Although we could write tomes upon tomes about things that were lost to the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most gutting for me personally was the absence of live music. Yes, it feels trivial and insensitive for me to lament about this when over 6 million people died from the disease itself, and I'm sitting here pissed that I had to wait two years to see The 1975 live again. But hey, concerts bring me and many others a heck of a lot of joy, and there's nothing trivial about that.
Which is why I felt no shame spending an embarrassing amount of money on concert tickets this past year. It was back payments after two years of begging to once again pay some Ticketmaster service fees. It was great to see concert tours come back with a bang, and I hope that momentum carries into 2023.
But the live music scene I'm seeing in 2022 feels different in some ways than the live music scene we left in 2019. Specifically, it feels as if we've finally re-entered a period of "cultural event concerts" that has been in hiding since the dawn of the internet age.
When I say "cultural event concerts," what I mean is a show where its cultural footprint feels outsized compared to that of a comparable show. Where it feels like you're missing out on something even if you aren't a fan of the artist and had no real intention of ever going to the show. The Beatles at Shea Stadium. Woodstock. Elton John at Dodger Stadium. Live Aid. Oasis at Knebworth. All of these shows sort of punctuated different eras of music and genuinely had an aura around them that made them feel like those in the room were experiencing a moment in history.
And then it seems like this phenomenon sort of faded after the turn of the century. Try to cite a massively culturally significant concert from the years 2000-2015. Think of any?
You could fill a whole senior thesis about the reasons for this. I think it's largely because the rise of the internet meant the fall of traditional gatekeepers of culture like MTV and terrestrial radio, and losing those gatekeepers means that culture just sort of splintered a bit. It wasn't as centralized as it was before.
But if we turned over a new page on this topic in 2022, then the first heading will definitely read "Love on Tour." The Harry Styles Madison Square Garden residency felt like the first milestone concert in recent memory. Where the entire audience treated it like a historical moment they were participating in. Where those who didn't go to the concert felt a bit of auto-FOMO whether they were Harry fans or not. Where it seemed like culture reunited around one artist again. You could say a lot of the same things about the summer Bad Bunny tour as well.
And at the risk of bringing up a sore subject, we're seeing that at never-before-seen levels with the upcoming Taylor Swift Eras Tour. Despite (or perhaps because of) the seven-hour queues and canceled on-sales and Ticketmaster death threats, it's likely that stretch of stadium shows will be the defining cultural moment of 2023, and I'm happy to see it in the hands of a music artist again.
So how did we get here? How are we in a spot where we're finally getting these landmark "cultural event concerts" again after decades of dormancy? Well, I think it's hard to overestimate just how much momentum these concert tours had coming out of the pandemic given the pent up demand for live music. But I don't actually think that's the main reason.
I think the main reason comes down to how social media is driving fandom to new heights (aka "Stan culture"). We all understand the effect that Instagram has on our self-image and how it drives us to compare ourselves to our friends in unhealthy ways. I see one of my friends post an Instagram Story of him shirtless in the bathroom and I think, "Gosh why do his muscles have to be so much bigger than mine? I look like a toothpick compared to that." Or a teenage girl looks at a bikini photo of her friend in Cabo and thinks, "How can I get that skinny? Why does it seem like she's always doing such cool things?"
What I think a lot of people overlook is that that same effect is true for fandom. We make unhealthy comparisons to people on social media about how much we like a certain artist. If I see one of my friends post an Instagram Story at an Arctic Monkeys concert, my first thought is usually somewhere along the lines of, "Ugh, you surely don't like them nearly as much as I do. Why aren't I there instead of you?" We get comparative, so we get competitive, and that competition drives this overall level of fandom for certain hot artists like Taylor Swift and Harry Styles to new heights. The cultural gatekeepers of MTV and radio no longer have the power to dictate who a culture coalesces around, but the unhealthy comparisons of fandom that social media encourages leads a few certain fan bases to drive their artist to the forefront of culture anyways, so we end up in the same spot.
As I've previously written, I hate "fandom." It just annoys the crap out of me. But I do think the effect it's having in creating these milestone concerts is cool, so if putting up with the Harry stans is the price I have to pay to see music get these cultural moments in the spotlight, I guess I'll take the deal.
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