbitant, ludicrous amount of Benjamins considering that I was paying to stand on a concrete floor listening to hip-hop I would normally only listen to on YouTube as a joke. Yes, I was being ripped off. But again, it was worth it.

Like the gigantic nerd I am, I actually showed up to the show relatively soon after the ungodly early door time of 5 p.m., under the wacked-out, patently schizophrenic delusion that a man like Flo Rida would actually come out onstage sometime in the early evening. In hindsight, I would have kicked my own ass for being there before 8. After getting my paper wrist band, I entered to find a nearly empty arena, with people standing around in little packs much like the beginnings of a junior high dance, where everyone huddles in with their friends. There were tables set up inside the rink where local volunteers were selling Domino’s pizza, beer, and vodka coolers for what must have been close to the gross annual GDP of Malawi. And there I sat and waited for at least an hour or two — amongst backward-capped youths and girls who were dressed up to an extent that they must have mistakenly thought they were going to a club with a dress code, rather than to see the guy who sang “Freaky Deaky” — before my friend who I was meeting at the show finally arrived, making all the standing-around-alone-in-an-arena slightly less punishingly uncomfortable.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of waiting, the first opening act came out. Their name is unfortunately lost to the sands of time, but let me tell you: they definitely stood out as unique and gifted. I’m pretty sure they had a beat going in the background and a number of young men took turns attempting to deliver lyrics that rhyme with some kind of flow, I suppose. They also noted several times that fans should really add them to their MySpace or Facebook pages. That’s the sum total of what I remember.

Then after another extended break, the second opening act came out, which managed to outdo the first opening act in all the worst possible ways. While the Social Networking Posse was bland and wholly unnecessary, Nikki Awesome & The Royal Society was nails-on-a-chalkboard irritating and wholly unnecessary — a devastating combination. The titular frontwoman seemed to be under the woefully misguided impression that dressing like a hooker and singing in a voice that most canines would find rather high-pitched was not all that appealing as a musical fan. Her over-the-top vamping made her seem like Lady Gaga without any of the self-awareness. Along with her two immemorable rapping backup singers (sorry — The Royal Society), they filled the role of opening act admirably. By the end of their set, the audience was ready for a nap.

After they mercifully left, the crowd started to get amped. Soon, Flo would be hitting the stage, in front of a non-full house of maybe 150 people, if even that. I was literally amazed and confused that so few people came to what was such a bizarre event. It probably didn’t help that it was on a Monday night (another attributing factor to the oddity) and that it was 40 damn dollars. But still: was I the only person interested in seeing this merely for kitsch value? Because if so, that’d be kind of sad, right? I assume that I wasn’t, but I can never be sure.

My time between sets also let me reflect on the fact that seeing a concert with 150 people is significantly different than seeing a concert with 40,000 people. This may seem obvious, but really, it’s still just people onstage playing instruments and singing songs. But with 40,000 people, it feels like everyone is in on it. There’s nothing unique about it. Whereas being at a small concert, only a few people in the world share the same experience, even if it is completely zany and surreal. Being at Flo Rida, I kind of felt like I was in on a secret that others were too intelligent to know or care about.

More than an hour passed and Flo still didn’t come out. Hearsay began circulating in the crowd that he was standing us up because we were a small town. That would have been some bullshit. I’m pretty sure a riot actually would have ensued. Seeing Flo Rida burned in effigy would have been pretty amusing, but I still wanted to see the concert. Finally, after nearly an hour of waiting, the man himself came out on the stage in his characteristic leather jacket and tank top, with a gold bling medallion the size of a CD smacking against his chest. He was also accompanied by an actual posse of about five guys, only one of which was actually another rapper. The rest of them might as well have been hat racks. They existed solely for the purpose to hand Flo Rida towels to wipe off his dewy, sweat-soaked face between tunes (more on that later). The crowd, needless to say, went wild with this development. Flo explained that his tardiness was a consequence of having a run-in with border control on his way over from the States, which cemented his status as B-grade for me. Would Dre or Snoop get caught with the chronic by border police? I think not.

Two different events stand out for me at this concert, neither of which had to do with a song. One of which was right before they broke into “Low,” Flo’s backup rapper who was pretty much his Barney Rubble, yelled “Where all tha ladiez in the house for Flo Rida!” which was met with much screaming and freaking out. They then proceeded to pick ladies out of the audience who had desperately thrown their hands up, who then got the privilege, nay, the honour of going on stage and grinding with Flo Rida as he repeatedly encouraged them to get low. Yup, if nothing else, Flo Rida is the epitome of grace and eloquence.

This was proven emphatically by the second memorable event. Cue towel boys stage left and right. Flo Rida said something akin to “I think it’s time for some autographs” which led to more screaming and hair-pulling. He then signed towels handed to him by his man-servants, which he proceeded to wipe on his face and toss into the audience who clawed at and fought over them like hordes of ravenous hounds. Yes, you read that right. The main artist-audience interaction at this show was frivolous grinding and the procurement of sweat-soaked facecloths. This depressingly means that as I type this and you read this, towels infused with the electrolytes and fluids previously employed to cool Flo Rida’s core body temperature may be selling for as much as $3.00 on eBay. I unfortunately didn’t get one of these towels, but rest assured, had I caught one, it would have become the centrepiece of my home decor. I might have even named it.

The night’s music wasn’t all that memorable as the sweaty rags unfortunately. He played all the hits — “Low,” “Right Round,” “Sugar” — as well as a plethora of other songs only the hardcore are familiar with. But despite the mildly cynical nature of this piece, I have to give Flo Rida some props. He put a commendable amount of energy into a show in a small town where a relatively well-known star could have easily justified phoning it in. He also gave a town its first concert with a currently popular artist since, well, ever. Since then, Sean Kingston has brought his love of beautiful girls and dancefloor arson to Brooks as well, so the concert was also precedent-setting.

But really, out of everything, it was the crowd dispersal at the end of the concert that gave rise to a moment that ranks right up at the top and which 2010 may have great difficulty topping: the witnessing of an actual girlfight as I was given two free boxes of pizza by the volunteers trying to get rid of their excess. If 2010 can top that, then it wins.