Dear Blue Light, Burn in Hell
Recording concerts ruins the experience for everyone involved. Just stop, I beg of you.
By Abby Vela with art by alex kozak
This past spring, I had written a piece reviewing Mitski’s Laurel Hell Tour. Never having seen her live, I prepared for a religious and life-changing experience. I donned my cowboy hat and my grandmother’s vintage boots; I knew her entire discography front to back and—like a green, naive soldier marching to their doom—I braved the mid-march chill with nothing but my hat and high hopes.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but neither should it have happened. There I was on the front left side, three rows from the barricade, unable to see a thing for nearly all of the show. Not because of the height of the crowd nor some odd obstruction from the building. Rather it was the three rows of blue screens in front of me.
A minute-long SnapChat story, a FaceTime call with a friend, a combination of Instagram stories and reading the setlist aloud from a Reddit post: these are the physical and mental obstructions that left me tired, frustrated, and disappointed.
It wasn’t the performer’s fault, and in fact Mitski had explicitly asked her audience to put their phones down for the 90 minutes she was on stage. I will forever stand by the statement that recording a concert counts as sitting on your phone; but while the hater in me wants to despise the people on their phones the entire show, another part of me simply feels sorry for them.
It’s no secret that quarantine decimated the music scene for artists and concert goers alike. Tours were canceled, releases were postponed, and—like many other social spaces—those who used music as their prime means of social interaction were deprived of possibly one of the only ways they got to connect with others.
We can anecdotally understand the effects of lockdown for those who were already in the music scene. However, it’s hard to predict the effects of situations like this until it happens. How will a completely new social sphere of music lovers react to the new availability of live music? Well, now we have the answer: with an unawareness of concert etiquette including a lack of respect for artists as people and a complete disregard for the experience of those around them.
Mitski’s Laurel Hell Tour is an extreme and heinous example of this butterfly effect, but I see it happen at nearly every indie show I go to. If the music’s demographic are people ages 16 to 19, it’s almost certain that a sea of cellphones will be pulled out to film an artist’s most popular song. This practice is distracting to both fellow audience members whose views are blocked but also the artist who, instead of connecting with the individuals in the audience, must entertain a wave of cameras and people who don’t want to move to the music in fear of getting a shaking video.
Along with this use of recording is the absolute repulsion to any dancing. The amount of times I have been stared down with daggers simply because I wanted to dance is absurd. Nobody should be shamed for enjoying music in their own way, especially when the person doing the shaming is sitting in the middle of the crowd with their arms crossed and looking like they’d rather be anywhere else.
As I said before, Mitski’s tour was extreme, but I’ve had similar experiences at countless other shows: Current Joys, Lucy Dacus, Greer, Backseat Lovers, Courtney Barnett. Unfortunately, that list could go on. Stale crowds with no physical response to the music other than pulling out their phones to record a song they recognize—this is the state of live indie music, and to be honest, it frustrates me enough to avoid indie shows altogether.
I don’t blame these people for lack of concert etiquette. In fact, I feel sorry for them. Not only are they hated by any experienced concert-goer, but they’re also forfeiting their own immersion for a compressed mp4 of an experience that blue light will never be able to capture. That just may be the biggest tragedy of it all.