Akon in HK!

土曜日晩は空港隣のエクスポセンターで エイコンのコンサートへ行った。彼の音楽あまり知りませんけど、僕達の会社はスポンサーから、行った。始また時あまり面白くなかったけど、後半時楽しかったになった！写真とビデオを見てください．Too be honest, I wasn't super psyched about this event in advance... I'm not a BIG hip-hop guy... actually I like hip-hop,  but I don't like a lot of what passes for Hip-hop nowadays (Crunk, Souljah Boy, etc). 

But since we were media sponsors for the Akon concert here in HK, I had the chance to go...  Actually after I checked youtube, I realized I actually knew quite a few of Akon's songs... so why not?

The concert was held at Asiaworld Expo (big convention center near the HK airport)... most of the big Western acts play here... and of course Hamasaki's concert will be held here in September. Seated it can fit about 12k seats, including the upper decks... so standing-only should be something similar -- ~8-12k I'm guessing. But I wasn't so sure if someone like Akon has enough fame to fill up a show like this here in HK...  

Well he got a pretty good turn out considering... about 3-4k people I'm guessing.  I'm not sure if thats enough to pay for a place this big, but it wasn't empty by any means.  The problem was, as with most of these types of 'standing only' shows - they put fences up to keep the different class tickets apart..... inherently they always apportion too much space to the expensive sections, which means you have some people forced to be further away then they need to be.  

At the start of the show Akon was just on the spartan stage w/ his band and his weird DJ/MC guy (i'll call him 'Skinny Mr. T with the tall Mohawk').   

The sound system had some problems and half the sound system blew out about half-way through.  doh.

But Akon has some definite skills working the crowd.  Sensing that people were not really enjoying the show (i was a bit bored after the first two songs or so), he climbed up onto the barracades and did almost the entire rest of the show from the midst of the crowd (with two or three bouncers making sure he didn't fall off and kill himself).

Akon is from Senegal... as he mentioned about 10 times during the course of the show. :-P

He later popped up in the middle of the crowd:

After a minute or two working the crowd from the fence he actually told the poor people stuck way in the back ' hey, why don't you guys come up here?  open those gates and let them come up here.'  and whether or not the security guards wanted them to, people did just that... -- I was a bit worried this would turn into a stampede, but it worked out ok... the energy level was definitely raised (and even though we were in the front 'VIP' section, I was happy to move towards the center and get a better view).

Here's a bit of  video I took:

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUmUBuIuryQ

Pretty fun at this point! 楽しそうね！

There was something weird at the end though. After the last song the DJ started playing some songs and i thought 'ok, they're going to do an encore, right?'  but alas the music just cut off suddenly and the lights came up... I guess no encore. doh. :-P

Maybe they realized what a mess was on the floor and decided they needed to end the concert early to get started on their sweeping. ;-)

After Party -  After the party is the after party! we relocated to the Central Ferry Pier where they had an after party...   We got in no problem because we were relatively early, but a bit later it was impossible to get in, despite the fact that it wasn't that crowded inside... the people manning the door were completely unorganized and too many pushy people saying 'I'm on the list!  I'm a friend of _____'...  needless to say I regretted going outside to find a friend and wasting 20 minutes trying to get back in.  :-P

Skinny Mr. T with the tall Mohawk' was there too.  

On the way out we stopped to pose w/ the logo. gotta represent! ;-)

Mai is so stylish (...and hot). Stephen... neither stylish nor hot....