On the evening of Saturday, Sept. 10, the streets of downtown Seattle teemed with young women dressed in fishnets, ripped t-shirts and sparkling heels. The crowd was all headed in one direction: to the “Get $leazy Tour” in Washington for one night only at the WaMu Theater.
The tour, headlined by the chart-topping, glitter-soused Ke$ha, also featured the well-known “party-rock” group LMFAO and a relatively unheard of hip-hop duo called Spank Rock.
The commonality between the three acts was a proud disregard of societal convention in favor of all things sexual, illicit and outrageous.
Opening act Spank Rock, hailing from Baltimore, featured a DJ and a rapper. The rapper, Naeem Juwan, while unknown to the vast majority of the crowd, managed to work the mosh pit into a considerable fervor with hilariously obscene lyrics and a similar electronic backing track style to the highly anticipated following act, LMFAO.
By the end of Spank Rock’s act, members of the crowd were heard wondering aloud about how to obtain their album; upon making an appearance outside of the venue after the concert, Juwan was swamped by new fans.
The next group, LMFAO, was met with near hysteria from the crowd. After beginning with their album opener “Rock the Beat II,” the group performed a series of top-40 hits that they have garnered from their past two albums, Party Rock Anthem and the ironically titled Sorry For Party Rocking. The hit numbers included “Shots,” “I’m In Miami B*tch” and “Party Rock Anthem,” and were all met with roars and flailing limbs of the wildly enthusiastic variety.
The performance featured an excess of leopard print, beer funnels, speedos, neon, inflatable zebras and bouncing afros, all backed by an extremely adept troupe of Asian dancers.
The act featured only one female dancer, and the members of LMFAO objectified the male body as equally if not more so than that of the female dancer.
One memorable moment saw the entire male ensemble sporting speedos, rapidly gyrating their hips to the lyric “wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle, yeah” during the song “Sexy And I Know It.”
By the time that the headlining act finally arrived on stage in her diamond encrusted bodysuit, the crowd was impossibly riled up.
Sporting bright blue makeup and gobs of glitter splashed across her arms and face, the pop star sang about sex, alcohol and in the occasional softer moment, love-but those sentimental moments were few and far between, and the performance more often leaned in the direction of glitter cannons, animalistic dance moves and dinosaur-shaped balloons.
In one highly memorable moment, Ke$ha called a man in the crowd up on stage, duct taped him to a chair and straddled his neck with her thighs while she sang a song instructing him to “grow a pair,” whilst a man in a massive penis costume jumped around in the back.
The act was most notable for this delightfully absurd raunchiness—Ke$ha’s vocals, while mostly fair, were often overshadowed by background singers in favor of a focus on her dancing, smirking, glitter-throwing, beer-drinking and overall partying hard.
While Ke$ha interacted notably less with the crowd than the prior two acts and featured much more choreography as opposed to getting up close with the audience, the show was undeniably well done.
Whilst Ke$ha may claim to be an irresponsible, whiskey-swigging, man-eating maniac, she clearly manages to maintain at least enough responsibility to put on a damn good show.
