In our eternal quest to become more cool, we sent senior editor Sandy Hingston’s 18-year-old daughter Marcy and Marcy’s friend Patrice to the Chris Brown concert at the Wachovia Center last night (Chris Brown being a heartthrob singer, also 18, who stars in the new movie This Christmas). Then we had Sandy ask the girls the sorts of questions Philly Mag readers want to know about … well, a Chris Brown concert.

Sandy: Is there a metal detector?
Marcy: No. They said they had the right to search our bags, but they didn’t search ours, and I didn’t see them searching anyone else’s, either.

Sandy: What was the crowd like?
Marcy: A lot of trashy white girls. And there were a lot more families than I expected. I think because it was Chris Brown. He’s not a rapper. He’s, like, a singer.

Sandy: And he’s the guy whose naked torso is the wallpaper on your college laptop.
Marcy: Right.

Sandy: So you go in. What’s it like inside?
Marcy: The venue is a madhouse. There were a lot of people in our section, because it was close to the stage, who weren’t supposed to be there. And whenever the lights came on, they’d say, Okay, we have to go back to our seats before security comes.

Sandy: How close were you?
Marcy: We were really close. Like, the third row. [Sighs] Chris Brown touched some people in the first two rows. There were cameras filming him, too, and he’d talk to the cameras. It was almost like he was talking to us.

Sandy: Was there an opening act?
Marcy: When we got to our seats, it was in between acts. Which was good, because if we’d come in when Soulja Boy was on, everybody would have been crankin’ [accompanied by hand and body movements]. And then Bow Wow came on. Everything had, like, a really big introduction — planes coming down, and fire, and explosions … There was, like, a five-minute introduction for Chris Brown.

Patrice: That was torture.

Marcy: There was a two-minute, 50-second countdown.

Sandy: What does that mean?
Marcy: They had the numbers up on a screen for us to count down. I think they really wanted to milk that time. There was a long break after Bow Wow did his thing, and everybody got restless and started chanting “We want Chris Brown!” Then we had the two-minute, 50-second countdown. And then he fell from the ceiling.

Patrice: Oh yeah, he came down from the ceiling in a harness.

Sandy: What was he wearing?
Patrice: He had on a long-sleeve brown shirt with black pants and black shoes and a black beanie hat and a black bulletproof vest.

Marcy: He almost looked like a really hot security guard.

Patrice: He looked like a SWAT trooper.

Marcy: Yeah, I think that’s what he was supposed to be. Then they had those green laser things. I liked them. I thought that enhanced the SWAT team thing.

Patrice: He started off with “Wall to Wall.”

Marcy: He did a couple of numbers on the main stage, and then he moved to the middle. I’ll let Patrice describe that.

Patrice: Let me draw a picture [drawing a picture]. There’s this circular stage that moves and tilts, for the crowd farther away.

Sandy: How’d he get there?
Marcy: We were trying to figure that out. We think it might have been underground.

Patrice: He was there for two songs, “Take You Down” and “Lottery.”

Marcy: And he had two other shirtless male dancers with him on the circular, shifting, tilting stage. It was pretty intense. That’s where he did most of his thrusting. Then he popped back up on the main stage in that striped outfit. How did he change his clothes underground?

Patrice: Didn’t you ever see those underground tunnels? They run and change their clothes at the same time. They have Velcro, so they can change real fast.

Sandy: What was the striped outfit?
Patrice: It was jet-black, with glow-in-the-dark sparkly diagonal stripes.

Marcy: The dancers had them, too. Then he changed again and came out in his dorky outfit playing his Saved by the Bell song. Everybody was in dorky middle-school gear. That’s the theme of his “Kiss Kiss” video.

Patrice: It’s like the nerd Chris Brown is getting bullied by the cool Chris Brown, and the girl is trying to stand up for the nerdy Chris Brown.

Marcy: He seems really happy, really willing to let his dorky side show. He knows he’s so hot that he doesn’t have to try all the time. And then he took his shirt off [long sigh] and did “Kiss Kiss,” which is my personal favorite. And then the DJ said “Thanks for a wonderful night,” but there were two more songs. Bow Wow came out, also shirtless, and they did “Shortie Like Mine.
That was the grand finale.

Patrice: Everybody knows Chris is a better dancer than Bow Wow.

Marcy: He’d do all these fancy moves, and then Bow Wow would kind of do them. Then they did some fire and called it a night.

Sandy: Was the audience rowdy?
Marcy: I actually expected it to be more rowdy. There was a fight over Chris Brown’s hat. He threw it, and a girl got it, and everybody left their seats and piled on her.

Sandy: How did the limo driver know where to find you?
Marcy: He called and said he’d be at the same place where he dropped us off. He was really, really nice. When we were in line to buy T-shirts, he said he didn’t want us to go overtime on the rental, because you probably wouldn’t be happy about that.

Patrice: So instead we got bootleg T-shirts. They might be a different color from the official ones, but it’s usually the same picture. And they’re cheaper.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 10:18 am and is filed under Music, Arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted by Victor Fiorillo on 12/21/07 in Music, Arts