The Marvels of Mawazine

I’ve discovered that I tend to overuse alliterations, but they sound nice, so who cares?

The Mawazine music festival has begun here in Rabat. It’s a weeklong buffet of music from around the world, including local artists. It was while stuffing my face at a student’s house on Friday that I discovered that Mika would be the main act on Saturday night. I freaked. He’s one of my favorite artists. I’d committed to a two-day trip to nearby Meknes with some friends and when it was apparent that no one had even a remote interest to shorten their trip to join me at the concert, I decided to fly solo.

I’d never been to a concert by myself before and was quite thrilled by the opportunity. I was also a little nervous about finding the place as my body language vocabulary hasn’t evolved enough to include proper nouns like Mika. I knew it would be different from the last time I saw him when I waited with my family in SLC’s freezing February weather for a couple hours to be handsomely rewarded with a killer, intimate performance as Mika was just beginning his career and had not gained significant popularity.

It was different. I feel like using a long list of expletives to explain how cool it was, but my mom reads this blog, so I don’t want to embarrass her. First of all, it was FREE! Well, technically (thanks Joe Baker) it wasn’t if we remember TANSTAAFL…there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. The price attached to the actual concert was $0.00. I paid a total of about $5.25 in transportation costs. The biggest opportunity cost was sitting through a crappy band from Trinidad and Tobago whose songs all sounded identical. It was worth it though, as I got there early enough to reserve the closest possible position.

Second, there were probably 36.8 times more people in attendance as the outdoor venue allowed for much more space. Third, I was the only white person I saw the whole night. Consequently, I was usually the only one singing my lungs out except during the choruses where most everyone joined in the fun. Despite not knowing the words, however, the folks in attendance were there to party! It was definitely a fun atmosphere and I got loads of smiles from people around me as I was singing every word of every song. I barely even felt like I was there alone. I actually ended up meeting a Moroccan guy who’d been to SLC doing a project on volunteerism with the U.S. Embassy. Needless to say, we connected on many levels.

Whereas Mika’s concert in SLC felt like a low-tech coffee shop gig, I felt like I was in the middle of a top-dollar, two-hour music video for this performance. He had multiple costume changes, ENORMOUS, inflatable ‘fat-girl’ legs for his, “Big Girl” song, a Moroccan wedding procession for, “Everybody’s Gonna Love Today,” an opera-singing accompanist for, “Blame It On the Girls,” a huge “BILLY” banner for, “Billy Brown,” an incredible garbage can drum line to open, “Lollipop,” and loads of other entertaining stage antics. Not to mention the radical, technicolor background visuals.

I went home exhausted, voiceless and still in shock that I only paid five bucks to see this. Livin’ the dream!