Review of the concert
The concert was last night and I met up with some Dominicans that came from other cities.
Annexet is, well, an anexo of the main arena called The Globe. It has space for up to 3500 people, not including the crew.
The line of people waiting to enter was BIG, bigger than what any of us thought of, and the doors were opened at 7:30pm. Annexet wasn't at full capacity but to the time I'm writing this review, none of the local papers had written squat about the concert and I don't have a way to find out how many tickets they sold. All the sold tickets were for standing up seats, with the exception of a few people sitting on a wheelchair.
We saw 2 pre shows (see below) and after waiting almost 45 minutes, and after a lot of cheers of "¡Que salga!" (come out!), "¡Injusticia!" (injustice!), and "¡Eso no se hace!" (you can't do that), at about 9:35pm we see a film of a propeller plane taking off and landing and JLG riding an elevator from the "hangar" to the stage and we're all shouting and clapping and dancing to "Que vale la pena".
JLG and his 440 sang a mix of their most known songs and material from his latest album "La llave de mi corazón". We danced and sang to hits like "El Farolito", "La Cosquillita", "Woman del callao", "La Gallera", "Burbujas de amor", "La bilirrubina", etc. When he was about to sing songs with political or protest messages, then words of peace, poverty, hunger, etc. would be shown on the screen, together with shots of artists like Juanes and Ricky Martin on a peace concert they had in South America (someone correct me on this). Those songs were "El costo de la vida", "Ojalá que llueva café" and "El niágara en bicicleta". Throughout all the performance, there was words from the songs or images being played on the one screen.
About an hour after his performance started, he presented his band. Adalgisa and Roger, as well as JLG himself, haven't aged a day. My God they look great! I don't know much about Juan Enrique (Kiko) so I can't comment. I saw them in 1992 (I think) at the Olympic Stadium in SD and wow, they still got it. Then they went to rest for a bit and the musicians entertained us a little bit, including part of the "Thriller" dance, performed by the percussion guys.
Then Adalgisa, Roger and Kiko had a chance of singing one merengue each and our hero came back and continued delivering songs like "La llave de mi corazón" and others from his latest album. After playing for about 2 hours, he said good night to us and finished his performance with the song "Como yo".
This was the best 500 SEK (about 2500 DOP) I've ever paid.
The good: aside from JLG & 440 themselves, we got a good show by "one of the biggest Latin artists in Sweden", a guy called Pablo Cepeda. It was also nice to see other Dominicans and Latins united in this event, plus the random Swede.
The bad: this isn't JLG's fault or even the arrangers (maybe?), but with about 3000 people in a somewhat small place, the ventilation system should've worked better. 100 more people and it would've been dangerous, as little "new" air was being released and we all got very sweaty. The amount of BO and f@rt was unbelievable. We were told that JLG was to perform at 9pm and he really started about 35 minutes later. None of the local papers has written a peep about it, even tho they were represented there.
The ???: 2 of the "biggest Latin starts in Sweden" were completely unknown to us, the Latin community.
The ridiculous: it is true that you can take some people from the barrio, but that you can never take the barrio away from them...
|
(10)
