<
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/bebe-rexha-harry-styles-drake-how-did-concert-etiquette-get-here-op-ed>
"In the last few weeks, the trickle of occasional headlines about a random
tossed item at a concert — starting last year with Harry Styles, more recently
jumping from Bebe Rexha, to Ava Max, to Kelsea Ballerini, to Pink, then Drake,
then again with poor Hazza over the weekend — became a worsening stream.
Outlets like
Rolling Stone weighed in, understandably striking an aghast
tone; last week, Adele herself “dared” audience members to try throwing
something at her. But how did this all start? What the hell is going on?
I’ve been regularly going to concerts since middle school, whether at Madison
Square Garden, a Massachusetts suburban house show, or a range of venues in
between. I started regularly attending shows solo — a fraught choice for a
gender-marginalized person, one I only undertook after years learning crowds —
about five years ago. There are certain concert-related milestones I keep in my
top ten life experiences, like seeing Frank Ocean tour on both
Channel Orange
and
Blonde. All this to say, I love live music, so it’s really killing me to
see how a space that
could be safe for audience members (a hope many
performers have expressed, but which has been struggled over for decades) are
becoming so unsafe for those on stage.
One possible explanation says fans are doing it for attention (something I’ve
heard off the record both from other concertgoers as well as from touring
musicians) and, relatedly, in hopes of going viral on TikTok. There’s something
to this; anecdotally, at the last sold-out show I attended, I was on the floor
of the venue and couldn’t actually see the performers because everyone’s phones
in front of me were blocking the stage. In the current video-focused era of
social media, with text-based apps crumbling and TikTok remaining reliably
supreme, concerts are grist for the content mill. Another reasonable assumption
is that, in an era of rising parasocial fixation, musicians are struggling to
reassert the boundary between themselves and their fans."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: July 13, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-86026386
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
