Jef With One F: The only concert I have been truly disappointed in was going to Motley Crue about three years ago. I honestly can't say I was cheated because a friend scored The Wife With One F and me $70 tickets for free. This was the Toyota Center, and the $70 tickets were still high in the rafters, which meant that those "lucky" ones on the floor probably paid in excess of $500.
And for what? The whole theme of the show was a kind of decadent circus involving strippers with track marks so prominent I could see them in the nosebleed seats, and some little people dressed as clowns wandering around the stage cursing God. Tommy Lee brought the lights up so he could film girls taking their shirts off, which I thought was real classy considering how many people are bringing their children to see the over-the-top '80s glam-metal acts that they enjoyed in their youth.
The music was fine, but the whole experience smacked of cheap Vegas, and we left long before it was over. It was about this time I lost my taste for spectacle, Gaga-excluded of course. Too often it's the refuge of little talent in an effort to blind an audience to that fact. In Motley Crue's case, all it did was say, "We're still relevant! Look! Titties!"
If someone's going to drop half their rent on concert tickets, it would be nice if it was for something that couldn't be seen at Super Happy Fun Land for less than $10.
Shea Serrano: I may have mentioned this before, but that doesn't make it any less true: I was sublimely disappointed with Trey Songz' show last year when he came with Jay-Z. Going in, I was pretty amped to see him. His songs are always so catchy on the radio. It could've been so good. But in person, almost everything he did felt flat and supplemental to his hyper-self-indulgence.
I didn't even pay for those tickets, but I was still like, "Goddamnit, this is a total ripoff." Do you understand how magnificient that is? I was actually upset that I had gotten great seats to a Jay-Z concert for free. The badness of his show transcended logic and reason.