Naimul

I know event blogs are never as fun as issues and ideas blogs, but really, these event blogs deal with some important issues.

Like that of religious intolerance.

Last night "Intense," the flight of the conchords tribute band, was slated to play at a venue with an audience in desperate need of our comedy stealings. I somehow managed to set us up in the most hostile environment imaginable. Amongst Evangelical Christians.

Well, they weren't all evangelicals, some of them were just Christian members of the student ministry on campus, but the supposed open mic night at the Union Caberet was populated entirely by these bible thumpers. Before the show a rapid staccato email exchange read something like,

"Come at 7 and sign up, keep it clean."

"Um...we sing a song called business time, its like marvin gaye but nerdier, is that okay?"

"Yeah you're cool, just keep it respectful."

"What?"

And so forth. When we got there, we weren't sure what was okay and what wasn't. We decided to let the first few acts tell us what it was all about.

So the first song was a young man with little creativity singing about how, as christians, we are surrounded by the world. And that world is full of SIN and TEMPTATION. And this young boy is going to wait for his girlfriend. After his rousing first song we were treated to another chronicling his debates about dying/killing himself to get to Jesus faster vs. just sticking it out on earth because god put him there to make music. Holy shit I almost picked up my guitar and fled.

But a brief pow wow with Adam and we decided to play Albi the racist dragon to tie in the issue of race and play it off as planned. Then we would play Humans are Dead to wow them and tell them about how all their crazy self flagellation will pay off soon because the robots are coming. We still had to sensor somethings.

Despite the cold reaction from a few tables in this large room of people (this one guy kept glaring at me for being a heathen), a lot of people liked this stuff. You judge for yourself. I think it is one of the better live renditions we've run. On to new songs.