Thunderstorms, some heavy during the morning hours, then skies turning partly cloudy during the afternoon. High around 85F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected..
Tonight
A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
I’m not quite sure what I expected from Boy George. But I certainly didn’t expect “Sympathy for the Devil.” My expectation – and how that clashed with reality – revealed something important, I think. Stick with me.
Angie and I took in the Culture Club concert at Starlight Theater in Kansas City earlier this week, a gig I was not particularly excited about. Culture Club was big in the mid-1980s, a time when I was more into Def Leppard and Ozzy than I was synth-pop dance numbers by gender-benders.
I was following my gut in those days, but also – I now realize – what was expected of a 16-year-old red-blooded American male in 1983. Boy George? Weirdo!
Angie suffered under no such restrictions, or had better guts than I did. She liked them back then; going to this show was her initiative. She goes with me to those Springsteen gigs; I’ll tag along to Culture Club and suppress the eye-rolls. Warm-up acts included Berlin and Howard Jones, neither of which fired my engines, either.
They were good. But Culture Club was better, and what they got across was more meaningful. Boy George now sports a close-trimmed goatee, and the getup is less flowy-dress and more big hat with neon polka dots.
Still showy, with makeup and feminine mannerisms, but he looks, dare I say, sorta normal. As he put it early in the show, back then he was “the only weirdo around…now they’re everywhere!”
They ran through their crowd-pleasers, including “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya,” “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” and “Karma Chameleon.” Those were better than I remember.
But the shocker was that they were a rock-and-roll band, too. Their show-closer was “Bang a Gong,” and what blew my mind was covering the Rolling Stones’ biggest production number, “Sympathy for the Devil.”
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are about as close as you can get to prototypical masculinity, and so for that particular song to be claimed by Boy George – the polar opposite – made me say: “Wow.” Several times. In a good way. By “Bang a Gong,” I had gotten my head around why it was so shocking: Because, in the mid-1980s, you just couldn’t have imagined the pairing of that artist and those songs. Had Boy tried it back then, it would have seemed forced, as if trying too hard to make a point. “Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name. But what’s confusing you is the nature of my game.”
Now, four decades later, it just seems joyous, celebratory. Good music, played by a good band, having fun.
So what was my standard about, 40 years ago? Why was Def Leppard’s spandex and big hair OK, but not Boy George’s kimonos and makeup? Why was Mick’s eye liner OK, but not Boy’s? I hadn’t thought about it much until this week, but I’m guessing it had entirely to do with my teenage perceptions of sexuality – Ozzy and Lep and the Stones were quite adamantly heterosexual, whereas Boy George was almost certainly gay. That was off-limits, in those days. Prince was about as far as we were able to accept.
Times change. Life beats those prejudices and irrationalities out of you, if you let it. And acceptance and inclusion sure are a lot more fun.
