Tribute Bands

This past weekend my friends and I made our annual summer trip to the Taste of Reston which is held in Reston, VA which is a suburb of DC in Northern Virginia. At it's core, dozens of restaurants line blocks of closed off streets and sell tasting sized versions of some of their most popular dishes. It was a fantastic time as always with me eating too much food (as usual) and with my ratio of actual food to dessert being way off and tilted towards the latter.

I arrived after work around 8 and we stayed there wandered around for a solid three hours just eating, chatting, walking, and having a great time. As the sun finally set, the mood of the festival slowly started to change to something very different. At first it was even more vibrant - there's a carnival in addition to the food festival and it's mesmerizing to just stare at the bright, whirling rides and hearing the excited screams of little kids who were dared to ride on the roller coaster by their older siblings. Later on, the mood slowly became more mature, almost somber even. By 9:30 the little kids were fewer and farther in between - most brought home by their equally tired parents, and by 10 they were pretty much were non existent.

We ended up finding out way over the main pavilion of the festival where a Journey Tribute Band was performing that night. Even though they were a Journey tribute band, they played a bunch of classic rock hits from the Beatles, Don McLean, and Kansas to name a few. The music itself was good, but what I ended up watching for most of the time were the people crowded around the stage dancing the night away like there was no tomorrow. At first it was funny watching the mostly middle aged crowd rocking out the way they were, but then it got me, Ms. X, and a few of my other friends thinking: that's probably going to be us in 15 or 20 years, crowded around the stage drunk and dancing while teenagers stand around watching and probably giggling. One thing we all agreed on though is that even if nothing else changed, one thing that will definitely be different would be the music the tribute band is playing. So, what will they be playing and who exactly will they be impersonating?

One of my friends pointed out that we could probably gauge what our tribute bands will be based on what was played during our prom in high school. If that's true, I'm slightly worried since we had some crowd favorites like:

 

and this



and of course this...



I promise my high school wasn't actually too trashy....we had a Paris themed prom after all and at least my friends tried to keep it classy.

I was tan as hell but I still fucking rocked that tuxedo.

To be fair, we also did have some music which I'm pretty sure will become some enduring favorites for the pop-minded people in my generation like Train's Hey Soul Sister, Mr. Brightside by The Killers, and some Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift to name a few love it or hate it artists.

After the tribute band wrapped up, we started discussing what we thought our tribute bands would end up being. We realized that since we are pretty much still in the era of pop, the most likely covers we will be seeing will be of Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Coldplay, Ke$ha (is that even possible to cover?), The Killers, early 2000s singers and boy bands like N*Sync, Britney Spears, and The Backstreet Boys, and now the likely one hit wonder that is Carly Rae Jepsen with Call Me Maybe. Of course some other true classics like Journey and MJ will endure so not all is lost. Yes, there are many other good artists of our generation, but a lot of the music isn't really danceable which was our main criteria for main stage tribute band stardom one day. It's an interesting list and only time will tell if this actually pans out but thankfully I still have a while until I reach the point in my life where I don't mind dancing like a fool in front of hundreds of other people.

As the topic of music wore on, we also tried to figure out what kind of music our kids will "rediscover" and find retro and cool like we originally did. I think it will probably be Dubstep and the recent wave of dance/club music from David Guetta, Skrillex, Deadmau5, Avicii, and Calvin Harris. I can already hear my kids going "Dad, that weird bassy music with all those sound effects is sooooo old school and all the rage with the hipsters now". I'm cringing at the thought of it already, both for that sentence itself and for the fact that hipsters as a breed may not have died out by then.

So I figure some of you are probably mentally yelling at me for thinking that we'll be dancing shamelessly to the likes of Katy Perry and Gaga, (trust me, it kind of hurts me too to think about it too) but what do you think will the tribute bands be performing in 15 or 20 years? I'd be happy with The Killers, Fall Out Boy, and some Franz Ferdinand mixed in with some pop and dance/club, but I figure when I'm 35 or pushing 40 (*shiver*) I'd probably like anything from this current era of my life.

Are there any songs you figure you'll never NOT be able to dance like a fool to no matter how old you are? And yes, Call Me Maybe is a perfectly acceptable answer.

All the best,

JP