Miguel Declares War On Misogyny

Somewhere in the middle of his set on Friday night at College Street Music Hall, during a very Prince-like moment where his four person band joined in on a mid-tempo vamp while being introduced, singer Miguel engaged in the standard banter to the crowd — ​“How’s everybody doing tonight?” and ​“is everyone having a good time?”

Then, without warning, the singer said, with no room for misinterpretation: ​“Fellas, if she didn’t come here with you, keep your hands off her.” And then reiterated: ​“If you don’t have her express permission, do not touch her. We don’t do that at the Miguel show.”

Miguel’s songs, which talk — often explicitly and sometimes candidly — about sex, marijuana, and partying when they aren’t dealing out introspection or small helpings of almost New-Agey wisdom — are party songs with a transcendent edge. The crowd was generous in their response to these, a sign that probably most everyone in the College Street venue was on the same wavelength.

In his statement about permission, It’s unclear if the singer was reacting to behavior he saw from the stage, or was just making a general reminder about the importance of consent in sexual interactions. It was clearly not meant to put a damper on anyone’s mood. It was merely a part of ensuring that everyone in attendance was having an equally good time — and the crowd response to this was equally positive.

Since breaking through with his 2012 album Kaleidoscope Dream, Miguel has occupied a hybrid space on the charts. Most of his success is in the context of R&B, but his songs and studio productions have also drawn from guitar-driven psychedelia and post-rock. It doesn’t hurt that the artist is a genuine sex symbol, evidenced by the many screams when he lifted his shirt to reveal his abs, or during one calculated moment when he began gyrating wildly from his knees.

But Miguel boasts a powerful voice on record and on stage, forgoing Autotune and letting some vocal ad-libs between lines keep the momentum going in a set of mostly mid-tempo music. It was notable that for heavily produced music, a great deal of it was played by the onstage band — consisting of guitar, bass/synth-bass, keyboards and drums — with only a few backing vocals and intros piped in over the PA. This created a stage chemistry that anchored the performance underneath the dynamic lighting and frenetic bursts of movement propelling the singer across the stage.

The opening acts accompanying Miguel on this tour supporting his latest album, War & Leisure, did a fine job of connecting to the crowd. Nonchalant Savant, boxed in by a laptop, MIDI controller, and a pair of congas, offered a set of smoky late night jams from his own catalogue. With interludes of live percussion on top of his canned productions and a charismatic stage presence — even confined to a small portion of the stage — Savant set the mood well, even as a great many attendees were still in line to get into the venue outside. He got an easy pop with a cover of the iconic 1993 reggae song ​“Murder She Wrote,” but fans seemed to be genuinely connecting to his original music as well.

Savant was followed by SiR, a California-based producer crossing over as a performing artist. Accompanied by a keyboardist and a DJ, the music pushed a more classic neo-soul vibe, with jazz-inflected harmonies and the singer’s raspy falsetto calling D’Angelo to mind. SiR had equal command as an MC and singing in a full-voiced tenor, and his genuine eagerness to be performing in front of a full house was quite evident.

But it was Miguel’s show, and the crowd’s excitement for his first stage appearance was so high that even the band’s pre-set line check elicited a huge cheer. The set officially began with a short film, a combination of music video and press conference combining interview footage, clips of the singer’s ethereal song ​“Now,” and infographics about the Adelanto Immigrant Detention Center, a facility in California gaining notoriety for its prison-like conditions. It was a specifically political statement, along with the statement that a portion of merchandise sales would be donated to BAJI, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration — but the video was presented in such a way to remind the audience of the world outside the venue, rather than to disrupt the mood. Later in the set, when Miguel started on an extended philosophical interlude, the audience was still mostly with him, even if there were a few noticeable outbursts of ​“I love you” and ​“he’s still talking?” from concertgoers less excited by the the implications of humanity’s place in the universe.

But one got the impression that Miguel wouldn’t have it any other way, as songs in the set moved from love and material pleasure to social musings and existential questions. The sold-out crowd at College Street Music Hall was with him with great enthusiasm through to the end of his second encore.