Fiddy and Co.

It’s been a busy two weeks since I posted last. Since then, I went to Scandinavia for four days; found an apartment; saw a ballet; finished Russian as a Second Language (RSL) finals. I wrote a post about Scandinavia called “Perfectland” but I never finished it. The crux was this: Scandinavia is just more developed and refined than Russia in every way (I wondered indeed if any large societies on Earth work better). Going from one to the other is like going from a seedy two-star hotel to a five-star. Upon my return I went through a brief period of soul-searching; I asked myself why I was in Russia and not somewhere, you know, more comfortable. The obvious answer, and the reason I never finished the post, is that my choice to be here has nothing to do with comfort or logic and it shouldn’t. Its true: many places in Russia are dirty; stairwells often smell bad; there are stray dogs in the subway; the traffic is horrendous and particularly noxious (the motor fuel here is less refined than elsewhere); it’s generally very dark and wet outside; the government is autocratic; the food tends to be mediocre; television sucks; strangers can be pushy and humorless. Yeah, so what? None of that is a reason for me not to be here; none of it even factors into the equation. I love this place––it challenges and fascinates me as nowhere else. There’s more to it, but let’s leave it at that for now. The fact is I went to a 50 Cent concert last night and I’d like to talk about it.

I had been planning to keep a low profile for the concert. I was sure this gig would attract the rabble: all the wanna-be gangsters and disaffected young men who connected with Fiddy’s talk of ghettos, drugs, and broken homes. These guys would be big, drunk and pugnacious.

A few of these fellas showed up, but they vastly outnumbered by U-17s and even U-14s. The atmosphere was closer to Chucky-Cheeze’s than South Jamaica, Queens, NY where Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent, grew up. On the floor I watched two unsupervised seven-year-olds chase eachother as carelessly as if they'd been in one of their backyards. Many of the kids had come alone, but an equal number had come with their parents. Excluding the wanksters and the kids, everybody else was just normal––a little bit wealthier than the average Russian (tickets cost $32 and up, which is considerable here) and extremely well behaved. The most violent incident occurred when somebody accidentally spilled a beer on my friend’s scarf.

50 Cent himself was not impressive. He basically spent ninety minutes doing karaoke (a word of Japanese origin, literally ‘empty orchestra’) to his own stuff. I couldn’t understand what he was saying and neither could the Russians (at one point one of his assistants told all the 'fellas' to put their hands up, a word which perhaps 5% of the crowd understood.) From what I could understand, Fiddy isn't a particularly creative lyricist. He certainly isn't a creative performer; he just stands in one place moving his arm up and down then switches places with one of his assistants and does it some more. He can’t dance or sing (he did try a few times). By far the most impressive thing about the concert was the number of times he changed his clothes––I counted three of four. One time he even changed his shoes!

Fiddy's whole show was built around gangster violence, which reminded me of the first thing I heard about him, the first thing anybody hears about him "that guy's been shot nine times!" There were guns on the jumbotrons, in the sound effects, in his lyrics, and in the very hand gestures he used. His concert is all about seeing a REAL gangster up close. In other words, its a freakshow.

PS- The photo is from a fish shop on the Russo-Finnish border. All the Russians swarmed the counter and spent their last kroners on salmon, herring and sturgeon.