Show One

Yang heard Akon was coming two town for a concert and she immediately signed us up to go. And then she asked who Akon was.

The concert was in the Olympic basketball arena which is a near diagonal across town from where we live. For our previous concert experience there, The Eagles, we taxied to the subway and then took the subway to the arena. This time the concert started a bit later and a quick check of traffic and we thought we could drive. Got onto the forth ring road and it was not moving. So we not moved the car to a near by subway station and change the modes of transports. This put us about 20 minutes late but Akon started 25 minutes late (no warm-up acts) so we didn’t miss a thing.

As you can see from the picture, we did not exactly have front row seats. I will say this for Akon, he came out with a lot of energy and passion and for the most part nailed the songs that he did. But..and there is a but. The show went less than an hour before he left the stage. He did one encore of three songs. Total play time was maybe an hour and ten minutes. Including a couple long interludes with the fans where he tried to get everyone excited and yelling. And the crowds were fairly excited, for here, especially compared with the Eagles show at the same arena. I had an inkling it was going to be a short set when early in the show it seemed like every song was a hit song and while I’m not that familiar with his catalog, I don’t remember it having that number of hits. The second complaint was it wasn’t really an arena level show with just him and his DJ dancing around.

He closed the night with maybe his biggest hit, Freedom. It’s a story about a boy who came to America with his parents only to have his parents break under the pressure and find himself an outsider in this a land. All he wants is Freedom, which is a great word because it meaning is one that warps with the listener. It’s a story that would resonate here, in so many dimensions, and I’m sure it touched a few. And then he left the stage, a likely 1 million dollar payday banked.