tranny siberian orchestra
January 15th, 2025
So I went to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra with my parents over the Winter Break, and it was not what I was expecting. To be fair, I never looked into it because it looked like something straight people would go to. In the paraphrased words of Hank Hill: you’re not making Christmas music better, you’re making Rock n’ Roll worse. Still, I wasn’t expecting the truly godawful story that seemed to be written by an AI, or the atrocious AI visuals¹ (I refuse to call it art) that they projected onto the set. No clue if TSO was always this bad, but I can’t imagine the adoption of AI into their “creative” process helped any. Outside of the story, the music itself was OK, nothing special but it was tolerable enough. Just, the story though. They really could’ve done without the story.
So the story starts with a young girl wandering a hotel: ok, simple enough. There’s musical numbers followed by narration as she wanders before finding a blues bar? In the hotel? It feels a little random, but ok. Now we’re suddenly following a businessman with no segway whatsoever, and wait why is the Grinch on the TV? Up to this point the story has been pretty grounded, these are just normal people not Whos. The musical number after it wasn’t even about the Grinch, and he was never brought up again. Now we follow the businessman out of the bar and down the street as the little girl tails him because she sees that he’s sad? Ok, musical number about her getting distracted by toys, and now we’re being told the businessman once had a happy family before his wife died in labor and his son was said by the doctors to have gone without oxygen for too long and it would be a miracle if he could ever walk so the father gives him to the state and resigns himself to a life of misery - wait, what? What the fuck? It was complete whiplash being hit with that out of nowhere in this meandering little bit of AI output, I remember looking at my mom and her looking back like o_o Long story short, the boy grew up to become a normal guy apparently, now a nurse working with babies, and the girl is his wife’s ghost? Telling him to seek out his son? And it ends with him sitting next to his abandoned kid soothing babies like I don’t think they let hospital guests just walk in and grab infants but whatever I guess. At this point its a minor detail. As for the narration, I don’t think I could do it justice in text - it was just incredibly irritating to listen to, it had pauses in all the wrong places as if noone read the script aloud before the performance, and it was done in a booming grandiose voice that just did not mesh with the content. Transitioning (heh) from the story to just music again was a relief, as at least I could gel with that more than . . . whatever was going on with the story segment.
The 2nd half of the show (rough guesstimate on whether that was half) was fairly uneventful, there was an aside to thank the military which I should’ve expected, still bleh though, and alot of jerking-off of the band members and producers.
