The last few days have been fun and sleepless. On Friday evening, we (Lise, her boyfriend Olivier, and one of his friends from Sciences Po, their university in Lille) trekked to Aulnoye-Aymeries, a small town in The Middle of Nowhere, Northern France, where the first night of the music festival, Les Nuits Secrètes, was taking place. I was pleasantly surprised. I love listening to music, of course, but I’m usually more of a “iPod+headphones type” rather than a concert-goer, because I have an unfortunately short attention span for live music. However, I really enjoyed the four main acts we saw over the weekend, probably because it was such a wide variety of genres. Friday night began with Puppetmastaz, probably the most entertaining concert I’ve ever seen. Imagine a puppet show mixed with a rap concert, with gangster Muppets, including Kermit, Yoda, Elvis’ head, and Snuggles the bunny, among others, singing about taking over the world from the humans. And it was even weirder in real life than it sounds from that description. Seriously.
the ridiculous rapping Muppets of Puppetmastaz
The next show on Friday was Mr. Oizo, a 35-year-old DJ, apparently well-known in the techno world, who played an endless pulse of beats while chain-smoking and sipping on Moet et Chandon, with a completely straight face. The one time he pulled out his phone and took a picture of the crowd was practically the only indication that he realized that he wasn’t balancing his checkbook, or reading the TV guide, but in fact playing music for a crowd of thousands of moshing fans. While I wasn’t worried about my hair catching on fire from the many techno-loving French smokers who were waving their hands in the air, I had lots of fun.
On Saturday, between the two nights of the festival, I went to the free zoo in Lille. The weather was perfect, and the animals were very active. The small zoo was fairly similar to any zoo in the States, but I got to learn some new French animal vocab words, and also see a Slow Loris (a painfully cute nocturnal mammal–look it up) in person. Saturday night: back to Les Nuits Secrètes. The first group we saw, Au Revoir Simone, was a trio of girls from Brooklyn, who played some cute, easy-to-listen-to music, and made me feel better about speaking in French when I heard their attempts to address the crowd. After that, we saw the General Elektriks, a funky, jazzy group with some wild hairstyles and a lead singer who looked like he should be in the Rolling Stones, but acted like a twelve-year-old on a trampoline.
Memo: photos are finally up from Brussels, Lille, and the music festival so check them out.