2012 in Concerts: Festivals, divas, residencies and high energy
“I’m not f!@king Justin Bieber!”
Those words, growled out by Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong like a wolf guarding his kill, may have been the most memorable uttered from a stage in Las Vegas over the past year.
It was the first night of the two-day iHeartRadio Music Festival at the MGM Grand Garden arena in September, Green Day’s set was coming to an end, and Armstrong wasn’t happy about it, demanding more time to play before abruptly smashing his guitar on the stage with the force of a blacksmith hammering an anvil.
It wasn’t the craziest moment of the year – that occurred at Tenacious D’s gig at the House of Blues in August, when the show was abruptly stopped after a stabbing in the crowd – but it was a real one, and as such, stood out from the prefab feel that can drape an event like iHeartRadio like a funeral shroud.
IHeartRadio was one of the biggest music events of the year and also emblematic of the current state of arena concerts, where more inspired, unpredictable moments – Green Day’s roughshod but invigorated showing; Pitbull’s boundless energy; Pink flying high in the rafters during her set – were contrasted with more stilted ones – Rihanna sleepwalking through a listless performance; Bon Jovi turning in a by-the-numbers, perfunctory suite of hits.
A trio of electronic dance music acts performed at iHeartRadio, underscoring the growing mainstream presence of the music.
This was amplified at the three-day Electric Daisy Carnival, which returned to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in early June.
There, big-name DJs such as David Guetta, Kaskade and Steve Aoki performed amid a pulsating, retina-blasting landscape of towering video screens and amusement park rides where sight and sound merged into an immersive, all-encompassing spectacle.
To say that DJs are the new rock stars is to fall back on an old cliche.
They’re not.
Rock stars no longer draw crowds of nearly 100,000 a day.
There were a number of other festival-type shows that highlighted the year in concerts: the two-day Rock Vegas fest brought Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie and other brooding dudes to the Mandalay Bay Events Center in September; the twice-a-year Neon Reverb Festival continued to be a well-assembled survey of local and national indie rock in March and September at various venues downtown; the punk-centered Warped Tour swarmed the Luxor Festival Grounds in what was the most grueling show of the year, an all-day endurance test under the merciless June sun.
THE DIVAS
Indoors, 2012 was the year of the diva.
Madonna sold out two nights at the MGM Grand Garden arena in October, where she reconfigured past hits into barely recognizable forms, wielded prop machine guns, dressed as a majorette and dropped trou, exposing her thong-clad derriere to the adoring crowd.
Not quite as outsize but just as awesomely outlandish was Nicki Minaj’s performance at Planet Hollywood Resort in August, where the rapper donned Day-Glo wigs and professed to be an alien while strutting across a stage designed to look like a spaceship at times.
On the artier side, Florence and the Machine, led by the radiant-voiced Florence Welch, thrilled with a stirring, mesmeric, ceaselessly flamboyant performance at the Boulevard Pool at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas in April. Fiona Apple did the same at The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel in September, though her set was decidedly more understated, even when she quivered with emotion, her body visibly vibrating, eyes clamped shut, as she gave voice to songs so personal, it often seemed to pain her to sing them.
And there was the diva of all divas, Barbra Streisand, who held court in the MGM Grand Garden arena in November.
THE RESIDENCIES
Elsewhere, 2012 was the year of the residency in Vegas, beginning with Motley Crue’s stint at The Joint in February.
“It’s gotta be bigger, badder, sleazier than anything we’ve ever done,” Crue frontman Vince Neil said of the band’s extended local stay in a pretaped video montage that played shortly before the group took the stage.
That it was, with lots of fire, enough scantily clad damsels to staff the overnight shift at the Spearmint and Tommy Lee’s roller-coaster drum kit.
In October, equally ribald rockers Guns N’ Roses took over the same venue, playing into the early morning hours with a three-hour set whose unchecked bombast seemed borrowed from a Michael Bay fever dream.
SOUL & ENERGY
On the hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues side of things, Drake turned in an alternately cocksure and vulnerable set at the MGM Grand in May, proving himself to be one of rap’s least self-conscious performers, while D’Angelo returned to the road after a decade-long hiatus with a by turns raucous and window-steaming set of get-on-your-feet funk and libidinous soul opening for Mary J. Blige at The Pearl at the Palms in September.
For sheer energy, no act rivaled The Hives’ sweat-saturated gig at the Boulevard Pool in September. Singer Pelle Almqvist seemed like an inmate trying to escape from his own skin in a nonstop blur of ego and attitude as the band bashed out by turns frenetic and funky, cardiac arrest-inducing rock ‘n’ roll.
Speaking of heart attacks and personal peril, there was the aptly named Summer Slaughter Tour, one of the best, most brutal events of the year, which leveled the House of Blues in July.
A 10-band deluge of death and progressive metal, the show paired younger, more technical-minded acts like Periphery and Veil of Maya with old school bruisers like Exhumed, Goatwhore and the granddaddies of them all, the mighty Cannibal Corpse.
When it was all over, attendees felt like “Survivor” victors, conquering the odds and their fatigued flesh.
Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at
jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.
