So
that's why Nancy Reagan hated drugs so much. With the hair gel, and the glitter, and the smiles, and the neon, and the gender-bending, and the fingers constantly touching sides of noses, and the shifting eyes - the '80s must have been a wild time, man. Fischerspooner: Welcome to 1983, New York City, or at least the 1983 New York City that I've read about.
It was everything you'd expect Saturday night at House of Blues - guys wearing tank tops and runner's shorts, girls wearing pants with zippers for sleeves, old men and old women acting like children while their children drank illegal drinks spiked with glitter. Fischerspooner turns music into strobe lights shot from fingers through eyeballs reflected off mirrors shaped like spandex on the legs of an art-school giant with skin that resembles white powder that, when snorted, becomes a tattoo made of sex.
The thing you should know about any Fischerspooner concert is that the songs, they do not matter. At all. The show goes from song 1 to song 2 to song 3 all the way to the end without mention of titles, records, lyrics, context, import, anything at all.
Because Fischerspooner doesn't make music, really; they make sculptures. Colorful ones. With heartbeats and dance shoes and boys wearing girls' clothes, girls wearing almost nothing.
You know that old thing about art bands - I hesitate to use that moniker because, for the most part, it's idiotic - how they come from hoity-toity art programs and then get bored with what the stuffy professor professes about theories of art and the strictures of artistic technique, blah blah stupid stupid... Well, it's true about Fischerspooner.
Both Warner Fischer and Casey Spooner were students at the Art Institute of Chicago where they studied performance art, met up, said, "Hey, let's make music," peaced the fuck out and here we are - Saturday night, Houston. The duo turned House of Blues into a dance party reminiscent of South Beach with more expensive drinks and a shit load more plasma screens, where even apathy shakes his ass.
Basically, here's how the show can be described: Song, costume change, song, strobe light. Costume change, song, strobe light, girl has seizure (there were warning signs on the door - sorry, no suing), song, costume change. "Emerge" (the song that everyone in the crowd knew every word to, you know - the bit that goes, "Looks Good, Feels Good, Sounds Good too" - it rules).
Halfway point. Costume change, song, song, strobe light, alcohol, dude in bathroom snorting coke off toilet, song, song, strobe light, costume change (with tu-tus). Song, band leaves. Clap-clap, tap-tap, encore.
I could include titles, but titles don't matter. Fischerspooner are stage performers, men with blood made of fantasy and brains made of oozing kaleidoscope gel. Kraftwerk or Devo or what comes between New Wave and What the Fuck? To see Fischerspooner is to experience the possibility of music not mattering, only acting as the goo inside the ears being swallowed by the eyes unblinking because to blink is to miss the cartoon.
But really, if you go to a Fischerspooner show anytime soon, take drugs. Tons and tons of drugs.