Photos: Lollapalooza 2008

Alien lanes

Live Reviews

Millionaires

Photo credit: Joe Harrington

As hordes of tweens in Day-Glo hoodies and neon-green sunglasses crowded at the foot of the stage at Harpers on a rainy Sunday night, I found it hard to take my eyes off the disconcertingly young girls in the spotlight gyrating nervously in their make-up and skimpy outfits. But then Millionaires hit the stage and wrested my attention away from Olympic gymnastics.

• Betty Boop
• •

Millionaires played the kind of set I wish I’d see more of: high-energy, hit-filled, and mercifully short — seven songs in 20 minutes (including “the new one!”). The three teenage girls and two DJs that make up Millionaires demonstrate a clear debt to Justice’s newish brand of electro-clash, and they dish out enough energetic spunk and raw sexual innuendo to make me feel old and embarrassed to be standing so close to the stage. Did I say “innuendo”? It wasn’t really, since there was nary a veiled allusion — songs like “In My Bed” evince more artless boy-craziness than sly intimations of carnal desire.

I should mention their voices. It seems that in the way that everything ’80s is being re-recycled right now, someone has finally taken Moon Unit Zappa’s (or Dale Bozzio’s) Betty Boop squeak and tripled its power to be both awesomely sassy and highly irritating. The result was a full-frontal assault of sorts — with a lyrical focus on, uh, getting boys, getting paper, and beating (to a pulp) any girls who get in the way of lyrical focuses 1 and 2. The show was as confrontational as any Dwarves gig I’ve seen, maybe more so. It was a marvelous sight, during set closer “Alcohol,” to bear witness to a crowd of girls crushing and crashing the stage to the chorus’s repetitive plea, “Let’s get fucked up!” — but I still felt the need to slink out before any of them asked me to buy the booze for her.

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