A few weeks ago, I saw Ivri Lider in concert at a private party held in a club. Through admittedly limited exposure to his music, he had never made much of an impression on me. What's more, he comes off as a stuck-in-the-mud blowhard as a judge on X-Factor, with a Simon Cowell-like limited worldview of what can and will sell in the modern world. It turns out that private party Ivri Lider is nothing like the introspective singer-songwriter Ivri Lider whose songs I'd been hearing up until now. He transformed all of his songs (even the sensitive ballads like "Zachiti Leehov") into party-starting rave-ups. Everything got the pseudo-trance remix treatment with Lider as the vocalist/party host, frequently heading into the audience to dance with fans and happily pose for photos and selfies. It was something I never thought he could pull off, quite frankly. Even amongst an audience of people from his age bracket (myself included), this type of show could have flopped miserably -- nothing is less cool than a forty-something artist trying to reinvent themselves for a younger audience. Obviously this was no experiment on Lider's part, for he's clearly polished and perfected his private concert persona, but I personally needed to see it to believe it. I also could have never believed I'd have so much fun watching it.
All in all, it was either the best or second best DAT/playback concert I've ever seen. Oh yes, Lider appeared with a guitarist and a DJ/percussionist, and the entire concert save for Lider's vocals, and possibly some sparse bits of guitar and percussion were pre-taped and mimed. For me, only Moby's set from the See The Lights tour in 1993 comes close. I don't have a recording of that gig, but here are snippets from New York and Sydney from the same year. In the New York show, you can see that most of the audience stands around looking puzzled, treating the entire spectacle as a piece of performance art, while the first few rows lose their minds. When I saw Moby, I was one of those people losing their minds, possibly oblivious to the apathy taking place behind me. I recall a wild party atmosphere in the entire club, but I was smashed up against the front of the stage, so who knows what I wasn't able to see?
Those Moby shows don't hold up at all (there are plenty of alternate clips on youtube). The vocals are terrible, and rave was already out in a big way by 1993. Moby had been grandfathered in because he had been so instrumental to the scene, but he was swiftly being ushered out. The speed of his fall was discussed in detail in his autobiography, "Porcelain". I think that's the lesson of the DAT shows, and the reason why more people don't do them even today -- they're best enjoyed in the moment, with no apologies, and no aspirations for creating a piece of art that will last beyond the moment that the last person files out of the club. The only thing that's changed in the past quarter century is that now we have the selfies to prove we were there.
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