Jigga What!
Jigga was in the “D” for the second time this year, and I, once again, was there to witness it!
The sad day that my fish died, my sister called me on the way to work. She had heard on WWJ that Jay-Z, on behalf of Obama, was giving a free concert at Detroit‘s Cobo Hall on Saturday. The concert was to promote voter registration. I am glad that these candidates realize how important of a state Michigan is, as well as how important the city Detroit is in this election. I am impressed that they actually had the concert within the city limits, too. That speaks volumes to me, and it almost makes up for Obama being relatively scarce in this important state, and not saying all that much at times when he was here.
My sister told me that the tickets needed to be picked up starting at 3pm that day at an Obama campaign office. So, it became my duty to see if someone could pick them up for us, since, as is known from this blog, I do not drive…yet.
So, I called my parents to see if they would pick the tickets up for us. That day happened to also be my brother‘s birthday, so my mother was finishing up cooking for him, and my father was finishing up his cake. It was already close to three at that time, and my brother was supposed to arrive at 4pm. My father simply said, “I will see what I can do.”
About an hour later, my mother called me back and said that my father had just left to see if he could get a ticket. Supposedly they were giving out one per person, but my mother was not finished cooking, so she could not go with my dad. I was not too worried, though, because my dad is pretty persuasive. I had a good enough feeling that he would leave with two tickets.
My dad ended up getting two tickets after agreeing to volunteer at the office sometime during the next week. (He is supposed to be doing that today). He mentioned that the people at the office said to him, “These must be for your grandchildren.” lol. And, with that, we were going to a free Jay-Z concert.
Saturday rolls around…
So, we left around 6:20pm on Saturday. The concert was supposed to start at eight, but the doors opened at seven. We decided to have my father drop us off, so that we would not have to worry about parking. That was a good idea because they were charging $10 for parking at the Cobo Hall lots and there was already a lot of traffic because of how late we left. There was already a line inside the building even though it was only 6:40ish. At least they were letting us line up inside because it has been chilly lately.
We stood in that line until around 7:30pm before they let us go inside the concert area. While we were out there, they had us fill out forms with some personal information and checkboxes in hopes that we would volunteer. I figured this must have been what my father filled out at the campaign office. They told us that we would need to have them filled out to enter the concert. They said “free concert–it’s the least that you can do.” So, they collected those forms in boxes before we got to the ticket takers.
The seats were pretty good. There were three different colored tickets, blue, grey, and beige. The blue tickets were for the floor, grey were for the first and second level, and beige were for the top. We had grey tickets, so we ended up sitting in the first level. They were pretty good seats as you can see from the pictures. It was better than being on the ground because those people had to stand the whole time. These seats were even better than the paid concert that I went to earlier in the year, which was another “Too many tickets, only one Urs” experience, by the way.
Of course, they had a bunch of people talk to us before the concert about being registered to vote and getting others to register. But, hey, it was free. Bushman from WJLB and Suga Rae from Hot 102.7 were the MCs. Also, during this time, Detroit‘s own Lashelle Griffin performed the national anthem.
Finally, Jay-Z came on and lit the crowd on fire. Maybe it was just the fact that it was free, but I think this concert was better than the one he did at The Palace earlier in the year with Mary J. Blige. He performed a really balanced mix of the hits and newer tracks at this concert. He performed for a good seventy minutes, which is excellent, especially for a free concert.
Even though I was pretty far away, I was able to get some pictures and video for what it is worth. Enjoy!
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