So, I went to the Black Eyed Peas concert in Central Park yesterday evening. I felt too old for it as soon as I accepted the offer, however I was also excited. I'd never been to a concert in Central Park, in eleven years of living here, and my girlfriend and I had been looking for something new to do. AND the tickets were not only FREE, they were FREE VIP tickets!
VIP...mmmm....I admit I am a VIP whore. Over the years, I have come to realize (and slowly admit) that my basic problem with mass culture is not the lowest-common-denominator general tawdriness of the content. It is, rather, the idea of having to consume mass culture among the masses. I don't want to be reminded how common and banal my taste is. VIP tickets? Well, that lets me shamelessly indulge while doing so far away from the lumpen throngs of fellow concert-goers.
Let me just get out of the way that the show was good. Good energy, good lighting, good singing & rapping, some good improvisation. I'd say where I thought they excelled, but I don't know any of their songs. Or, rather, I didn't know that some of those songs they play ad nauseam at my gym were sung by them. Anyway, the group was great and the crowd of 60,000 seemed to be lapping it up.
The surreality of the night was not during the show.. It was in the way things were named or called. In the continuing encroachment of Orwellian doublespeak into our public discourse, except, as another George (Carlin) pointed out, not dressed in jackboots and wielding a truncheon, but rather wearing baseball caps and sporting the latest Nike kicks, this evening was Exhibit "A". .
First, the VIP tickets. Much to my disappointment these VIP tickets got us very little: no drinks, no couches, no special backstage visits to swill booze and scarf down tacos with Fergie. And, as I came to find out during the introduction, all the tickets, VIP or otherwise, were FREE! That kinda knocked the "I" out of my VIP. How can you make VIP tickets for a show where all the seats are free? Is that even possible? I started looking around and realized that maybe I was surrounded by 60,000 VIPs. And that made me feel like a Very Average Person.
The VIP confusion was cleared up quickly, however, when the pre-show started. The first 30 minutes of the concert was a rapid-fire roster of random celebrity appearances: a local disc jockey, or whatever you call the people who speak between Clear Channel automated playlists nowadays, Dr. Oz, Kristen Chenowith, some actor from The Hurt Locker who was visibly drunk (aha! NOW we know who the VIPs are!) Then a weird appearance by Calvin Klein, who was introduced as a graduate of NYC public schools and FIT. He didn't actually appear, though. Instead, they played a video advertising his flagship store, in which the only human being who appeared was a 20-something waif. Apparently Calvin Klein was so goddamned Very Important, he couldn't even be filmed for this event.
As we learned from these celebrities, this free concert was being sponsored by the Robin Hood Foundation, a charity that raises money for the poor by soliciting money from big corporations like Chase, Calvin Klein, etc. They told us how we could text a certain number and donate money to help them, too. A very noble goal. I texted my ten bucks. But the name? Robin Hood Foundation? I thought Robin Hood was this outlaw joker who robbed the rich and gave to the poor, all the while battling the evil King John. Apparently now, he's a guy that begs for money from the rich to throw parties where he can then guilt trip the average into giving him more money, so that he can help the poor and talk about how wonderful and generous the rich are. This is Robin Hood as a really nice Sheriff of Nottingham who throws good parties, except he gets you there through deceptive marketing practices.
At about 7:25pm, the light stuff is over. We are now getting into the important part of the show. The disc-jockey introduces the man of the hour, the real VIP: the Vice President of Marketing of Chase Bank. He gives us the standard talking points: over 50% of kids born in NYC are born into poverty (!), a $10 contribution can feed a family of four for x amount of days, etc. Then he talks about all the wonderful things Chase does for New York. And how many people Chase employs. And how lucky we were that not all 220,000 of them decided to show up at the concert tonight, because then there would have been no space for us. Wow. I get to be here only because some Chase bank teller had something better to do tonight. Now I feel Very Important.
He runs a video featuring exclusively African-American children at that cute stage between the loss of baby teeth and gaining of adult teeth. They show quick photos of some beat-up storefronts in the Bronx that house not-for-profits Chase supports. The video boasts that Chase has donated one million dollars to charities in New York! (over what period of time--a year, a decade, a lifetime--is not clear.) So, let's see. 1.8 million people live in poverty in NYC. A million bucks comes to about 55 cents per person.
But hey, a million is a lot of money, especially to average VIPs like you and me. How much is it to Chase? Well, how much did Chase net last year? $17.4 BILLION. (and that's not net revenue, that's net income.) That's 0.57 percent of their net income, much of which comes from fees: debit card fees, ATM fees, checking fees, overdraft fees, seeing-a-live-teller-in-person fees. They take our money, give a tiny bit to Robin Hood so he can throw a big party where they both proceed to ask for more of our money. And they call this program, with no apparent sense of irony, "Chase Community Giving."
This is the world we live in now: everything means its former opposite. It's a world where all the VIPs are average, Robin Hood is an obsequious corporate shill in bed with the King, and one of the entities responsible for the rapid demise of the middle class in this country shames us into donating money to a poverty crisis they help to perpetuate. And that little tiny fraction of money they give to the local community credit center that you have to see because you're up to your ass in Chase-related debt and overdraft fees?...That's called "Community Giving."
It was a good concert, though.
