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MTV Campus Invasion lacked talent and fun
by Kent Farago
The Carillon
Punk rock brought to you by Nokia.
That was the scene for the MTV Campus Invasion Tour, which strolled through our town last Friday night with little fanfare.
The concert featured Gob, Kazzer, and Jersey but none of these bands were the main attraction for the night. Instead, the real attractions were the various Nokia, MTV, FCUK fragrance and Playstation 2 booths that attendees had to walk by in order to get to the stage area. Concertgoers were bombarded with company stooges yelling and screaming at them to sign up for the various mailing lists and potential chances to “play Playstation 2 with Gob.” I remember a few years ago when you didn’t have to win the chance to hang out with Gob, they just hung out with their fans because they wanted to.
Once inside the actual venue, people had the chance to play Game Day 2004 on the Playstation 2 while waiting for the bands to take the stage. To be honest those PS2s came in handy when the show started half an hour late (possibly due to the lack of an audience, only 300 or so people showed up to a venue that can hold at least quadruple that amount).
The show finally opened with Jersey, a street-punk band from Burlington, Ontario. The crowd, comprised mostly of fourteen year-old girls and 20-something bro-core morons (guys who wear backwards hats and wife-beaters while lining each other up in the pit and doing their best to knock them over while their buddy cheers, “Ya bro! Have another beer” and slaps them a high-five), was generally unreceptive as the band tried their best to pump the crowd up. It came to a point where the band actually called for a “circle-pit.” The bro-cores, not knowing what a circle-pit was, just used the shout-out as an attempt to prove whose knuckles drag lowest to the ground.
After another lengthy delay, and a set of cheap advertisements from an unknown MTV personality, Kazzer took the stage. Making sure that he “kept it real,” Kazzer gave “shout-outs” to Nokia, MTV, and Playstation before launching into a horrid cover of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” to close his inane set.
So far, the night’s performances were so devoid of fun that I decided to call it a night even before Gob took the stage. However, once I realized that I lived in Regina and that there really isn’t anything to do here, I headed back and caught the remaining few songs of Gob’s set. From what I saw Gob made sure that the lackluster audience was having a good time by filling their setlist with songs from their two latest releases. When the band closed with “No Regrets” from their album The World According to Gob the band remained on stage urging the crowd to chant Gob in order for them to turn the lights on and do an encore.
Forgive me if I am wrong but isn’t the point of an encore for the audience to show their appreciation for the band’s performance and for the band to reward their fans for being such a good audience? Gob obviously realized that the already thinning crowd would not be able to create a noise loud enough to fill the Canada Centre Building so they just stood on stage in the darkness waiting for enough people to make some noise that would warrant the return of the band. This was a truly pathetic sight and I believe that Gob themselves even realized this.
After being tormented with hours of terrible performances, moronic crowd activity and blatant excuses for advertising, I was thankful that the concert had finally ended, and I believe that many others in attendance felt the same way.
Hopefully this sorry excuse for a concert will prove to Gob that karma truly is a bitch and if you alienate all of your earliest fans then you will have no-one to turn to when your bubble-gum pop flavouring has run out with the “tween” crowd.
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