What a great concert!
And to think I almost missed it. I knew some time ago that Chris Brown was coming to Manila, but I didn't really know a lot of his songs and so if it was just him, I would've skipped it. But then I saw the posters that indicated that he was having a concert with Rihanna. Rihann! So naturally I had to see it. :)
I've been to a couple of concerts in the past but nothing as major as this one. And this lack of inexperience on my part led me to believe that arriving at the Fort at 6pm (concert starts at 8pm) was a good idea. As I later learned, this idea wasn't the smartest. The traffic heading into the Fort was horrible! It was like rush hour on a Monday morning. Vehicles were moving quite slowly and all the roads were full. I ended up parking quite far away from the concert venue because with the traffic, I figured all the good parking spots were taken.
I lost about 30 minutes going through traffic and looking for parking and by that time my friends were about to head into the concert venue. So I decided I would go meet up with them. This meant I wasn't able to have any dinner or even drinks. So at 7pm we were standing at the spot where we would be for the rest of the concert.
The show started promptly at 8pm (thank God!) and Chris Brown was the first to perform. He did a lot of dancing, even doing a Michael Jackson medley where he danced to Jacko hits like "Rock with you", "Billie Jean" and "Thriller". Of course, he performed several of his own major hits like "Kiss Kiss" and "With you", and also sang "No air", asking the audience to sing along with him since Jordin Sparks wasn't there. He closed his part of the concert, appropriately, with his most recent hit "Forever".
The next 45 minutes were probably the most tiring because the stage hands and production management worked on rearranging the stage to get ready for Rihanna's performance. At that point, we had been standing for 2 hours already, and with no fluid or food intake, I had been running on adrenaline. With no music to dance to for 45 minutes, I started running out of battery.
Of course, the moment Rihanna came out, I had another surge of adrenaline that kept me dancing for the next hour. She opened her set with "Disturbia" that got everyone singing "Bum bum be-dum bum bum be-dum bum" along with her. The fact that she was wearing a very, er, interesting outfit made her even more engaging to watch on stage. ;)
She went through a slew of her hits such as "Please don't stop the music" and "Shut up and drive". When she sang "Unfaithful", practically the entire audience was singing every word along with her, which must've been great for Rihanna but kinda sucked for me coz I really wanted to hear her voice - which I think is great - and not the voices of the dozens of people around me whose concert I did not pay to watch LOL. It worked for "Hate that I love you" though, because Ne-yo wasn't there so the audience sang his part.
She left the stage and the crowd started shouting "More" and "We want more". Not with a lot of energy though and who can blame them - it was hot and everyone was hungry and thirsty. But Rihanna came out again and sang "Take a Bow" before closing the show with her biggest hit to date, "Umbrella". And midway through the song she calls Chris Brown to join her and they do the "Cinderella" version of that song. It was great! The crowd definitely went wild.
I won't go into the horrid details of leaving the concert venue anymore, but in a nutshell, I ended up walking for about 45 minutes trying to find a place to eat, which ended up being mini-stop because every restaurant was so full! I manage to leave the Fort at 1am and even at this time, 2 hours after the concert ended, the traffic was still bad.
But at the end of the day, to me, it was still all worth it. A great show with two very popular and current artists sharing the stage. Awesome!
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