A couple of weeks ago I heard that one of the actresses from the cast of Gossip Girl was at the center of a scandal, for exposing her breasts during a concert. If you follow celeb gossip or are a Gossip Girl fan, you probably already know all about it… or you can easily guess who it was
Being Italian, I don’t share in the whole hypocritical outrage about nudity (please, girls are running around with skirts so short they might as well not bother, yet you get outraged by a small stunt from a rocker chick?), so I didn’t especially care – what caught my attention was the fact that she was apparently in concert.
I mean, I had heard she had a band, but I pictured a lame group of self-absorbed celebrities armed with pricey instruments they coulnd’t really play – so the fact that her band was actually giving a concert, with actual people in the audience? Definitely had me intrigued.
Taylor has been getting a lot of flack for her looks, but again, hypocrisy much? I mean, who can blame a teenage girl for wearing lots of black, short skirts and raccoon eyes while Lady Gaga is showing up in meat dresses?
Say what you will, but the girl can act – and apparently she can sing, too. Girl? Respect. She reminds me of a young Courtney Love, back when she was still good looking and the grunge look was part of her charm. Add to that the fact that Taylor’s band, Pretty Reckless, includes talented musicians, and, well… Little Jen who??
So… last night. What, you weren’t on Twitter when I checked in at the Hallenstadion concert hall in Zurich? What else could you possibly be doing?
Stuff was going a little less smoothly than I planned yesterday.
First annoying occurrence of the day: my camera, my beloved Nikon S620, which is awesome and super-portable, and awesome, and purple, and have I mentioned awesome?
Well… it fell (the guilty party hasn’t been found yet. Sascha said he knew nothing about it, Sarah admitted only to finding it on the floor and picking it up, Stella avoided the question by making everyone pay attention to how cool her new t-shirt was) and the battery and memory card kept popping out. Said popping out caused a flipping out (guess who?) Sascha pacified me by promising to bring it to a Nikon specialist that same morning and by saying that I woulnd’t be allowed to bring cameras in the hall, anyway. (Riiiight)
So to summarize: available cameras for me to immortalize the first concert I was going to attend in several years: 0.
The morning passed without further incident. Met a friend for coffee, got home, made lunch, made dinner, then spent a couple of hours mentally preparing for the concert. (Translation: I checked my e-mails, read a few blogs, planned my outfit.)
Time spent on Polyvore planning concert outfit: 1 hour (think it’s easy to find the perfect balance of comfort and fashion that will work with April’s psycho weather and won’t get completely ruined if some jackass spills beer all over you?? Didn’t think so.) Outfits planned: 3.
Winning outfits: 1.
Time spent looking for military jacket – crucial piece of winning outfit – in the basement and virtually every room in the house: 45 minutes.
Time spent pouting and quietly cursing before deciding on a new outfit: 5. Ok, maybe 10.
So after opting for a modified, more concert-friendly version of the outfit I wore during the day, I got ready and headed out, met my almost-sister-in-law, and proceeded to head to the concert hall. But because yesterday was also Sechsilüte, the traffic was a nightmare and half.
When we finally got there, hundreds of people were sitting in front of both entrances, 30 minutes before door-opening time, 2 and half hours before the concert was scheduled to start.
We finally got in after waiting for an hour, and found our seats.
Then waited for two more hours. No opening band, only a DJ. Not an especially good one, either.
When we had lost all hope and I was starting to doze off from boredom and sugar shock (two Caramel Macchiatos in one day will do that) it finally started!
After the opening video, “Madhouse” came on then Rihanna came out in a black dress with lots of blinking red lights on it, and from there on it was kind of a blur – especially since I didn’t have my camera, which is why I borrowed a picture from 20 Minuten instead, which had kind of an obnoxious review of the concert, but some good pics of Rihanna in the second best outfit of the night:
Which she wore also while singing Shut Up And Drive, with an amazing dancer:
By the way, Rihanna’s band? Awesome. The backup singers, the guitar and bass players, the drummer…. all fantastic. But my favorite was the acoustic guitar player, who played an amazing Spanish/flamenco-inspired solo before she started singing “Te Amo”.
Other memorable outfits: a cagey bodysuit she came out in for “Please Don’t Stop The Music”:
(sucky audio but a better view of her costume here) which she also had on during “SOS” and a dominatrix-like outfit she wore while performing “Rude Boy“.
The audience was totally enthralled and clearly had forgotten all about the long wait – but there was a moment when only a small part of the audience participated, and that was when she broke into a rendition of “Wonderwall”, accompanied only by the awesome guy with the acoustic guitar. Of the 13,000 people in the stadium, only a few hundred sang along. Come on people – how can you not know one of Oasis’ best songs??? Shame.
Anyway – after she sang “Take a bow” the stage went dark for a few minutes and people started to leave. What??? L. and I looked at each other and said “No way it’s over!” ”She didn’t even sing Umbrella yet!!” and decided to stay put. And the stage came alive again, first with a video, then Rihanna was back, in my fave outfit of the night (glittery over the knee boots! Need I say more?), singing a medley of some of her biggest hits:
The medley of course included “Umbrella“, which is what she closed the show with. And after a confetti shower and a laser show, we were done.
I was home at midnight, and got up at 7 to get the girls ready and bring Sarah to school. Not too shabby. But next time I’ll be damned if I’m not bringing a friggin’ camera.
