By Coleman Patrick Ranahan
(Photo Credit – Vulture)
I’m not a man who attends a great deal of concerts. I can literally count on one hand how many actual concerts I’ve been too. And no, my siblings middle school choir concerts do not count, YOU CAN’T MAKE ME MOM.
It struck me Wednesday night, through the gap of a gay couple kissing in the audience of a concert at the Palladium in Hollywood, as Kesha commanded the stage, this was the most positive event I have been at all year. Not just simply because of the surrounding circumstances, a terrorist attack in New York, six hundred people shot in Las Vegas, an administration that runs around like a drunk toddler into a batch of legos.
All spectacularly bad photos below this sentence are taken by me.
I was surrounded by what had to be close to three thousand people packed in side by side at the Palladium. Some, were dressed in fancy outfits; custom, some painted, a man passed by me in gold spandex and sequin cape with a top hat, and some donned eye paint and glitter-beards. Anything and everything you could think of, we had it. Kesha’s army was here, her “animals” she lovingly called us. I was in a mere green button-up but I kind of wished I had dressed up.
Likely this will sound hyperbolic, but it had the vibe of the emerging flower power/sexual revolution 1970’s, but in the modern day. Or at least that’s what it struck me like as I was watching everything unfold in front of me from the back of the Palladium.
I didn’t wear anything fancy, though I sported a fancy attitude (some may contest otherwise), but I felt surrounded by the most positive energy I hadn’t felt in quite some time. It was astonishing, singular, and only of that moment. And it registered to me immediately upon stepping into the circular disco style floor of the Palladium.
Kesha’s choice in her opening band, Savoy Motel, a band I had never heard of before, showed an upbeat, fun 1970’s vibe with enough electric guitar solos to make AC/DC blush that seemed to coincide with Kesha’s jailbreak into the artist she’s evolved into.
As Kesha took the stage, she had a confidence, a swagger, a smile. She belonged up there. She loved roaring into the audience, even at one point taking a drink from a flask and “baby-birding” it into the audience. And we all ate it up. And with the presence of a super-star, gave the audience a little bit of everything. She could have asked us all to sucker punch each other in the face and we might have done it.
Without mentioning Donald Trump by name or by occupation, Kesha laid out that all were welcome, all were accepted, and to not let anyone be disparaged by their race, gender, sexual preference etc. The whole room didn’t have to hold their breath to know what she was getting at, we all knew.
The more unshackled Kesha became, the more it emanated into the room.
Whatever the days that come ahead, whatever nonsensical tweet storms our President decides to tear into like a proverbial six-pack that an alcoholic desires, I’ll most definitely remember this night. It wasn’t by any means an absolutely wild night, it was just a stark contrast of what we can be versus what our nation has grinded itself into right now.
And in that small room, that meager slice of life in Los Angeles, that room of people chanting ‘motherfucker’ back to Kesha as she strided around the stage, it felt like happiness, and that Donald J. Trump, is something you can’t roll back.