Having been present at the Tokio Hotel fan mob incident back in March, my younger sister knows only too well the horrors of the band and its overly enthusiastic fanbase. Which is why she was so taken aback by a sighting at her suburban Houston high school:
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Saturday brought the spring/summer edition of Z100's biannual pop medley concerts, Zootopia, to the Izod Center, an arena formerly named after former New Jersey governor Brendan Byrne and microwaved-cheesesteak-proffering air carrier Continental Airlines. The lineup was a testament to the currently scrubbed-clean nature of "pop music"; on the one side you had your petri dish-created acts designed to appeal to tweens of yesterday and today (Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, New Kids On The Block), while on the other you had your piano-thumping Billy Joel acolytes (OneRepublic, Sara Bareilles, Ferras, Gavin DeGraw). Hip-hop was nowhere to be found, unless the pre-show DJ dropping Kurtis Blow into his mix counts; R & B was a lesser presence, with only Danity Kane bringing the girl-group style (and not bringing it very well).
The German goth-pop band Tokio Hotel is like some sort of nightmarish blend of Evanescence, t.A.T.u., and the Jonas Brothers, with just a hint of Adam Duritz's dreadlocked aesthetic thrown in for good measure. It's the kind of band that would never exist without the Internet, and I'd have remained blissfully unaware of its existence if not for a fateful run-in with its fanbase on Tuesday morning here in Madrid, which, thanks to my uncle, was captured on video as a record of what might be the most unwarranted mania in the history of pop music. And that's including LFO and Limp Bizkit.
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Ed. note: Last night, the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C., hosted "The Music Of Seal On Ice," which would bring together the songs of the deep-voiced, Heidi Klum-attached crooner and the ice-skating prowess of Brian Boitano, Todd Eldredge, and Kyoko Ina and John Zimmerman (who look like they're attacking Seal with Ina's skate above). And lucky for us, former Idolator guestblogger Maria Sciarrino happens to be an expert on both figure skating and pop music, so we bundled her up and sent her down to the nation's capital for a report on just what would happen when one tried to combine a Seal concert with a few jumps and spins on the ice.
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At this point, you may be only slightly familiar with guitar-pop boy band the Jonas Brothers. This is because you are probably not a 13-year-old girl from Long Island or New Jersey. I was only vaguely aware of them before I set foot in Z100's pre-Jingle Ball event at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Friday, but I can assure you that when I left three hours later I was intimately—disturbingly—acquainted with all things Jonas Brothers.
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Our headline was actually one out of the several hundred text messages that scrolled across a video ticker high above the stage at Madison Square Garden on Friday night, when a sold-out crowd of tweens and teens (and Idolator) took in the pop chart mish-mash of New York radio station Z100's annual Jingle Ball, and the junior high horndogs who sent in that text weren't talking about James Brown's sidemen, but the Jonas Brothers, the pre-fab pop-punk puppy dogs fresh off a leg of the Hannah Montana tour. All night, the mere mention of the Brothers' names prompted screams so loud you'd think the arena had spontaneously popped a collective cherry, and for four hours, hundreds of exclamation point-riddled messages pledged love to one Brother or another, though usually more along the lines of a chaste hug than fellatio. And taken against the rest of the evening's performances, America's squealing affection towards Disney's latest attempt to bail out the industry (for at least another 12 months) wasn't necessarily misplaced.
It seems that anyone over the age of sixteen is unsure whether Fall Out Boy is an acceptable band or not, but only about one percent of the crowd at last week's Madison Square Garden show belonged to this ambivalent demographic, so the atmosphere was decidedly PSYCHED! TO! BE! THERE!
In my pretentious high school days, I'd have never deigned to attend a show at an arena (the horror!), but there was a very special time in my life during which the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands, Texas, was the destination for all my concert needs. Which included Blink 182 and... Blink 182. Observing the crazed mayhem last week, I couldn't help but recall the similar, if not identical sentiment of my seventh-grade Blink 182 experience. How do the two concerts compare? Are the kids today getting everything they can out of their exuberant mall-emo/pop-punk life phase?
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Last night's scattered real-time account of The Most Irrelevant Awards Show Ever was fun and all, but did it have pictures? And cranky red carpet commentary? It did not. So here are a few photos from the evening (via Getty Images, since we didn't rate a photo pass); within the gallery, you'll find some thoughts from The Academy Is... about their popularity in the bandom community, and everything you ever wanted to know about how I gave M&Ms to Rilo Kiley.
Idolator
