Live: LMFAO has fun with debauchery
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LMFAO’s Redfoo and Sky Blu stay in character and play debauchery for laughs and fun at Staples Center as part of Sorry for Party Rocking Tour.
The members of LMFAO are nobody’s idea of responsible citizens.
In the L.A. club-rap duo’s first big hit, known on the radio as “I’m in Miami Trick,” Redfoo and Sky Blu lay out a lifestyle of cut-and-dried hedonism: “Drink all day, play all night,” they croak over a slithering synth-bass groove, “Let’s get it poppin’.” It’s a devotion to the pleasure principle that only deepened with last summer’s “Sorry for Party Rocking” album, whose No. 1 singles — “Party Rock Anthem” and “Sexy and I Know It” — established LMFAO as A-list libertines.
Earlier this year, when Madonna required a spritz of next-generation intemperance for her Super Bowl performance, she knew whom to call.
Photos: LMFAO in concert at Staples Center
Redfoo and Sky Blu — the son and grandson, respectively, of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy — lived up to those low-down reputations Tuesday night at Staples Center, where LMFAO brought its Sorry for Party Rocking Tour to a full house peppered with fans borrowing Redfoo’s garish retro-’80s look. (Think neon, leopard print and glasses that may not have contained lenses.)
Minutes into the concert, Redfoo said that the ratio of women to men in the audience looked to be about 8 to 4 — perfect, he decided, for an act that rhymes with “ratio.” Later, the song “Shots” climaxed with the frenzied raiding of an onstage bar by the duo and its dance crew.
For all its cartoon sleaze, though, LMFAO flashed an earnest, almost scrupulous side Tuesday that complicated what might’ve been perceived as brain-killingly simple.
In matters of undress, for instance, Redfoo and Sky Blu proved refreshingly equitable, matching a demand to see a woman’s thong with their own appearance in skin-tight bicycle shorts; during “Sexy and I Know It” they stripped down further to the skimpy, Speedo-style swimsuits Redfoo claims to favor in the song’s lyric.
This exhibitionism was played for laughs, of course, but it also spoke to a sex-positive streak that distinguishes LMFAO from some of its more cynical clubland associates. “I am not a whore,” boomed a disembodied voice in a track from 2009’s “Party Rock,” to which Redfoo added, “But I like to do it.” His merry shamelessness felt like a
welcome disavowal of pop’s often-gloomy guilt com-
plex.
LMFAO exercised some civic-minded thoughts too on the value of recycling in an age of disposability run amok: After chugging a drink through a beer bong during David Guetta’s “Gettin’ Over You” (to which the duo contributed vocals), one dancer handily turned the implement into a jump rope. Redfoo was no less efficient in “Champagne Showers” when he gulped the remaining contents of a bottle he’d just used to drench fans in the front row.
Familiar hooks from other songs found new use in LMFAO’s hands, as well, including those from Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” and “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas.
The latter’s success in 2009 with hammering dance tunes like “I Gotta Feeling” laid the groundwork to some extent for the ascent of Redfoo and Sky Blu, who in previous eras would likely have had trouble proceeding beyond the remix gigs with which they made their name.
And just as the Black Eyed Peas have revealed the pop group formerly disguised as a hip-hop crew, the would-be creeps of LMFAO presented themselves at Staples Center as what they truly are: sheep in wolves’ clothing. ALSO:
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-- Mikael Wood
