Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Strange Happenings

Strange.... So last year I spent my birthday in Bali living the good life. Beach all day capped off with excellent vegan food and partying all night. Literally. I even had a reggae band sing me happy birthday in Bahasa "Ulan Tahun". This year was interesting, but in a completely different way. My actual birthday was spent at the beach with family and close friends and was most excellent, food, water and all. The weird part actually happened in the early morning hours of my birthday, namely 12:00- 1:30 AM. I attended a Brujeria concert at the Key Club in Hollywood.

I went by myself due to an extreme yearning for live music. My choices were Brujeria or well, actually just Brujeria. Naomi turned me on to them when we first met and I dig some of there stuff so I figured, "What the hell". So off I went to the Key Club. Prime parking and a spliff later I entered. Suprisingly enough, the bouncer wished me a happy b-day as I walked in. Cepahlic Carnage was playing as I walked in and they rocked the house way harder than Brujeria, musically at least. I bought a $6 beer, first & last, and dug the music until they ended. Outside reminded me of the Metal show I went to in Thailand, a mixture of young kids rocking Slipknot and Incubus shirts being drunk and bashing authority, although this time instead of Thai, it was Spanish being spoken.

One birthday spliff later I entered at 11:45 to insane visuals of rape, torture, and murder on all screens backed with a brutally grinding soundtrack. After waaaaayyyy too long Brujeria took the stage and the crowd went wild. This is where it gets strange. While many of there songs deal with weed and white people, it would seem that many that the played that night were about white people, specifically killing them. More times than I can count the audience broke into chants consisting of "Matando Guero" and "Pinche Guero". I was instantly brought back to the Fear concert I attended when I was 15.

The Fear show was a disaster, long story short, the audience was composed of mostly skinheads and they decided to beat members of Fear to a pulp, particularly Lee Ving and his new black guitarist. As this was happening the whole audience burst into chants of "White Power" and "Sieg Hiel" while saluting a nonexistent Hitler. Lame with a capital AME. On the way out people were asking us to "Join the Aryan Brotherhood", we drove off blasting the Dead Kennedys' "Nazi Punks Fuck Off". But I digress , the Fear show made me sick to my stomach, yet the Brujeria show did not. Both blatant acts of racism and ignorance yet one strikes me as worse. It is a weird feeling to be one of the 10 or 20 gueros in an audience of 500+ people chanting about killing you. I have absolutely no point to this story other than the experience was surreal, but hell I knew what I was getting into and hell, it was fun, just a little strange.

--------Z

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am glad that you can understand the minority's point of view.
(Your favorite litte non-white person (guess who)=)

11:56 PM  

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