Crowd control and the "bling technician"

How does one spend their last Saturday in Japan? Cherry Blossom viewing? Shopping for those last minute Japanese souvenirs? Visiting teary eyed with Japanese friends?

NOPE

The best thing to do is to head to Osaka to see Snoop Dogg. And that is exactly what I did. Me, Luciano and two Japanese friends headed to the Osaka Jo Dome for a full day of hip hop, reggae, R&B and a wholel lotta wierd ass Japanese concert crowd control. Springroove was the name and dealing with Japanese anal retentiveness while trying to enjoy some sweet ass ghetto fabulousness was the game. It was an all day, no holds barred music fantastico, Damian Marley, Erykah Badu, Pharrell, Snoop Dogg and a bunch of Japanese hip hop and Reggae acts.

Now in any normal country this would be a sweet ass day of mingling, dancing and grooving but in Japan it was a day of being told what he CANNOT do over and over again while being herded into caged zoo cells from which we weren't allowed to leave.

The concert was on the main floor of a stadium. Cool, no problems there, but instead of the normal logical western way of doing things (i.e roaming around to different parts of the venue to get the best vantage point to see Snoops ghetto shuffle) the clever, always illogically "efficient" Japanese decided to separate the ENTIRE floor into small "cages" where only a specific number of people could fit. Once the limit was reached they closed the gate and you were basically trapped in there for the ENTIRE concert, all 8 hours of it. No no no, none of that unjapanese "hey lets go check out the view from over there" type thinking was to be had. Instead it was "do as you are told and don't protest" sit in your cage and enjoy the show. Meanwhile there was a video screen at the front of the stage that continuously played a loop of images showing things that you were not allowed to do.

1) no crowd surfing
2) no smoking
3) no eating
4) no "heavy dancing"
5) no lighter waving .l..(poor Damian Marley couldn't read it and asked everyone to wave their lighters around. Then the security guards had a hernia)
6) no wallet chains
7) no videos, cameras, keitai phone pics
8) no bottles

and the list goes ON and ON.

Have you ever been to a Snoop Dogg show where not a trace of pot smoke could be smelt, hell not even cigarette smoke. We got so annoyed with the fact that security guards were right on our tail that we had to EAT our joints just to get a buzz on.

All Japanese anal retentiveness aside, the concert was really good and we managed to get a deliciously close to the stage.

5 sentence rundown

1) Pushim - Japanese reggae singer from Okinawa. Very good. Definetly buyable
2) Damian Marley - Wicked. Dance hall mixed with old fashion reggae beats. He had a big ass band and a guy who sole job was to get really high and run around on stage waving an Jamaican flag
3) Erykah Badu - Girl's got herself one crazy afro and an unstoppable set of pipes.
4) Pharrell - dissapointing. He was mediocre at best and had his very one "bling technician". A guy whose job it was to stand on the side of the stage and change Pharrell's bling necklaces as he sang. Each song required it's own special bling and this nerdy ass looking white dude had to run out on stage and remove the old bling and carefully place the new one around his highness' neck. I mean what the fuck! Pharrell can't even change his own fucking necklace! No joke, he didn't even touch them, it was all done buy geek boy bling guy. Wierd
5) Snoop - Gotta love him. Dude's so chill and ghetto fabulous. Too bad we were so tired from standing in the same place in our efficient Japanese concert cage that we could barely get our ghetto shuffle on.

All in all it was a groovy show in a shitty Japanese venue run by a bunch of incompetent Japanese drones.

Too bad. But I enjoyed it anyway.

I'm actually back in Canada now and will be updating on my boring life in the great white north soon.

Cheers
J