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"LIVE! In concert! "
Jun. 20th, 2018 05:11 pmI have spent a good part of my adult life going to music concerts. (Not so much the past few years, but that's another story.) I think I would go so far as to say that the concert experience is something that partly shaped who I am today. But suppose someone has never seen a musical performance and wants to understand the appeal of the experience. Why do I love a music concert?
First, let's get real. Not all concerts are great or even good. For a number of musicians (they know who they are), the live show has all the appeal of a contractual obligation: we put out an album; we gotta tour. The set list is predictable. The performance is sluggish and indifferent. The seats are on the moon (and cost about as much as a trip to the moon). The songs off the new album suck hard. You wonder: if the artist isn't going to put in the effort, why did I bother?
Fortunately, most artists are not that stupid. They've spent a good deal of time and effort cultivating an audience, and they want to show their fans that they're an important part of the show. So we get the music concert as communal experience. Musicians of the twitter age like Taylor Swift treat their concerts like a gigantic private girls' club. Back in the 1970s, the Grateful Dead allowed and even encouraged their fans to bootleg concerts; the resulting subculture of fans following the band around, taping concerts--the "Deadheads"--still exists today, long after the band itself has gone. Queen was also highly invested in bringing the audience Into the performance; Brian May wrote "We Will Rock You" specifically as an audience participation anthem. (I'd say it works.)
But I get that some of you might bristle at the audience participation idea: "Hey, I'm not putting on the show--YOU are! Entertain me, big shot musician!" For those of you who want the fourth wall between artist and audience intact but still need something more than just a buncha songs, we have the conceptualists--music concert as theater. In this category, we have the Who with Tommy and Quadrophenia and Pink Floyd's The Wall, cohesive musical statements with a narrative and characters. (And for The Wall... a wall, built on stage.) It can also be David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust or Madonna playing bedroom games. For Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense, the narrative was the evolution of the band itself, starting with David Byrne and a tape recorder, and filling up the stage, song by song, until the audience experienced the global reach of the band's music.
Most of time, though a concert is the simple joy of seeing the artist in person, the shift from music as an abstract sequence of bytes on YouTube to something you can hear AND see in real time--music concert as gestalt. In concert, there could be stories behind the songs that don't come with the recorded version, radical reinterpretations or improvisations within the song or it could be the emotions that play across the artist's face when playing the song. For every singer who treats a concert like an imposition (that's YOU, Van Morrison), there are many others who bring such a sense of joy and humor to their live shows that the audience goes out feeling great.
(For classic rock nerds like myself, there's also the special thrill of analyzing a great band's dynamic. It's one thing to listen to the Who on record; it's another to SEE the Who in action--how Townshend plays his guitar, how Entwistle and Moon lock into a rhythm, and how Daltrey layers his vocals onto that wonderful musical chaos.)
In the end, a music concert is a form of storytelling, with or without words, engaging the mind and the senses so the listener can make sense of the world.
********
On Sunday, my family and I were driving back from upstate New York. We'd just left the wake of a family friend and the mood in the car was somber. My wife turned on the oldies station, and for the first time I can remember, the two of us started singing the songs together. Our harmonies were terrible, but it didn't matter--we were sharing the stories that were precious to us in a concert for three. (J&P live from Nyack!) Don't know if the boy enjoyed it, but I felt a little better by the time we got home.
First, let's get real. Not all concerts are great or even good. For a number of musicians (they know who they are), the live show has all the appeal of a contractual obligation: we put out an album; we gotta tour. The set list is predictable. The performance is sluggish and indifferent. The seats are on the moon (and cost about as much as a trip to the moon). The songs off the new album suck hard. You wonder: if the artist isn't going to put in the effort, why did I bother?
Fortunately, most artists are not that stupid. They've spent a good deal of time and effort cultivating an audience, and they want to show their fans that they're an important part of the show. So we get the music concert as communal experience. Musicians of the twitter age like Taylor Swift treat their concerts like a gigantic private girls' club. Back in the 1970s, the Grateful Dead allowed and even encouraged their fans to bootleg concerts; the resulting subculture of fans following the band around, taping concerts--the "Deadheads"--still exists today, long after the band itself has gone. Queen was also highly invested in bringing the audience Into the performance; Brian May wrote "We Will Rock You" specifically as an audience participation anthem. (I'd say it works.)
But I get that some of you might bristle at the audience participation idea: "Hey, I'm not putting on the show--YOU are! Entertain me, big shot musician!" For those of you who want the fourth wall between artist and audience intact but still need something more than just a buncha songs, we have the conceptualists--music concert as theater. In this category, we have the Who with Tommy and Quadrophenia and Pink Floyd's The Wall, cohesive musical statements with a narrative and characters. (And for The Wall... a wall, built on stage.) It can also be David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust or Madonna playing bedroom games. For Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense, the narrative was the evolution of the band itself, starting with David Byrne and a tape recorder, and filling up the stage, song by song, until the audience experienced the global reach of the band's music.
Most of time, though a concert is the simple joy of seeing the artist in person, the shift from music as an abstract sequence of bytes on YouTube to something you can hear AND see in real time--music concert as gestalt. In concert, there could be stories behind the songs that don't come with the recorded version, radical reinterpretations or improvisations within the song or it could be the emotions that play across the artist's face when playing the song. For every singer who treats a concert like an imposition (that's YOU, Van Morrison), there are many others who bring such a sense of joy and humor to their live shows that the audience goes out feeling great.
(For classic rock nerds like myself, there's also the special thrill of analyzing a great band's dynamic. It's one thing to listen to the Who on record; it's another to SEE the Who in action--how Townshend plays his guitar, how Entwistle and Moon lock into a rhythm, and how Daltrey layers his vocals onto that wonderful musical chaos.)
In the end, a music concert is a form of storytelling, with or without words, engaging the mind and the senses so the listener can make sense of the world.
********
On Sunday, my family and I were driving back from upstate New York. We'd just left the wake of a family friend and the mood in the car was somber. My wife turned on the oldies station, and for the first time I can remember, the two of us started singing the songs together. Our harmonies were terrible, but it didn't matter--we were sharing the stories that were precious to us in a concert for three. (J&P live from Nyack!) Don't know if the boy enjoyed it, but I felt a little better by the time we got home.
