Concerts in the Age of Hyper-Reality
Hi Everyone,
To celebrate the height of summer, we decided to dig back into the changing landscape of touring—seeing how things are fairing since we last explore.
Without a doubt, it’s an interesting moment. Everyone is still feeling their way through the COVID era freeze + boom: an enormous change to consumer spending habits, an infusion of money throughout the economy, a jolt of inflation, and then a mass return to live experiences.
All of this took place, it’s crucial to note, within a music industry already in the throes of transition. On one hand, social media has been in the long process of shattering the mainstream, propelling a string of one-hit-wonders (or medium-scale cults) into the top reaches of the charts. Such acts, as we’ve mentioned before, often have untested seat-filling abilities and unclear long-term trajectories. Like, yeah, maybe Lil Nas X will find a third act, and become this generation’s….B52’s? But he could also easily run out of steam, and end up as a footnote.
Given the sheer speed of artists’ rise and fall, it feels harder than ever to pick long-term winners—no problem for the streaming economy, but more challenging for the parts of the industry that thrive on longevity. Springsteen, after all, had the 3rd biggest tour of 2023, roughly 40 years after Born in the USA cemented him in the rock firmament. The ever-increasing Simon-Reynolds-was-right atemporality of things doesn’t help much either. It’s obviously sick that bands like Duster suddenly have hundreds of millions of streams. But such groups likely don’t have the touring infrastructure or willing-to-show-up fanbases of more ongoing concerns like…Pavement (who they’ve outstripped on Spotify).
The flipside of all this has been the continued dominance of a handful of superstars—artists so big that they’re able to not just survive the dispersal of the pop mainstream, but actually thrive because of it. It’s still something of hunch, but it does seem like the continued demand for shared musical experiences—coupled with the limited number of acts able to fulfill this need—has helped further propel the careers of this generation of already-reigning millennial acts. It’s interesting to consider the role of social media in this context. Most readers will have experienced the slow, sad retreat of the “everyone at this show is on their phones” complaint—an Obama-era discourse that has little meaning in our all-instagram age. Its collapse is due less to shifting generational mores than the fact that online is now inextricably a part of shows—a reason why people go, a venue in which they experience going, and an intentionally-cultivated element of the overall performance by the artists themselves.
While a doom-pilled analysis might describe the results as a Baudrillard-style simulacrum, in which any potential for unmediated being is stripped away by an endless chain of references, for those with a little more chill, things can seem…OK? After all, if the center of reality for a mass event has shifted away from unidirectional spectacle to fan-orchestrated interactions, couldn’t there be something potentially liberatory in there? Or at the very least, something somewhat resistant to instant commodification? The friendship bracelets say…maybe. Or maybe not. It’s also unclear how these (digital) spaces are being valued on the market. Clearly, mimetic excitement helped boost the status of both the Renaissance and Eras tours. How is it being priced into live appeal of the Duster reunion?
Which brings us, finally, to the Sphere, James Dolan’s Las Vegas spectacle. What’s fascinating about the sphere is the extent to which, despite being a piece of peak digital hype, its fundamental appeal is to raw experience. “You have to be there.” “The video’s don’t do it justice.” “Just go.” Etc. In a strange way, it seems simultaneously the obvious end-point to and the vehement rejection of the proliferation of digital elements within contemporary concert-going. It’s an experience both defined by screens and greater than them. And of course, it’s available to you for 200 bucks a night—which might very well be a sign of things to come.
You can listen to that Hear (Apple), Hear (Spotify), or Hear (Podbean)
Department of Actual Music:
Saxon: Somehow I missed that Mac Demarco released a 9 hour record last year. Made up mostly instrumentals, the record confound music writers, seemingly unable to grasp DeMarco’s disregard for the contemporary album format in place of laying bare his process. Anyways, I love when artists do something unwieldy, massive and messy. This song is one of the few actual …songs. A gem detailing finding comfort in television after a breakup in classic slacker DeMarco fashion.
Sam: Metal that comes out the other end into Xenakis-like wonder. I really like the sheer physicality of the sound here—the way that the various audio qualities and recording techniques used in this short track force me imagine the space + experience of making, not just this, but sort of…everything? A trip.
Saxon & Sam