{"id":35239,"date":"2011-03-15T08:18:20","date_gmt":"2011-03-15T12:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=35239"},"modified":"2011-03-15T08:45:31","modified_gmt":"2011-03-15T12:45:31","slug":"you-think-that-im-strong-youre-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=35239","title":{"rendered":"You Think That I&#8217;m Strong.  You&#8217;re Wrong."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" width=\"640\" height=\"390\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/DCJhHbSRg3U\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In 2003, Robbie Williams gave a series of 3 concerts in Knebworth over the course of a weekend, and over 375,000 people showed up.  I&#8217;ve heard that it was the largest concert in British music history.  You kind of can&#8217;t even believe it when you see the Youtube clips.  They don&#8217;t seem real.  The live-album of this event is good (although seriously edited), and there are moments where Williams looks out at the crowd and says, in his strong accent, &#8220;When I saw you lot tonight &#8230; I&#8217;ve never seen anything like this in my life.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t really written about Williams &#8211; not much &#8211; and I think it&#8217;s easy (too easy) to dismiss him and his success.  I think that&#8217;s a mistake.  I also think he&#8217;s doing something that is relatively unique right now, and also unabashedly entertaining.  We don&#8217;t really have an equivalent, although I would say maybe Justin Timberlake comes close.  Williams is not a stooge front-man, he&#8217;s not just a &#8220;voice&#8221; &#8211; he is the personality and the force behind the entire thing.  He also writes &#8220;hits&#8221;.  Hits after hits (whether or not they become radio hits is irrelevant).  Whether or not pop music is your taste, and I don&#8217;t care if it is or not, there is something that happens with MOST of his songs that is actually rather special, something that mainlines right into an audience&#8217;s listening: The songs also REQUIRE that you sing along.  Again: he&#8217;s openly entertaining.  He has a song called &#8220;Let Me Entertain You.&#8221;  He&#8217;s a regular guy, a football fan, a beer-drinker, a wild bad boy, had a drug addiction, kicked it, likes to mess around and goof off &#8230; but that&#8217;s part of the powerful identification that his audiences have with him.  He&#8217;s the guy who is gorgeous in a rough way, gets way too drunk and loud, moons people for fun, and makes mistake after mistake with girls he likes.  He&#8217;s a bit of a goofoff.  His persona, with the tats and the haircut, is inherently macho &#8211; and yet there&#8217;s something feminine in how he invests in these songs, and how he struts around on the stage fearlessly.  Watch his body language.  He&#8217;s not a Freddie Mercury, but there is something similar that he is tapping into.  You watch some of Mercury&#8217;s body language during live performances and you think: &#8220;God, that is so &#8230;. OUT there, so BIG.&#8221;  None of this huddling by the microphone, lost in your moody memories stuff, that so many male performers nowadays embody.  They don&#8217;t want to put themselves OUT there because it seems too feminine, or like you might not be taken seriously.  Robbie Williams is beyond those concerns.  I am sure he cares about being taken seriously &#8211; but that doesn&#8217;t translate into <i>how he performs<\/i>, and that makes all the difference.<\/p>\n<p>The song above is my favorite Robbie Williams song, and judging from the massive heaving crowd, I am not alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2003, Robbie Williams gave a series of 3 concerts in Knebworth over the course of a weekend, and over 375,000 people showed up. I&#8217;ve heard that it was the largest concert in British music history. You kind of can&#8217;t &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=35239\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35239"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35243,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35239\/revisions\/35243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}